Death penalty, exhibit B

Following my previous post, I would like to subject the internet to a series of quotes from Scott Turow's book, Ultimate Punishment. Turow is a former prosecutor and author of many legal suspense thrillers who was also served on the Illinois Commission that influenced Governor George Ryan's decision to commute the sentences of all Illinois Death Row inmates before he left office. Turow's perspective is interesting because, while he agrees the death penalty should be an option under ideal circumstances as, as the Commission words it, "the strongest condemnation of a small number of the most heinous crimes," he believes we are not at this stage prepared to administer it fairly.

While he acknowledges also possible moral issues, Turow focuses on several examples of exonerated inmates, and cases in which the crimes of some life inmates were demonstrably worse than those of certain Death Row inmates.

And says:

“In confronting murder, we as a society ask how we should face an ultimate evil, which, if unchecked, would reduce almost all human interaction to war. We want to punish in order to prevent murder, but also as part of our effort to restore ourselves from the anxieties it raises about our ability to live with one another…"

"Murder takes us to the Land’s End of the law. Our horror and revulsion undermine our capacity to reason—and prove that justice alone will not make us whole. Only the attachments we have to each other, the antipodal experience of what goes on in the moment a murderer kills, can accomplish that. In the face of the cruelties we visit upon one another, murder being the gravest wrong among them, a sense of meaning and connection must come from outside the law.”

“I admit I am still attracted to a death penalty that would be available for the crimes of unimaginable dimensions like (John Wayne Gacy)’s, or that would fully eliminate the marginal risks that incorrigible monsters like (repeat offender who killed again after he was imprisoned) might ever again satisfy their vampire appetites…There will always be cases that cry out to me for ultimate punishment. That is not the true issue. The pivotal question instead is whether a system of justice can be constructed that reaches only the rare, right cases, without also occasionally condemning the innocent or the undeserving.”

And here is my favorite.

“After twenty-five years of attempting to establish laser-like guidelines, we still end up with a moral hodgepodge where Chris Thomas is condemned to die because he is poor and belligerent, while the likes of the Menendez brothers, who shotgunned their parents for the millions, or the Unabomber, who killed and maimed and threatened the nation for years, get life. In yet another of the perpetual paradoxes in this subject, retaining the death penalty seems to be a road to breeding disrespect for the law, because it exposes so many of its shortcomings. (emphasis added)”