"Startling."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Unusually intimate and powerful."
--New York Times
"A slim volume of indelible impressions. . . . Highly
recommended."
--Library Journal
"Gripping. . . . I could not put this book down."
--Jimmy Breslin
"Masterfully opens pathways for thought."
--The Nation
"If the initial response to Christianson's book and exhibit are
any indication, Condemned may further erode support for capital
punishment."
--Village Voice
"The important achievement of Condemned is not in theorizing
about the death penalty . . . it is in forcing the reader to look
at it up close and thus get a firmer sense of what it really, truly
is. If you favor the death penalty, you ought to know exactly what
it is you favor. Based on the book, I will tell you this: It is a
horror."
--Scripps Howard News Service
"This is a rare book-haunting fragments from the lives of men
and women on their way to the electric chair. A moving and
troubling epitaph for the guilty and perhaps the innocent."
"--William Kennedy, author of Ironweed"
In the annals of American criminal justice, two prisons stand
out as icons of institutionalized brutality and deprivation:
Alcatraz and Sing Sing. In the 70 odd years before 1963, when the
death sentence was declared unconstitutional in New York, Sing Sing
was the site of almost one-half of the 1,353 executions carried out
in the state. More people were executed at Sing Sing than at any
other American prison, yet Sing Sing's death house was, to a
remarkable extent, one of the most closed, secret and mythologized
places in modern America.
In this remarkable book, based on recently revealed
archivalmaterials, Scott Christianson takes us on a disturbing and
poignant tour of Sing Sing's legendary death house, and introduces
us to those whose lives Sing Sing claimed. Within the dusty files
were mug shots of each newly arrived prisoner, most still wearing
the out-to-court clothes they had on earlier that day when they
learned their verdict and were sentenced to death. It is these
sometimes bewildered, sometimes defiant, faces that fill the pages
of Condemned, along with the documents of their last months at Sing
Sing.
The reader follows prisoners from their introduction to the
rules of Sing Sing, through their contact with guards and
psychiatrists, their pleas for clemency, escape attempts,
resistance, and their final letters and messages before being put
to death. We meet the mother of five accused of killing her
husband, the two young Chinese men accused of a murder during a
robbery and the drifter who doesn't remember killing at all. While
the majority of inmates are everyday people, Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg were also executed here, as were the major figures in the
infamous Murder Inc., forerunner of the American mafia. Page upon
page, Condemned leaves an indelible impression of humanity and
suffering.
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