Capital Punishment An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor Billy Wayne Sinclair An impassioned, well-researched report on one of the most burning issues facing us today: the death penalty. Billy Wayne Sinclair was only 21 when he heard the Louisiana judge pronounce these words: "I hereby sentence you to death in the electric chair." It was the culmination of a botched holdup committed the year before in which Billy had accidentally shot and killed a man. Billy spent the next 40 years in Angola Prison, one of the country's worst, six of those years on death row. When in 1972 the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as arbitrary and capricious, Billy was re-sentenced to life without parole. Finally released in 2006, he now examines the death penalty in great detail, from ancient history—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—to the present. Informed by his own experience and his decades-long studies, this book offers important information about, and insights into, a subject that is as heated and controversial today as it ever was.

Billy Wayne Sinclair spent seven years on death row, over thirty-five years behind bars. Every day of his life he is in danger of being murdered for exposing corruption both in the prison system and in the statehouse of Louisiana. •Seven years on death row •Thirty-five years in the Louisiana prison system--the nation's worst •Denied parole six times •Largely responsible for integrating the once fiercely segregated Angola State Penitentiary •Respected, self-trained jailhouse lawyer who has helped hundreds of fellow inmates get a fairer deal •Award-winning journalist, editor of the higly respected prison journal The Angolite •Whistle-blower extraordinaire, the man who blew wide open the pardons-for-sale scandal that rocked the Louisiana government and helped send key officials to jail •Married by proxy, behind the backs of prison officials, to a pretty, feisty television anchorwoman, who has been his staunch supporter and helpmate for twenty years and is now his coauthor Such is the abbreviated curriculum vitae of one of American's most famous prisoners, Billy Wayne Sinclair, a man known to many as a latter-day Robin Hood. Sentenced to death in 1965 at age twenty for an unpremeditated murder during the bungled holdup of a convenience store, Billy Wayne spent his first seven prison ...