Review of Lethal Injection: Capital Punishment in Texas During the Modern Era

Texas has a notorious reputation as the death-penalty capital of America. The sheer number of Texas executions since 1976 has created a statistical pool that Jon Sorenson and Rochy Pilgrim use in Lethal Injection to address four major factual (as opposed to moral) issues surrounding the death penalty: (1) Does it deter would-be murderers from killing? (2) Does it prevent probable future acts of violence by those sentenced to death? (3) Is it applied to the most deserving defendants? (4) Is it imposed fairly and cost-effectively? These are certainly the right questions, and, for the most part, the authors do an excellent job providing honest, and sometimes surprising, answers