The Execution Of Willie Francis

Author : Gilbert King
Publisher : Civitas Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Execution of Willie Francis written by Gilbert King and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration behind "A Lesson Before Dying" meets the best of John Grisham as a young Cajun lawyer fights to save a black teenager from the electric chair. 16-page b&w photo insert.

Author : Gilbert King
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062097717
Total Pages : 508 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Devil in the Grove written by Gilbert King and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A must-read, cannot-put-down history.” — Thomas Friedman, New York Times Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young black men who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys." Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the "Florida Terror," but the young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, Gilbert King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader.

Author : Gilbert King
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0399183426
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beneath a Ruthless Sun written by Gilbert King and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Exposes the sinister complexity of American racism... King tells this... story with grace and sensitivity, and his narrative never flags." --Jeffrey Toobin, New York Times Book Review From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Devil in the Grove comes the story of a small town with a big secret. In December 1957, the wife of a Florida citrus baron is raped in her home while her husband is away. She claims a "husky Negro" did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial. But crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. Who was protecting whom, or what? She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence begin to surface. Beneath a Ruthless Sun tells a powerful, page-turning story rooted in the fears that rippled through the South as integration began to take hold, sparking a surge of virulent racism that savaged the vulnerable, debased the powerful, and roils our own times still.

Author : Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1400077702
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Lesson Before Dying written by Ernest J. Gaines and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-01-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. "An instant classic." —Chicago Tribune A “majestic, moving novel...an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." —Boston Globe "Enormously moving.... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times “A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Author : Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Publisher : Grove Press
ISBN 13 : 0802165680
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mercy Seat written by Elizabeth H. Winthrop and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed novel by the author of The Why of Things tackles “the Deep South during the Gothic worst of Jim Crow times . . . truly a bravura performance” (Geoffrey Wolff). “One of the finest writers of her generation,” and author of three previously acclaimed novels, Elizabeth H. Winthrop delivers a brave new book that will launch her distinguished career anew (Brad Watson). On the eve of his execution, eighteen-year-old Willie Jones sits in his cell in New Iberia awaiting his end. Across the state, a truck driven by a convict and his keeper carries the executioner’s chair closer. On a nearby highway, Willie’s father Frank lugs a gravestone on the back of his fading, old mule. In his office the DA who prosecuted Willie reckons with his sentencing, while at their gas station at the crossroads outside of town, married couple Ora and Dale grapple with their grief and their secrets. As various members of the township consider and reflect on what Willie’s execution means, an intricately layered and complex portrait of a Jim Crow era Southern community emerges. Moving from voice to voice, Winthrop elegantly brings to stark light the story of a town, its people, and its injustices. The Mercy Seat is a brutally incisive and tender novel from one of our most acute literary observers. “Artful and succinctly poetic . . . A worthy novel that gathers great power as it rolls on propelled by its many voices.”—The New York Times Book Review “A miracle of a novel, with rapid-fire sentences that grab you and propel you to the next page . . . It’s a breakout. It’s a wonder.”—Dallas Morning News

Author : Arthur S. Miller
Publisher : Praeger
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Death by Installments written by Arthur S. Miller and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1988-08-16 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The principle revealed in Death by Installments is that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment does not guarantee protection to black men who kill whites. Reading the carefully researched and well-told story of Willie Francis offers a four-decade-old view of both the society's commitment to this principle, and the Supreme Court's unwillingness then and now to challenge it. Derrick Bell, Harvard Law School ...not just a `good' but a splendidly written, expertly researched, grippingly told, and passionately presented tome that can proudly take its place alongside Anthony Lewis' Gideon's Trumpet. Henry J. Abraham, University of Virginia The case of Willie Francis has been scrutinized and reexamined over the past several decades, and it is still not clear whether he was guilty of the crime for which he was executed in Louisiana forty years ago. Miller and Bowman's book recounts the ordeal of this teenaged black youth who was sent a second time to the electric chair a year after repeated attempts to supply enough current to kill him failed. His tragic story raises disturbing questions not only about capital punishment itself but about the humanity of our methods of carrying out executions and our capacity as a nation to uphold fundamental rights guaranteed by our Constitution. Miller and Bowman describe Francis' experiences from the time of his arrest, and they review the legal struggles within the Supreme Court that followed the botched execution attempt. In considering Eighth Amendment provisions against cruel and unusual punishment, the Court held that Willie Francis' previous subjection to electrical current did not make his subsequent electrocution any more cruel in the constitutional sense than any other electrocution. The authors examine the far-reaching implications of this stand in light of the many similar--but unpublicized--incidents of prolonged, agonizing executions by electrocution, gas, and even lethal injection. They contend that the Court has never faced the issue squarely and that its failure to set limits on the inflicting of pain in the Willie Francis case renders the Eighth Amendment guarantee meaningless.

Author : David M. Oshinsky
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Capital Punishment on Trial written by David M. Oshinsky and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian takes a new and closer look at the Supreme Court's controversial and much-debated stance on capital punishment in the landmark case of Furman v. Georgia.

Author : James S. Liebman
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231167237
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Wrong Carlos written by James S. Liebman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989, Texas executed Carlos DeLuna, a poor Hispanic man with childlike intelligence, for the murder of Wanda Lopez, a convenience store clerk. His execution passed unnoticed for years until a team of Columbia Law School faculty and students almost accidentally chose to investigate his case and found that DeLuna almost certainly was innocent. They discovered that no one had cared enough about either the defendant or the victim to make sure the real perpetrator was found. Everything that could go wrong in a criminal case did. This book documents DeLunaÕs conviction, which was based on a single, nighttime, cross-ethnic eyewitness identification with no corroborating forensic evidence. At his trial, DeLunaÕs defense, that another man named Carlos had committed the crime, was not taken seriously. The lead prosecutor told the jury that the other Carlos, Carlos Hernandez, was a ÒphantomÓ of DeLunaÕs imagination. In upholding the death penalty on appeal, both the state and federal courts concluded the same thing: Carlos Hernandez did not exist. The evidence the Columbia team uncovered reveals that Hernandez not only existed but was well known to the police and prosecutors. He had a long history of violent crimes similar to the one for which DeLuna was executed. Families of both Carloses mistook photos of each for the other, and HernandezÕs violence continued after DeLuna was put to death. This book and its website (thewrongcarlos.net) reproduce law-enforcement, crime lab, lawyer, court, social service, media, and witness records, as well as court transcripts, photographs, radio traffic, and audio and videotaped interviews, documenting one of the most comprehensive investigations into a criminal case in U.S. history. The result is eye-opening yet may not be unusual. Faulty eyewitness testimony, shoddy legal representation, and prosecutorial misfeasance continue to put innocent people at risk of execution. The principal investigators conclude with novel suggestions for improving accuracy among the police, prosecutors, forensic scientists, and judges.

Author : Willa Cather
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1649741847
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Death Comes for the Archbishop written by Willa Cather and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death Comes for the Archbishop is Willa Cather's best known novel. This epic, is a dream like, mythic story of a life lived simply in the southwestern desert. Father Jean Marie Latour is transferred to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. He finds a vast territory of hills, arroyos, and lonelness. Cather delivers a story of a simple life lived well and full in this her tour de force.

Author : Steve Dorff
Publisher : Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1540005011
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I Wrote That One, Too . . . written by Steve Dorff and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Book). One of the most successful songwriters and composers of the last 25 years, Steve Dorff has penned over 20 Top 10 hits for pop and country artists around the world, including Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion, Blake Shelton, Smokey Robinson, Kenny Rogers, Ray Charles, Anne Murray, Whitney Houston, George Strait, Dolly Parton, Judy Collins, Cher, Dusty Springfield, Ringo Starr, and Garth Brooks. He has scored for television shows, including Growing Pains , Major Dad , Murder She Wrote , Reba , and several films, including Any Which Way but Loose for which he penned the titular song, and more recently, he has embarked on Broadway (forthcoming musical Josephine ). Chronicling his four decades behind the music, Steve Dorff gives anecdotes, advice, and insights into his journey. The book follows Steve from his childhood in Queens to Manhattan to Nashville and to his eventual arrival in Los Angeles, California. Oftentimes, songs are attributed to the singers who perform them, but it is the songwriter who really knows the story behind the story from conception to execution. Full of heartfelt stories, hard-earned wisdom, and delightful wit, I Wrote That One, Too . . . is a great read for musicians, music fans, and whoever has chased their dreams and survived the surprising but often serendipitous turns in the road.