Ultimate Punishment
by Scott Turow
Posted October 15, 2003 thepeoplesvoice.org
Farrar Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com
(ISBN 0-374-12873-1)
U.S.A. $18.00 / Canada $29.95
Scott
Turow is known to millions as the author of peerless novels about the
troubling regions of experience where law and reality intersect. And as a
respected criminal lawyer, he has been involved with the death penalty for
more than a decade, 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 and impassioned young prosecutor to his recent
service on the Illinois Commission that investigated the state's
administration of the death penalty and influenced Gov. George Ryan's
unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 167 death row inmates on his
last day of in office. Along the way, Turow 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 super max prison and that the
execution chamber. This gripping clear-sighted, necessary examination of the
principals, the personalities, and the politics of a fundamental dilemma of
our democracy has all the drama and intellectual substance of Turow’s
celebrated fiction.
Praise
for
Ultimate Punishment
“In
that rarest of achievements, a page-turner filled with genuine wisdom, Scott
Turow takes us on a mesmerizing voyage through the land of murder, holding
us spellbound as we arrive finally at the secret lying at the heart of every
one of Turow’s gripping novels, a secret whose revelation exposes what we
truly seek from capital punishment - and why we will never find it there.
Written with a fine lawyers feel for fairness and with a superb novelist's
gift for telling us truths beyond the power of the law’s logic to express,
Ultimate Punishment is the ultimate statement about the death penalty: to
read it is to understand why law alone cannot make us whole.”
-Lawrence
H. Tribe,
Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School
Scott
Turow it is the world famous author of six best-selling novels about the
law, from Presumed Innocent (1987) to Reversible Errors (2002), which
centers on a death penalty case. He lives with his family outside Chicago,
where he is a partner in the firm of Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal.
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