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White Mercy A Study of the Death Penalty in South Africa
Robert Turrell
Book Code: E07132
ISBN: 0-325-07132-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-325-07132-9
296 pages, Photos; Exhibits
Praeger Paperback
Publication: 11/30/2004
List Price: $26.95 (UK Sterling Price: £14.95)
Availability: US Rights Not Available
Media Type: Paperback
Trim Size: 6 1/8 X 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • Turrell's study is an impressive piece of scholarship that provides an invaluable frame for the study of death penalty and mercy in other countries. As a comprehensive and largely descriptive account it covers rather fully of the variety of mercy cases and pulls together much important information and many the sources from which future scholarship can depart. His examination of race, degeneration, gender and mercy shed light on the mysteries that surrounded the mercy process in South Africa....[t]his book is a must be read for students of South African history and law.
    —Crime, History & Societies     2005
Description: Robert Turrell presents a novel approach to the study of capital punishment in 20th-century South Africa. White Mercy focuses on official acts of mercy rather than on miscarriages of justice. Turrell bases his absorbing narrative on a thorough investigation of government statistics, court testimony, and judges' reports. He shows that racism and sexism profoundly influenced death-penalty cases, but not in equal ways. Africans, whom white rulers considered the "weaker" race, and women, whom men called the "weaker" sex, entered a legal realm that both promoted preordained cultural difference and disproportionately granted clemency to females convicted of murder. What will perhaps surprise many readers is that a number of condemned white men went to the gallows because the court believed they exhibited the incorrigible instincts of the "weaker" race. White Mercy stands alone in South African scholarship as the only book-length history of capital punishment. It is also a pioneering study in the field of gender studies. Turrell's sharp analysis and engrossing vignettes will be welcomed by students in graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses covering a range of themes from race relations and gender studies, to the death penalty and constitutional developments in the United States and South Africa.
Table of Contents:
  • Acknowledgments
  • List of Tables
  • List of Illustrations
  • Introduction
  • Segregation: "This man is only a native" (1900-1910)
  • Lord Gladstone: "This judicial slaughter is a desperate business" (1910-1914)
  • Degeneration: "Inferior whites undermine the white race as a whole" (1914-1921)
  • Prince Arthur and the Rand Rebellion: "Between judges and politicians" (1922-1924)
  • Racial Murder: "A national pastime" (1924-1933)
  • General Smuts: "Mostly illiterates and natives" (1933-1939)
  • A Discretionary Death Penalty: "Executions are carried out by one racial group on another" (1939-1948)
  • Conclusion
LC Card Number: 2003060013
LCC Class: KTL3964
Dewey Class: 345
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