David R. Dow and writer Mark Dow bring together diverse views from lawyers, wardens, victims' families, executioners and inmates to show how America's death penalty system actually works.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"A thoughtful and compelling book written by people who struggle on the front lines with the machinery of death. It exposes the critical fault-lines: how race and poverty continue to matter; how innocent people can end up on death row; and how constitutional rights are routinely ignored by state and federal judges. Anyone who wants to know how the death penalty really works in America should read this book." -- Barry Scheck, Co-Author, Actual Innocence, and Co-Director, The Innocence Project
"This volume brings together lawyers, prison officials, social workers, journalists, and relatives of murder victims who have intimate knowledge of the machinery of the death penalty." -- Future Survey
"A compilation of testimonial essays brought together by death penalty lawyer David Dow and journalist Mark Dow, builds the case that the death penalty in any form is irrefutably and inexcusably not decnt. The editors bring together the voices of lawyers, prison personnel, and relatives of murder victims to bear witness to the reality of the death penalty in America." -- Margaret M. Chaplin, M.D., Psychiatric Services
"'Machinery of Death' maps familiar fault lines of capitl punishment: its condemnation by the international community; its randomness, striking innocents along with the guilty; its concentration on certain jurisdictions and not others; and its inherent and apparently ineradicable racism. What's new in this remarkable collection of essays is that each was written by a person who has seen the death machine first hand-- attorneys, prison officials, social workers, journalists, and relatives of murder victims-- and how that intimate experience altered their lives." -- The Angolite: The Prison News Magazine