Arcadia Public Library

Explores the issue of the death penalty by placing opinions from a wide range of sources in a pro/con format. Features articles that express various perspectives on this topic.

Raises constitutional questions about the legality of the death penalty and reveals how race, poverty, publicity, and prosecutorial ambition can determine who lives and dies after a murder conviction.

Provides a history of capital punishment, and of the opposition to it. Includes well-known figures on both sides of the issue. Various methods of execution are explained and their use placed in historical context. Legal terminology important to the debate is defined and explained.

An Ohio death row inmate, convicted of killing his 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 17 years old, dies of heart disease. Six years later, the police arrest a Canadian expatriate living in Sweden for repeatedly kicking a drunken man in the head. A cantankerous Det. Supt. Ewert Grens of the Stockholm police discovers that the foreigner in their jail cell is a convicted murderer, the same death row inmate who supposedly died in America six years earlier....