The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence

That's the title of a new book that is expected to be available at the end of the year.  It's written by Frank R. Baumgartner, Suzanna De Boef, and Amber Boydstun.  Professor Baumgartner has created a dynamic website to support the book, containing many links.  I'd urge you to visit the site.

The book is available for pre-ordering at this time from Amazon.com.

Here's an excerpt from the site:

Since 2003 Frank Baumgartner and colleagues have been involved in a project   tracing the changing politics and issue-definitions associated with the death   penalty. The question is to determine the degree to which the new "innocence"   frame is displacing the traditional "morality" frame relating to this issue.   Important substantive issues about the future of the death penalty in America   can be addressed as well as difficult methodological issues concerning how to   study the links among issue-definition, public opinion, the media, and public   policy.

With Suzanna De Boef,   graduate student Amber   Boydstun, and occasional other collaborators on different parts of the   project, Baumgartner and others have addressed a number of questions relating   to these issues. The research has focused on substantive issues relating to   how the media has covered the death penalty (with particular reference to the   use of various frames), public opinion (in particular the cognitive process by   which individuals react to the "moral" and the "innocence" frame, based on   experiments), and the history of the issue since 1960.

I also want to add this excerpt from the Acknowledgements:

This project began with a phone call. Peter Loge, a Washington-based advocate then working with The Justice Project, called Baumgartner in 2002 saying he had read some previous work about the importance of issue-definition and framing, that he was working on framing an issue and could we discuss it. What’s the issue, and what’s the frame, Baumgartner asked. Well, the issue is the death penalty and the frame is that it’s a government program run by bureaucrats and it is prone to waste, inefficiency, and errors, Loge responded. With that intriguing beginning, Baumgartner agreed to come down to Washington to meet and find out more. Soon Cheryl Feeley, an undergraduate student at Penn State searching for a topic on which to write her senior honors thesis, had a new topic: Investigate the history of how the death penalty has been discussed in America over several decades to see if it had, indeed, been reframed. Boydstun, then a first-year PhD student, got involved. After some time, as our analysis got more and more complicated, De Boef got interested in both the substance of our study and the methodological challenges we faced. Feeley graduated in 2003, having completed her thesis, and took a job in Washington with The Justice Project; she is now in law school and we thank her first and foremost for her initial work. In the years since then, we three authors have learned a great deal about a topic on which none of us was originally expert; it has been shocking.

The books index is here.