Book description
As a pioneer of the modern legal novel and a criminal lawyer, Scott
Turow 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.
Scott Turow is the world-famous author of six best-selling novels
about the law, from Presumed Innocent (1987) to Reversible Errors
(2002), which centres on a death penalty case. He lives with his
family outside Chicago where he is partner in the firm of Sonnenschein
Nath & Rosenthal.
