America's leading writer about the law takes a close,
incisive look at one of society's most vexing legal
issues.
Scott Turow is known to millions as the author of
peerless novels about the troubling regions of experience
where law and reality intersect. In "real life," as a
respected criminal lawyer, he has been involved with the
death penalty for more than a decade, including
successfully representing two different men convicted in
death-penalty prosecutions. In this vivid account of how
his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow
describes his own experiences with capital punishment from
his days as an impassioned young prosecutor to his recent
service on the Illinois commission which investigated the
administration of the death penalty and influenced
Governor George Ryan's unprecedented commutation of the
sentences of 164 death row inmates on his last day in
office. Along the way, he provides a brief history of
America's ambivalent relationship with the ultimate
punishment, analyzes the potent reasons for and against
it, including the role of the victims' survivors, and
tells the powerful stories behind the statistics, as he
moves from the Governor's Mansion to Illinois' state-of-
the art 'super-max' prison and the execution chamber.
This gripping, clear-sighted, necessary examination of the
principles, the personalities, and the politics of a
fundamental dilemma of our democracy has all the drama and
intellectual substance of Turow's celebrated fiction.
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