THE HANGMAN'S KNOT: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America's Struggle with the Death Penalty

This is an excellent short history of capital punishment—from Civil War–era lynchings to Illinois Gov. George Ryan's recent commuting of the sentences of that state's death row inmates—written by a fierce death penalty opponent who nonetheless displays an acute sensitivity to the many complexities of this issue. As founder of the nonprofit Project HAL (which tracks executions), and as part of the Capital Punishment Research Project, Steelwater has had access to records of thousands of legal executions, as well as thousands of lynchings. She skillfully and judiciously uses this information to argue that the struggles over the death penalty throughout U.S. history—and especially during three distinct eras of reform and rejection of capital punishment followed by eras of acceptance—are less about making sure that the death penalty is applied equally and more about "our many battles over who's in charge." Steelwater has written a definitive history of the arguments that have been used to justify the use of the death penalty: the early attempt to "politicize punishment" through the creation of penitentiaries and the death penalty; the influence of the Southern festival of shivaree along with the Ku Klux Klan in making lynching acceptable as a way to "express moral judgment," however dubious such judgments were; the influence of the vigilantes in the West, especially San Francisco, on efforts "to justify illegal execution and other lawless acts in the name of a moral crusade, a demonstration of popular sovereignty, or both." (Aug.)