Dr. Lauren A Ricciardelli

In Capital Defense: Inside the Lives of America’s Death Penalty Lawyers,authors Jon B. Gouldand Maya Pagni Barak employ a sociological framework to identify and explain the struc-ture and culture of trial-level capital defense in the United States. The authors offer criticalcommentary about the U.S. criminal justice system by examining the social, cultural, andpolitical influences that“never appear in the statutes or case law”(Gould & Pagni Barak,2019, p. 9), but that have bearing on capital adjudication. In line with the book’s mantra,Death is Different,the authors’“central argument is that capital defense is both a special-ized community and distinct culture within law, even among criminal defense as a whole”(Gould & Pagni Barak,2019, pp. 10–11).