Download Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty AudioBook Free
America's leading writer about the law requires a close, incisive check out one of society's most vexing legal issues
Scott Turow is known to millions as the writer of peerless novels about the troubling parts 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. With this vivid account of how his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow describes his own experience 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 best punishment, analyzes the potent known reasons for and against it, like 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 study 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.
