Ongoing Praise for The Hangman's Knot

“This book is chock-full of information and history about the connection between race, poverty, vigilante justice, and the death penalty. Pristine research and scholarship combined with colorful storytelling make this book read like a novel. I couldn’t put it down.”

-- Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, author of Dead Man Walking

“In The Hangman’s Knot, Eliza Steelwater tells a fascinating, chilling story backed by original archival research. The author shows that political leaders in nearly every state have supported not only lawful executions but also vigilante killings and mob lynchings, using all such modes of capital punishment as political tools. The result is a compelling challenge to the ongoing use of the death penalty in the U.S. from a unique perspective: citing the past history of legal and extra-legal executions to warn us about present and future dangers inhering in any capital punishment system.”

-- Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union,
and Professor of Law, New York Law School

“Eliza Steelwater gets to the root of the capital punishment business, laying bare, with scholarly precision, the inescapable connections between Reconstruction-era lynching, Gold Rush vigilantism, and the modern-day practice of lethal injection. If you care about how America came to be the last remaining western democracy to impose the death penalty on its citizens, read this book.”

-- Locke E. Bowman, Legal Director, MacArthur Justice Center,
University of Chicago Law School

"Steelwater, founder of Project HAL (Historical American Lynching) and an opponent of the death penalty, recounts the history of legal and extralegal executions in the United States and seeks an answer to why the death penalty persists here and not in other modern democracies. Using source materials from Project HAL, the Capital Punishment Research Project, newspaper accounts, and records of executions, she describes events and cases, examines thinking for and against the death penalty, and chronicles efforts to end the death penalty. Among the examples of executions (and occasionally, other punishments) she chronicles since medieval times are those of witches, African Americans, labor activists, immigrants, and persons of supposed 'low moral character.' This is an important, eyeopening book for the information it provides and for connections the author makes. She shows relationships between extralegal punishments (lynching and vigilantism) and court-imposed death sentences and then links executions generally to struggles for economic and political power. Thousands of books have been written on capital punishment. This is one that should be in the collections of every academic, public, and law library."

-- Library Journal

”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.”

-- Publishers Weekly
 

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