Crime and the Ultimate Punishment

The United States, alone among advanced democracies, still enforces the death penalty. The public's support for capital punishment, however, seems to be dropping in the face of numerous recent exonerations of wrongly convicted death row prisoners. So now the argument gets serious. When does a crime warrant the death penalty? Some say the ultimate punishment should be reserved for "the worst of the worst," the most horrific cases -- yet attorney and best-selling author, Scott Turow, says that's exactly what can make for its undoing. Turow's new nonfiction book, Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on the Death Penalty, is about his shift from a self-declared "agnostic" on the death penalty to his current belief that it can never be made fair and accurate enough. Turow served as one of 14 members of the March 2000 Commission appointed by Illinois Governor George Ryan to consider reform of the capital punishment system.

McNally: I was surprised to learn that you started as a writer, and turned to law and then back to writing. How did you navigate that?

Turow: Well, my dream from childhood was to be a novelist, and I pursued it in a relentless way. I thought I could will my way to becoming a successful writer. When I was a writing fellow at Stanford, I started to make myself nuts with the demands I was putting on myself to produce. And that's not how the creative process works.

I'm not really a scholar by nature, so it was a flabbergasting idea to me when it first came up, but I realized that the people who I was friendliest with, whose works seemed most interesting to me were all lawyers. My roommates from college, the people I'd been meeting in California. And I began to think: Well, maybe I should consider law school. My colleagues at Stanford were astonished.

McNally: It was like leaving the priesthood, right?

Turow: Absolutely. We're talking about the mid-70s now and the English Department at Stanford had been radicalized by Bruce Franklin. It was as if I was crossing the border to join the ruling class. My dear friend, Tillie Olson, who was then my teacher, is an old revolutionary... I don't think she can believe it to this day.

McNally: "Where did we go wrong?"

Turow: Right.

McNally: So you remain passionate about both literature and the law?

Turow: I certainly remain passionate about writing. Am I passionate about the law? Yeah, I think I'm passionate about the law's problems. The older I get, the more resigned I am to the inability of the law to cope with everything that's dropped in its lap. I've been practicing now since 1978, so we're talking about 25 years. And I've seen rules change. They're not sacred. They go this way, then they go that way. Sometimes you realize it's just rules for the sake of rules. You've got to have rules so these are going to be the rules this week, but next week, the rules may be different. That's an aspect of the legal process I'm no longer passionate about.

McNally: I read a comment by a friend of yours who noted that in South and Central America and Europe, it's common for writers and poets to be involved in politics and public policy. While celebrities are involved in the U.S. -- and certainly in California, writers and artists are not so much. Any thoughts about that?

Turow: I remember when I was a kid, James Michener ran for Congress from Buck's County, Pennsylvania, and Norman Mailer once ran for mayor of New York.

McNally: And Gore Vidal.

Turow: And Gore Vidal. But he comes from a political family. I think it is strange that our writers are less involved. And a lot of it comes back to that high/low distinction in American culture. Politics is somehow on the low side. So why would somebody who's really smart dirty themselves with a calling that involves having to appeal to people at their most basic level?