No Human Way to Kill (book)
ISBN: 978-0-9562082-4-8
Price: £24.99
Binding: Paperback, perfect bound
Author/Editor: Cathy Harrington, Robert Priseman, Anthony Ross, Professor Sir Nigel Rodley, Jim Willett
Size in mm: 210mm x 210mm
Total no. of pages inc. prelims: 102
No. of illustrations: 12 Black and White,
No Human Way to Kill creates a unique account of the death penalty by juxtaposing an interview with former Texas Prison Warden Jim Willett who oversaw 89 executions, an essay about life on death row in San Quentin by former Crips gang member Anthony Ross, and an essay from Cathy Harrington whose daughter was lost to murder; Cathy negotiated a life sentence for her daughter’s murderer when he had been facing a potential death sentence.
This beautiful and compulsive book also features etchings by Robert Priseman.
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