Yuma Public Library

A compendium of opinion on the moral and ethical issues surrounding capital punishment, including whether it deters murder and whether it's too expensive to retain.

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. The author underscores the problems...

A film adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy, placed in a setting inspired by nineteenth-century Japan, in which exiled royals--including a duke's daughter disguised as a man--and country folk, learn lessons about class and gender through a series of love triangles in the Forest of Arden.

Sheriff Spencer Arrowood receives an invitation to an execution for Fate Harkryder, a young man he helped convict twenty years earlier for the murder of two hikers, but the parallels between the Harkryder case and another murder that took place over one hundred years earlier, leads Spencer to question whether Harkryder is really guilty.

Pittsburgh corporate lawyer Nick Fallin's high life has gotten the best of him. Arrested for drug use, he is sentenced to 1,500 hours of community service. He must now squeeze those hours into his 24/7 cutthroat world of mergers, acquisitions, and board meetings. Reluctantly, he is now a part-time child advocate at Legal Aid Services, where one case after another is an eye-opening instance of kids caught up in difficult circumstances. As the show...

A shell-shocked Juliette is released from prison after serving 15 years for murdering her young son. As life has moved on, she must relearn certain basics. After being banished from her family, she is now reunited with her younger sister, Lea. Hopefully, Juliette will learn to forgive herself in the process.

This book provides a history of crime and punishment in the United States, from the transportation of British convicts to the American colonies to recent efforts to close the prison revolving door and restore former inmates to productive lives in society.

An Ohio death row inmate, convicted of killing his 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 17 years old, dies of heart disease. Six years later, the police arrest a Canadian expatriate living in Sweden for repeatedly kicking a drunken man in the head. A cantankerous Det. Supt. Ewert Grens of the Stockholm police discovers that the foreigner in their jail cell is a convicted murderer, the same death row inmate who supposedly died in America six years earlier....

On the mountainous border of China and Tibet in 1708, a detective must learn what a killer already knows: that empires rise and fall on the strength of the stories they tell. Li Du was an imperial librarian. Now he is an exile. Arriving in Dayan, the last Chinese town before the Tibetan border, he is surprised to find it teeming with travelers, soldiers, and merchants. All have come for a spectacle unprecedented in this remote province: an eclipse...