References:

• Death Penalty online exhibition at
  Amnesty International
• Warden
  Jim Willett
  Bright Sky Press
  ISBN 1931721505
• Dead Man Walking
  Helen Prejean
  Zondervan Publishing House
  ISBN 000628003X
• Executioner Pierrepoint
  Albert Pierrepoint
  Eric Dobby Publishing Ltd
  ISBN 1858820618
• Better
  Atul Gawande
  Profile Books
  ISBN 978-1-86197-657-4
• Discipline and Punish
  Michel Foucault
  Penguin
  ISBN 978-0-14-013722-4
• In Cold Blood
  Truman Capote
  Penguin
  ISBN 978-0-14-118257-5
• Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair
  Richard Moran
  Vintage Books
  ISBN 037572446X
• Goya
  Janis Tomlinson
  Phaidon
  ISBN 0714838446
• Andy Warhol Prints
  Feldman/Schellmann
  Distributed Art Publishers
  ISBN 1891024639
• The Complete Engravings, etchings and Drypoints of Albrecht Durer
  Walter L. Strauss
  Dover
  ISBN 0-486-21097-9
• The Complete Etchings of Rembrandt
  Gary Schwartz
  Dover
  ISBN 0-486-28181-7
• Pierrepoint
  Adrian Shergold
  Lionsgate
  ASIN B000GT0NTS
• Capote
  Bennett Miller
  Sony Pictures
  ASIN Boo1Q94TK6
• Aileen
  Nick Broomfield
  Optimum
  ASIN B0001IMD79
• The Green Mile
  Frank Darabont
  Warner Bros.
  ASIN B00004VVTV

‘No Human Way to Kill’ comprises an exhibition of twelve etchings produced by the Goldmark Atelier in 2007 and a 102 page book published by Seabrook Press in association with the Human Rights Centre at the Universtiy of Essex in 2009. The etchings were first displayed at the University of San Francisco in 2008 and the European Commission Gallery in 2009.

The book maintains a detatched observance of the subject, acting to reflect on different points of view on the topic of the Death Panalty. It opens with an essay from Cathy Harrington whose daughter was lost to murder. Cathy negotiated a life sentence for her daughter’s killer, who had potentially been facing the death sentence. Following this is an account of life on death row in San Quentin from former Crips gang member Anthony Ross. Then, former Texas prison Warden Jim Willett, who oversaw 89 executions, gives a detailed account of how an execution is carried out.

The etchings offer a survey of twelve different types of state sanctioned execution found around the world during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and are delicately etched onto an English handmade paper. An analysis is given of each of the methods illustrated, including where and when they were last used and in what countries each technique is practiced.

The book is available in paperback, hardback and pdf download. Free downloads are available of Cathy Harrington’s essay ‘A Mother’s Story’, the interview with Jim Willett and the New York Times account of the first electrocution in 1890.

Quotes

‘In ‘No Human Way to Kill’, Robert Priseman has brought together different voices to create an important and compelling new overview of the death penalty as it exists in the world today.’
Helen Prejean, C.S.J.

‘No Human Way to Kill’ presents a graphic account of the death penalty. The etchings and accounts offer up a strange and original contemplation on a subject which stretches back far, far too long. It is time for the death penalty to end; this book helps us to see why.
Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve

Robert Priseman’s twelve etchings are beautiful and strange: airless depictions of the spaces in which and the objects by which healthy human beings have been, and still are, put to death under law. Some of the devices are disturbingly homely, even comic-looking – the eager inventor’s over-elaborate handiwork – and soon nearly all appear this way. The would-be scientificity of the lethal-injection gurney and the gas chamber is punctured, that is, not only by their place in the series alongside the garrotting chair, but by the artist’s evenly precise and dispassionate attention to perspective and texture, to straps and bolts and curtains.

The graphic technique lets us address visually a major theme of the texts in this collection, and notably of Priseman’s own Afterword. The complication of the machines, like that of the entire juridical process of execution, is a kind of hangman’s hood, to shield an individual from responsibility for the act.
Christine Stevenson, the Courtauld Institute of Art

Related Websites:

www.amicus-alj.org: A London based charity which trains European lawyers to work with local attorneys on capital punishment cases in the U.S. and around the world.

www.amnesty.org: Campaigns on global human rights issues.

www.deathpenaltyinfo.org: Provides state-by-state information on executions, history of the death penalty, discusses mental retardation, race, innocence, deterrence, and botched execution.

http://www2.essex.ac.uk/human_rights_centre/: The Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. Research topics include the prohibition against torture, freedom of religion, children in armed conflict, methods of democratic assessment, and the relationship between human rights and foreign direct investment

www.penalreform.org: Penal Reform promotes humane treatment of offenders, and aims to eliminate discrimination in penal institutes, and reduce the use of prisons worldwide.

www.reprieve.org.uk: UK based charity providing effective legal representation and humanitarian assistance to impoverished people facing the death penalty at the hands of the state.

www.meydaan.com: Campaign to change the Islamic Penal Code of Iran so that stoning will never be practiced as a punishment again.

www.murdervictimsfamilies.org: Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights is an international, non-governmental organization of family members of victims of criminal murder, terrorist killings, state executions, extrajudicial assassinations, and “disappearances” working to oppose the death penalty from a human rights perspective.

www.mvfr.org: Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation (MVFR) is a national organisation of family members of both homicide and execution who oppose the death penalty in all cases.

www.worldcoalition.org: The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty facilitates the constitution and development of national and regional coalitions against the death penalty. It leads lobbying actions towards international organisations and States, and organises events which have an international impact.

www.Robert-Priseman.com