Richard Stack, by Julia Jang

Richard Stack is an associate professor at the American University in the School of Communication. He began activist oriented research about the death penalty for his new book, Grave Injustice: Unearthing Wrongful Executions. 

Stack believes that presently, it is possible that capital punishment causes the problem of wrongful execution, which is obviously unfair to innocent people. Based on his research, he said that there is evidence to show that executing notorious individuals leads to an increase in violent crime. He further determined that violence is not a valid reason to uphold the death penalty. Stack does not want the government teach young children that violence is an acceptable way to solve the problem. Stack thinks we can make a better solution, instead of violence.

For the research, Stack used both primary and secondary research methods, and qualitative research methods. The research format of the primary research and the qualitative research was personal interviews, whose subjects were individual persons who had already been unfair execution victims, family members, lawyers, journalists and a prison chaplain. These interviews helped him to understand the reality that courts can make a mistake that bestows a wrongful sentence on an innocent person, and they could be victim of death penalty. In reality, there were many cases of innocent people being charged with the death penalty as a punishment. As a secondary research method, he did a lot of literature reviews from medias’ coverage of capital punishment. He wanted to know how the media and other people think about the death penalty from this research method.

“To me the evolution of the death penalty has reached the inevitable level of enlightenment,” Stack said. He insisted that he want to show that the death penalty does not make logical sense in the 21th century. Also, people should know about the fact that violence is not the only method to make a better world for the next generation.