Introduction: Invitation to an execution / Gordon Morris Bakken
Politics and capital punishment: the role of judicial, legislative, and executive decisions in the practice of death / Stacy L. Mallicoat
Conflicts of interest: business, death, and the bird court / Michael A. Pierson
Fear, capital punishment, and order: the construction and use of capital punishment statutes in early modern England and seventeenth-century New England / Patrick Callaway
Murder most foul: Native Americans and the evolution of the death penalty / Vanessa Gunther
The death penalty in federal law / Lonnie Wilson
Ovines and bovines / Ion Puschila
Amnesty International and the death penalty: toward global abolition / Alexander Karn
The celluloid execution: Hollywood films and capital punishment / Susanne Teepe Gaskins
The death penalty in the south / Michael A. Powell
The death penalty in the north / Dino E. Buenviaje
The death penalty in the Midwest / Melody M. Miyamoto, Charles W. Showalter
The death penalty in the great plains / John Gregory Jacobsen
The death penalty in the Pacific Northwest / Joseph Laythe
To do no harm: medicine and the death penalty in England and Texas / Norwood Andrews
Means of death: methods of execution in California, 1937-2007 / Thomas Bojorquez
Capital punishment and executions in Montana / Ellen Baumler
The death penalty in Arizona and New Mexico / Daniel Stackhouse
Arkansas and Missouri: the death penalty / Timothy R. Finch
Capital punishment and corporal punishment in the California gold mines / Andrea McDowell
Vigilantism during the Gold Rush / Mary Marki, Christopher Clayton Smith
The death penalty in California: 1857-1970 / Susan Sanchez-Barnett
Capital punishment suggested reading / Catherine Kaye.