Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty
Aug 2010 · Macmillan + ORM
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180
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About this ebook
The #1 New York Times-bestselling legal thriller writer delivers “the most convincing, levelheaded analysis of [the death penalty] I have encountered” (The Washington Post).
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.
Ultimate Punishment—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.
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.
Ultimate Punishment—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.
“[Ultimate Punishment] deserves a huge audience. The writing is . . . elegant, the thinking deep, the insider experiences on which he bases his arguments irrefutable.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Thought-provoking, heart-wrenching, and deserving of a close read.” —The Denver Post
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About the author
Scott Turow is the author of worldwide bestselling novels including Presumed Innocent, Ordinary Heroes, The Burden of Proof, Reversible Errors and Limitations. His works of nonfiction include One L, his journal from his first year at law school, and Ultimate Punishment, which he wrote after serving on the Illinois commission that 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. Ultimate Punishment won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He lives outside Chicago, where he is partner in the firm of SNR Denton (formerly Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal).
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