A Fifty-Year Journey of Argument and Persuasion
Michigan is the only state in the country that has a death penalty prohibition in its constitution—Eugene G. Wanger’s compelling arguments against capital punishment is a large reason it is there. The forty pieces in this volume are writings created or used by the author, who penned the prohibition clause, during his fifty years as a death penalty abolitionist. His extraordinary background in forensics, law, and political activity as constitutional convention delegate and co-chairman of the Michigan Committee Against Capital Punishment has produced a remarkable collection. It is not only a fifty-year history of the anti–death penalty argument in America, it also is a detailed and challenging example of how the argument against capital punishment may be successfully made.
The advocates of execution also refer to a study by Isaac Ehrlich. The study is
based upon a highly sophisticated and arbitrarily designed econometric formula
comprising dozens and dozens of mathematical components. Its validity, design
and findings have been thoroughly discredited by other econometricians at
Columbia University, and elsewhere, and there is only one other published
econometric analysis, which has equally been discredited, I might add, that
supports Ehrlich's ...
