Northeastern University Press
2009 • 340 pp. 18 illus. 6 x 9"
Criminology / Social Science
$29.95 Cloth, 978-1-55553-713-5

It is an undisputed fact that Chris Thomas was guilty of participating in a brutal double homicide. He was convicted of killing his girlfriend’s parents in November of 1990, was sentenced to death in November of 1991, and was executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia in January of 2000. Chris Thomas was one of the last juvenile offenders to be put to death before the Supreme Court ruled that the execution of juveniles constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In Anatomy of an Execution, Todd C. Peppers and Laura Trevvett Anderson tell the entire story, shedding light on issues surrounding the death penalty—such as the quality of court appointed counsel, the execution of juveniles (from both a constitutional law and public policy perspective), conditions of confinement on death row, and the role of spiritual advisors in the condemned’s last days. While providing insight into the legal workings of the modern death penalty system, the book also offers a rare glimpse of a young, condemned man’s life before and after the crime: a childhood ravaged by loss and neglect, a toxic first love, the brutal murders, trial and sentencing, and, ultimately, a chance at redemption. This is not an effort to excuse a crime but an assertion that even a murderer’s life is worth more than its worst act.

The crime happens, the mob gathers. Far too often, the question is, which nigger’s neck are we going to put the noose around?
—GARY PARKER, FORMER DEFENSE LAWYER FOR CARLTON GARY
Over the course of eight bloody months in the 1970s, a serial rapist and murderer terrorized Columbus, Georgia, killing seven elderly white women by strangling them in their beds. In 1986, eight years after the last murder, an African American, Carlton Gary, was convicted and sentenced to death. Though many in the city doubt his guilt, he remains on death row.

Award-winning Vanity Fair reporter David Rose has followed this case for a decade in an investigation that led him to the Big Eddy Club—an all-white, members-only club in Columbus, frequented by the town’s most prominent judges and lawyers . . . as well as most of the seven murdered women. Among Rose’s discoveries was that a young black man was lynched in 1912 in Columbus after he was tried for murder and freed, and that the Columbus judge to whom the Gary case was first assigned in 1984 was the son of the mob leader in the 1912 lynching.

Framed by the tale of two lynchings—one carried out illegally at the start of the twentieth century, and the other a legal lynching carried out at the century’s end—The Big Eddy Club is a gripping, revealing drama, full of evocatively drawn characters, insidious institutions, and the extraordinary connections that bind past and present. The book is also a compelling, accessible, and timely exploration of race and criminal justice, not just in the context of the South but in the entire United States, as it addresses the corruption of due process as a tool of racial oppression.

David Rose is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and has worked for The Guardian, The Observer, and the BBC. He is the author of five previous books, including Guantánamo (The New Press), and lives in Oxford, England.

Pub Date: Spring 2007
Format: hardcover
Trim: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 368 pages

Nolan's portrait of Jesus introduces us to the man as he was before he became enshrined in doctrine, dogma, and ritual, a man deeply involved with the real problems of his time - which are the real problems of our time as well. As the author says, "Nothing about Jesus will be presupposed or assumed.. My interest is in the man as he was before he became the object of Christian faith." "A convincing, eloquent, moving message for a distressed world." -Library Journal

Pub Date: September 2001
Format: paperback
Trim: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches, 196 pages