Execution's Doorstep: The true stories of five men unfairly condemned to death.

"Wonder how it could be that 126 wrongly convicted people on death row have been exonerated? What's wrong with our court system? Here's a promise: if you accompany Ms. Lytle into these five stories you'll not only "get it," you may be moved to join our efforts to change it."
—Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and Death of Innocents

"Damn, I wish I had written this book! Leslie Lytle has done a masterful job of drawing out her subjects in interviews (as Studs Terkel might have) and telling their stories in fast-paced narratives (as John Grisham might have). Executioner's Doorstep is a truly compelling work."
—Rob Warden
Executive Director
Center on Wrongful Convictions,
Bluhm Legal Clinic
Northwestern University School of Law

"No issue is more important than innocence in the current death penalty discussion. In "Execution's Doorstep," Leslie Lytle has made an invaluable contribution to this discussion with her detailed and thoroughly readable description of the lives of five men from death row. These stories would be incredible except that they are told with such skill as to become real and believable. The impression this book leaves is a strong and important one."
—Richard C. Dieter
Executive Director
Death Penalty Information Center

The stories of five men unfairly condemned to death.

Execution’s Doorstep tells the true stories of five lives trapped in a living nightmare: sentenced to die for a crime they didn’t commit. Since capital punishment was reinstated in the mid 1970’s, over 120 individuals have been proven wholly innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death. But this statistic, as horrifying as it is, does not begin to tell the whole story.

Leslie Lytle confronts the human suffering behind these miscarriages of justice in her effort to reveal how and why they occurred. Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research, Lytle guides the reader through the fateful crimes, the arrests, the trials, the incarcerations, the struggles to prove innocence, and the difficult readjustments to life in the free world. Execution’s Doorstep is more than a gripping human-interest story. As Lytle shows, the criminal justice and capital punishment systems that we have established to promote an ethical society are fallible; subject to the same, incompetencies, petty corruptions, and politicizations that all human institutions are prone. As we relive these heart-rending stories of innocents damned, this book poses a simple question: can we trust the life and death of any man to a system run by men?

The five men whose stories are told in Execution's Doorstep will share in proceeds from sales.

Publisher: University Press of New England
Title of Book: Execution’s Doorstep
Subtitle of Book: True Stories of the Innocent and Near Damned
Author: Leslie Lytle
Press Name: Northeastern University Press
Pub Month: November
ISBN-13 (978-1-00000-000-0):
Category Suggestions: Crime and Punishment, Death Penalty

Leslie Lytle has an M.A. from Antioch University, serves on the board of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing, as a staff writer for the community newspaper, Sewanee Mountain Messenger, Sewanee, Tennessee, and as editor of Local Action and Beyond, the journal of the Cumberland Center for Justice and Peace. She was recently appointed the Center’s executive director.