Presented by “Executing Justice: America and the Death Penalty” Wednesday, January 22 / 4 P.M. / Free McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Stuart Banner, Professor of Law, UCLA Law School, will discuss his new book, The Death Penalty: An American History (Harvard University Press, 2002) at 4 P.M. on Wednesday, January 22 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building. The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country. Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes--from adultery to murder, from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes--an event replete with sermons, confessions, and last minute penitence--to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever. By recreating what it was like to be the condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishment's many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment. Stuart Banner, who received his B.A. from Yale University and his J.D. from Stanford University, teaches property, American legal history, and a variety of other courses at UCLA School of Law. In law school, Professor Banner was articles editor of the Stanford Law Review. Upon graduation, he clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. He practiced law at Davis Polk & Wardwell and then at the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City. Before coming to UCLA, he taught for eight years at Washington University in St. Louis. Banner's publications include The Death Penalty: An American History (2002) and Legal Systems in Conflict: Property and Sovereignty in Missouri, 1750-1860 (2000), Anglo-American Securities Regulation: Cultural and Political Roots, 1690-1860 (1998). This event is presented by the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and Law and Society Program with support from the Critical Issues in America Program as part of the series “Executing Justice: America and the Death Penalty.” Top of Page <<Back