Books : Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.66
EAN: 9780312423735
ISBN: 031242373X
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: August 01, 2004
Publisher: Picador
Sales Rank: 56688
Studio: Picador
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A gripping examination of the case for and against capital punishment by a respected criminal lawyer and celebrated novelist. In the words of Harvard Law Professor, Laurence H. Tribe--"Ultimate Punishment is the ultimate statement about the death penalty: to read it is to understand why law alone cannot make us whole."
As a respected 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. Telling 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, Ultimate Punishment has all the drama and intellectual substance of Turow’s bestselling fiction.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Excellent, excellent book. Essential, even.
Everyone should read it.
See, because my own views on the topic were very... elementary. And the topic itself is anything but elementary. The issue of capital punishment is not easily dealt with, it is not rudimentary. It is very intricate. It's convoluted.
It's a matter of life. And death.
It is ignorance to say, "I believe in it" or "I don't believe in it" without examining what is involved in choosing either decision. And here are 125 pages that are a great introduction into the matter.
Turow, a respected criminal lawyer [and bestselling author of crime-novels] was one of fourteen experts Governor George Ryan of Illinois appointed to serve on his Commission on Capital Punishment. While in office as governor, Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in the state. In March of the year 2000, realizing that abolition was not a current valid option, Ryan posed the following question to the Committee:
What reforms, if any, would make application of the death penalty in Illinois fair, just, and accurate?
Wow!
How's that for a homework assignment, huh kids?
For 24 months this Committee researched and deliberated, utilizing their combined years of experience and expertise to finally offer [in April of 2002] an impressive list of proposals for reform of the current system as applied to the state of Illinois.
Reading this book, one gets a sense of the arduous ... Read More
Rating:  -
Being a death penalty agnostic I was pushed to the pro-capital punishment side of the aisle by Mr. Turow's book. He uses the wrongly convicted and prosecution malfeasance as his main reasons for opposing the death penalty.
The criminals that Mr. Turow choses to highlight are for the most part deserving of termination. The fact that one criminal in a group murder gets the death penalty while others in the group get 45 years is not a reason to say the death penalty is used inappropriately. All of the criminals in the group who participated in a crime where death of the victim was caused should be given death. I was very disappointed in the way defendants of capital crimes were referred to as "Henry" or "Chris" by Mr. Turow. Sympathy for defendants in a controlled environment was ill founded. Advocating proper and intelligent prosecution and investigation of crimes would be a better cause for Mr. Turow.
Mr. Turow is not a death penalty agnostic. He is clearly on the side of anti-captial punishment and trying to appear objective by saying he "would push the button on John Wayne Gacey does not fool me.
Rating: -
Beautifully written and fully readable. Turow is level-headed and entirely fair-minded. He enters his study of the death penalty as an "agnostic" about it and ends up calling for abolition. I have purchased 15 copies and given them to my open-minded pro-death penalty friends. I wish I could say they all came around, but I think all took the book seriously and it forced them to examine their views on the death penalty. Highly recommended.
Rating:  -
Turow opposes capital punishment. He teases the reader so much in the first few chapters about "do I?" or "dont I?" that you quickly get the idea he opposes it. And the last chapter confirms your suspicion.
His chief objection to capital punishment is lawyers. Capital murder cases mean more than life or death to prosecutors and defense counsel; death cases are the ticket to financial wealth and political influence for the lawyers. And while he feels bad that monsters will escape the hangman if capital punishment is abolished, to frolic in prison, mocking the system and everyone, what can you do?
What you can do is make the stakes a whole lot more important to lawyers. And you do this by dis-barring them if they get it wrong and hang the wrong guy. Ditto for defense counsel; if they set the guilty free you dis-barr them, too. Make both sides really interested in getting at the truth.
More importantly, capital punishment dampens the requirement for lynchings. I study lynchings. The American People are very impatient with lawyers and a judicial system that conspires to abort justice in heinous felony cases. Probably the worst example of this conspiracy occurred in 1927 Tampa when a common laborer murdered 5 people with an axe, then 4 more people with a hammer. All of them while they slept. The murderer had no money and gets a former Supreme Court Associate Justice to defend him. The governor activates the National Guard to protect the guy, and the ... Read More
Rating: -
This book is a good review of what should be done to someone who commits murder.While there are many choices that have been used over the centuries;this book zeros in on the option of the death penalty.All the reasons for and against using the death penalty are presented; but in only brief detail.
Turow shows that the pronouncement and application of the ultimate punishment has been so inconsistant for a variety of reasons ,that there is some logic in elimination of it.
It seems that no matter how much the issue is studied that people will continue to have their own agendae,convictions and reasons to be for and againstit.
At one end of the spectrum are those who feel that criminals are not responsible for their actions,it's because of what society has done to them.This is the old victimization theory."When something goes wrong,it's somebody's fault,not mine." At the other end of the spectrum is the idea that people have a free will and they are responsible for their actions,not somebody else.
So,the issue that is really at hand is not the Death Penalty ,but what to do with the criminals and how to protect those who live responsible lives from those who have no respect foe life.
It would seem that an alternative to the death penalty would be to remove those convicted of henious crimes from society for good.You have to agree that the death penalty,with all its issues does that in spades. What would be a solution would be if those convicted ... Read More
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