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Ultimate Punishment
by: Scott Turow

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Binding: Kindle Edition
Dewey Decimal Number: 345.730773
Format: Kindle Book
Label: FSG
Manufacturer: FSG
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: March 09, 2007
Publisher: FSG
Release Date: March 09, 2007
Sales Rank: 28977
Studio: FSG

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
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 prosecutinos. 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 Illinios Commission that investigated the state's administration of the death penalty and influenced Governor George Ryan's unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 167 death row inmates on his last day in office. Along the way, Turow provides a brief jistory of America's ambivalent relationship with the ultimate punishment; analyzes the potent reasons for and against it, including the role of the victim's survivors; and tells the powerful stories behind the statistics, as he moves from the governor's mansion to Illinios' Super-Max prison and execution chamber. 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.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- His "X" On "No"
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 ... Read More

Rating:

- Death penalty agnostic
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. ... Read More

Rating:

- The single best general-purpose book on this subject.
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:

- No Mystery Here.
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.
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