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March 28, 2004
Review: A voice from death row
IT is a great British debate, which doesn’t happen any longer. Bring back capital punishment? Almost from memory, Joe Public says yes. Arguments are never joined and thus remain frozen, much as they were when the hangman’s rope was shredded 40 years ago. But that doesn’t mean there is no debate or that it has not moved on.
Scott Turow is famous for his deep woven legal thrillers. He is also a distinguished criminal attorney, experienced both as prosecutor and defender, now partner in a great Chicago firm. He writes with elegant subtlety, brings formidable expertise to bear — and makes up his own mind. This brief book, sub-titled A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty, is the fruit of all that: fresh, honest and memorable.
In March 2000, a tubby former drugstore chemist called George Ryan was governor of Illinois. He had a problem that troubled him. Ryan was a long-standing advocate of capital punishment, but he couldn’t duck some grim figuring. Since 1977, when Illinois had restored the death penalty, 270 men and women had received the ultimate sentence. Yet only 12 of them, all appealings spent, had paid it. More than a third of the time that Illinois imposed a capital sentence, it seemed, the defendants were either not guilty or not deserving execution.
Surely some mistake here? Ryan did what politicians with a hot potato usually do: he set up an advisory commission. And Turow, a self-proclaimed ‘agnostic’ on the issue, was one of his nominees. In youth, he’d seen capital punishment as barbaric. But now, from his time at the prosecutor’s table, he believed that some killers could be cruel, vicious and irredeemable, just “bad people”.
“My job... was to make sure they didn’t do bad things again. And I could see that a sentence of death was the most certain means to accomplish that goal in extreme circumstances.” Take Hector Reuben Sanchez, who randomly shot a boy in a Chicago car park then kidnapped, raped, sodomised and tortured his young girlfriend before beating her to death on a concrete floor. A bad man doing bad, bad things. His death sentence, Turow thought, was “a victory” for the federal prosecutor’s office. Practical justice.
And yet he’d been on the other side, too, handling pro bono the appeal of Alejandro Hernandez, sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 10-year-old named Jeanine Nicarico. But when another man later confessed to the killing, the county prosecutors stubbornly refused for years to accept the man’s confession, even after DNA evidence made him the killer and excluded Hernandez. This justice took years to achieve. This justice saw Hernandez eventually exonerated and several former prosecutors and policemen indicted on charges of conspiracy to obstruct it.
Where, Turow asked himself, was the shining principle in such dichotomies, the line which put Hernandez on one side and murderers like Sanchez on the other? Could you, indeed, find any principle here amid so much squalor and beastliness? And so, as the commission toiled, it was the practicalities, which gnawed away at him.
Why did Texas, performer of more than a third of all US executions since 1976, still have a murder rate far above the national average?Why was the system so flaky, so corrupt, so reluctant to admit mistakes? Why were the worst instances of incompetence reserved for murder cases when these were precisely the ones where most care ought to have been taken? Wasn’t this all politics?
The outcome of Ryan’s commission, in such dislocated circumstances, seems politically perfect. Turow and friends did a smooth, standard job, refettling this, reforming that, bringing ‘the system’ up to date. But the governor, by then, had almost finished his term and wasn’t running again. A free man, he wrestled with who to pardon and who to kill under the new rules — and gave up. He couldn’t, he said, “play God”. All 167 on Illinois’s death row were saved. And Turow, by then, was a convert.
There will always be cases that cry out for ultimate punishment, but that is not the true issue. The pivotal question is whether a system of justice can be constructed that reaches only the rare, right cases without also occasionally condemning the innocent or undeserving.
The ultimate trouble is not that there is no final justice. We are too feeble and fallible to dispense it. The trouble is that we are human, too. Because Turow takes us on his own halting journey of self-discovery, we ride along with him: human beings grappling, with a human dilemma. I finished reading it, by chance, just before George W’s State of the Union address and felt cleaner for doing so. — Dawn/Observer News Service
Ultimate Punishment
By Scott Turow
Picador
ISBN 0330426885
164pp. £12.99
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