Ultimate Punishment (Hardcover)

In his legal career, Mr. Turow has had some exposure to capital punishment cases both as a prosecutor and as a defendant's attorney. From these experiences, he learned that the law doesn't operate as smoothly as advertised in death penalty cases.

I picked up the book because I had read a little about Illinois Governor George Ryan's commutation of 167 death sentences on the last day of his term in office, and wanted to know more about how they came about. The book more than fulfilled my interest, because Mr. Turow was a member of a commission looking into reforming the application of the death penalty for Governor Ryan. The findings of that commission and the subsequent foot dragging by the legislature caused Governor Ryan to act.

Although I have been opposed to the death penalty for as long as I can remember, I was shocked to find out how poorly the sentence had been applied in Illinois. Prosecutors overlooked police torture to obtain confessions, judges overlooked obvious procedural errors, defense attorneys were expected to defend their clients at trial for a total payment of $300, defendants to the same crime often didn't receive the same sentence even when their acts were worse, AND many innocent defendants spent years awaiting death. If you want to understand all the gruesome details, this book provides them in a reasonably dispassionate way.

When he started with the commission, Mr. Turow described himself as an agnostic on capital punishment. By the end of the commission, he was an opponent. Most will agree with him that it's unlikely that the death penalty can be applied in a fair and rigorous way.

Although the book's subtitle was "A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty," I was ultimately disappointed that Mr. Turow didn't deal more with the moral and spiritual sides of the question.

To me, the most gut-wrenching part of the book involved the description of the most currently dangerous multiple murderers in Illinois and what their life is like in maximum security prison for 23 hours a day under lockdown. It's not much of a life.

The most revealing information came in Mr. Turow's description of what happened after the commutations. The electorate was evenly split on the point, and only prosecutors were uniformly negative. The new governor indicated that he will also probably defer having any executions until reforms suggested by the commission are in place.

Anyone who cherishes their person freedom will be very upset at reading how truly innocent people are railroaded into false confessions, are betrayed by lying witnesses, and abused by prosecutors who know better. It could happen to you!