Tennessee’s New Abolitionists: The Fight to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State

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Description

“One fine day when the death penalty is abolished in Tennessee, we will need to know how it happened. This book, edited by my good friends Amy Sayward and Margaret Vandiver, will tell the story-in riveting detail.”-Sister Helen Prefean, writer of Dead Man Walking

“The meaning of the admonition-four words most incessantly forgotten, ignored or intentionally violated-seems so simple: ‘Thou shall not kill.’ Here nineteen essayists remind us that there were those among us who understood the meaning-and who sought to give life to the law.”-John Seigenthaler

Seeking To Illuminate Tennessee’s death penalty system and those who oppose it, this collection of essays combines a historical overview of efforts to abolish state killing in Tennessee with first-hand accounts from people involved in those efforts. Representing a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, the contributors include, among others, lawyers, academics, activists, religious leaders, and a former state supreme court justice.

Surprisingly, prior to this book, there has been no examination of capital punishment in Tennessee within the context of the larger national debate on the death penalty. Whilst Tennessee has a death penalty system very similar to those of many other southern states, only six people have been executed in the state since then, despite the overwhelming concentration of executions in the South.

The book includes essays covering such topics as Governor Frank Clement’s attempt to abolish the state’s death penalty in the 1960s, the troubling questions raised by mental illness and capital punishment, and coverage of several up to date executions by Tennessee’s news-papers. The authors of the chapters in the final section, “Rarely Heard Voices,” include the father of a murder victim, four anonymous death row authors, Department of Correction officials, and the sisters of some of the men executed in the state.

A provocative contribution to some of the signal debates of our time, this book illuminates the myriad ways in which the quite a lot of forces involved in the controversyùfrom history, politics, and culture to individuals and organizationsùhave collided, intersected, and coexisted in Tennessee.

Amy L. Sayward is chair and professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University. She is also the writer of The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945-1965.

Margaret Vandiver is professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Memphis. She is the writer of Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South.

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