Among the Lowest of the Dead: Inside Death Row
By David Von Drehle
Perhaps the finest book ever on the death penalty. David Von Drehle provides a richly textured portrait of life on Florida’s Death Row in the 1970s as officials readied one of the first executions following a Supreme Court-ordered hiatus.
The Executioner’s Song
By Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer’s hugely ambitious and ultimately successful telling of the life and death of Gary Gilmore, the murderer whose demand to be executed by a firing squad in Utah gripped the country in January 1977.
Shot in the Heart
By Mikal Gilmore
Another take on Gary Gilmore, this one by his brother, who struggles to come to terms with his brother’s crimes and how his family shaped Gilmore.
Dead Run: The Untold Story of Dennis Stockton and America’s Only Mass Escape From Death Row
By Joe Jackson and William F. Burke Jr.
The account of the daring prison breakout is compelling enough, but the 1995 execution in Virginia of Dennis Stockton–an intelligent, fascinating man once scouted by the New York Yankees–despite his strong claim of innocence forms the heart of this book.
Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House
By Scott Christianson
A former investigative reporter and New York state criminal-justice official uses information from the internal files at New York’s Sing Sing prison to detail the history of the nation’s busiest death chamber for the first half of the 20th Century.
Reversible Errors
By Scott Turow
Fresh from his work on the Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment, where he studied and helped write death-penalty reforms, the novelist (and lawyer) delivered a layered, ultimately thrilling novel about capital punishment, with sympathetic characters on both sides of the dramatic case.
We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
By Michael and Robert Meeropol
The sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg tell the story of one of the nation’s most controversial executions–their parents’ being put to death in 1953 after being convicted of spying for the Soviet Union–and how they grew up in its shadow.
Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted
By Jim Dwyer, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck
The standard for books on the myriad problems that have sent innocent people to prison and Death Row, and how they eventually went free.
Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice
By Edwin M. Borchard
Published more than 60 years before “Actual
Innocence,” this 1932 work was the textbook on how the criminal-justice system sometimes goes wrong.
Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States
By Helen Prejean
Most people are familiar with the movie version of “Dead Man Walking,” but the book goes much deeper, forcing the author to confront a brutal criminal and reckon with his punishment.
