Author(s): Scott Turow

Fiction

A Laywer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty.

As a pioneer of the modern legal novel and a criminal lawyer, Scott Turow has been involved with the death penalty for many years. In this vivid account of how his views have evolved, he 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, analyses the potent reasons for and against it and tells the powerful stories behind the statistics, as he moves from the Governor's Mansion to Illinois's 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 within American democracy has all the drama and intellectual substance of Turow's celebrated fiction.