Best-selling author Scott Turow, a lawyer, who explores the criminal justice system in fiction, was in the State House halls Wednesday, not to hawk a new book, but to talk about his own evolution into an opponent of the death penalty.
“Because of my experience as a prosecutor, I thought [the death penalty] was an ugly necessity,” Turow told The Examiner. “I knew if I was called to stand in front of a jury and ask for the death penalty, I was certainly ready to do that.”
“I used to refer to myself as a death penalty agnostic,” but then he represented “a truly innocent man that had clearly been railroaded” and sentenced to death.
Turow?s thinking also changed as he served on the Illinois governor?s commission to examine the death penalty and got to interview a number of the murderers on death row.
His experience on the commission “taught me that I had been asking the wrong question” ? not is the death penalty “moral or right” but “will you ever be able to construct a legal system that reaches only the right cases, without sweeping in the wrong cases?”
” My conclusion is that you?ll never be able to do that ? it?s too great a challenge for the law,” Turow said.
“Americans want to believe that certain acts are so bestial, so extreme” that they want to “make a clear moral statement that we condemn this behavior. But the problem with the capital system is thatit does not make clear moral statements.”
“It?s riddled with inequities and fallacies,” Turow said. “You can actually convict a innocent person with barely any evidence.”
Turow wrote the recent nonfiction book “Ultimate Punishment.” Maryland Citizens Against State Executions brought Turow to Maryland to talk to legislators, the governor and his staff.
