Live From Death Row

Here for the first time are the prison writings of Abu-Jamal--including the censored commentaries from NPR--an unflinching account of the brutalities, humiliations and actrocities of prison life. Articulate and compelling, the work is certain to fuel the controversy surrounding capital punishment and freedom of speech.

The harrowing, heartbreaking story of Nick Yarris who spent twenty one years on Death Row for a crime he did not commit.

Oprah's Book Club Summer 2018 Selection The Instant New York Times Bestseller A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit. “An amazing and heartwarming story, it restores our faith in the inherent goodness of humanity.” —Archbishop Desmond Tutu In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty–nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free. But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence—full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty–seven years he was a beacon—transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty–four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015. With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty–year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.

The author, a prisoner on death-row for killing a police officer, presents a series of essays and reflections on his life and his spirituality.

With virtually every poll in America citing crime as one of the public's biggest concerns, in late 1994 and early 1995, the Dallas Morning News sent a questionnaire to every man and woman in the country on Death Row, asking some 75 questions about their crimes, their experiences, their attitudes, etc. The survey was drafted by the News with input from a veteran capital murder prosecutor, a Death Row appeals lawyer, a criminologist, a forensic psychiatrist, a Death Row warden and a former Death Row inmate. The paper received received more than 700 responses.The result is the first in-depth, comprehensive national survey of Death Row inmates. This book is an expansion of the paper's four-installment series that appeared in 1997.

The harrowing, heartbreaking story of Nick Yarris who spent 21 years on Death Row for a crime he did not commit.

I was only a child, ten years of age, when I was first incarcerated in the juvenile prison system. Locked up in a small brick cage with a solid wood door containing a thick, shatterproof glass window. So began the journey that would lead me here – to DEATH ROW. I’m simply just Herminio Serna now, who was “consciously awakened” to this living nightmare of awaiting execution, here on California’s Death Row, in San Quentin State Prison. Incarcerated since August 1991. Condemned to this death in November 1997 after a six year trial. Held in isolation, solitary confinement, while undergoing that sham appearance of a trial. And once condemned I was buried alive here, in a concrete cage, entombed inside the entrails of this beast, inside the infamous Adjustment Center, (San Quentin’s “Hole”/S.H.U.) for another fourteen years. A total of 20 years – two decades of “unusual cruelty.” As if the death penalty wasn’t enough of a punishment!