Book Review: The Past as prologue: The supreme court’s pre-modern death penalty jurisprudence and its influence on the supreme court’s modern death penalty decisions

DOI10.1177/0734016813516489
Date01 March 2014
Published date01 March 2014
Subject MatterBook Reviews
text was devoted to discussing the emergence of a possible fourth era in American policing. Though
some authors believe that policing in America will drift into an era they called militarization of poli-
cing, the author, however, believes that the next phase of policing beyond community policing will
be post 9/11/terrorism policing.
I personally share in the belief of the author because today, the threat of terrorism is not only an
international issue but has equally become a domestic issue whose fight requires that local police
departments must be on constant alert and always prepared to successfully thwart any possible
domestic terrorist attack. In discussing the new paradigm of policing, Chriss uses 14 dimensions that
will characterize the new era. These include the terrorism dimension, mission reconfiguration
dimension, federally led response, leadership, readying for action, business as usual mind-set, finan-
cial paradox, federal–local crime control partnerships, preserving public trust, and changing leader-
ship requirements dimensions. The discussion on these dimensions in the text was very thorough and
easy to follow. Chapter 9 of the text extended the security discussion in Chapter 5 to focus on private
security and how it operates alongside public policing in the postmodern world. The author adopted
both historical and contemporary perspectives to enable the reader to appreciate the mechanisms
underlying private policing, both in the past and in the future. Chriss also cited several relevant mate-
rials to support his discussion on private security.
Generally, I found this text to be very authoritative, and covers the nuances of policing in Amer-
ica. The author, who is a sociology and criminology professor, has extensive knowledge which he
brought to bear in discussing the various issues hovering around American policing. In view of this,
I will strongly recommend this text to anyone who wants to acquire detail knowledge on both the
historical and the contemporary developments of American policing.
Bohm, R. M. (2012).
The Past as prologue: The supreme court’s pre-modern death penalty jurisprudence and its influence on the supreme
court’s modern death penalty decisions. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. 239 pp. $33, ISBN 978-1-61163-091-6.
Reviewed by: Jennifer R. Wynn, LaGuardia Community College & John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Long Island
City, NY, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0734016813516489
Robert Bohm’s The Past as Prologue is a concisely written and meticulous analysis of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s premodern death penalty jurisprudence and its influence on modern death penalty
decisions. Bohm, a leading scholar of capital punishment and author of five books on the subject,
uses 1968 as the demarcation line between premodern and modern U.S. Supreme Court death pen-
alty decisions. The year 1968 was the first time in American history that no one was executed, and it
marked the beginning of an unofficial moratorium on executions that lasted a decade.
The book’s title is a nod to William Shakespeare’s observation, ‘‘What is past is prologue,’
which Bohm explains is relevant to an analysis of modern death penalty jurisprudence because judi-
cial rulings, under the doctrine of stare decisis, are supposed to be guided by legal precedent. As the
author comments, an examination of the U.S. Supreme Court’s (the Court’s) premodern death pen-
alty decisions sheds valuable light on modern death penalty jurisprudence because the modern deci-
sions are based, in part, on the rules established in earlier decisions. Moreover, while a great deal has
been written about the Court’s modern death penalty jurisprudence, decisions written before 1968
are few in comparison and have been largely relegated to ‘‘the dustbin of history’’ (p. ix). In fact,
prior to 1968, the Court rarely reviewed state death penalty sentences. Conversely, in the modern
102 Criminal Justice Review 39(1)

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