Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists “The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography, and local politics.” —Bryan Stevenson As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty.