Reviews for A Hanging in Detroit: Stephen Gifford Simmons and the Last Execution under Michigan Law

The average rating for A Hanging in Detroit: Stephen Gifford Simmons and the Last Execution under Michigan Law based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-08-13 00:00:00 Andre Schnor a fascinating legal history of capital punishment. well researched and written

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-27 00:00:00 Christopher Hellerman Pretty dry reading, the way historical surveys tend to be -- because they're surveys, one damn factoid after another. This is not to say it isn't informative. I think it's most useful when summarizing and giving some historical and (sometimes) intellectual context for landmark cases through the 19th and 20th centuries. I would also register my persistent disagreement with the author, whose conservative ideology, though he demonstrably strives to write in an evenhanded way, is apparent. This is not a criticism of the study itself, which would amount to criticizing it for being written from a perspective, which is silly; it's just an observation of the character of my engagement with it, which was frequently oppositional.