Show Daily: Interview with Scott Turow
Weighing Executions
by Michael Archer -- Publishers Weekly, 6/10/2004
Scott Turow didn’t write Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections
on Dealing with the Death Penalty [click here to read the review] to add to his list of bestsellers. Turow,
whose gripping law novels have made him one of the country’s most celebrated and
bestselling authors, had something important to share. “I wanted to reach those
people who, like me, are divided, and just say to them, ‘This is where I’ve come
to.’ I really don’t think the question is: Are some crimes so awful that we want
to make an ultimate statement about them? I’ll concede that point. But are we
ever going to be able to do that in a way that justifies that
rationale?”
Turow seems the ideal candidate to write such a work, which
Picador reprints in August. (He autographs today at the Picador booth [1615],
3–4 p.m., and he guests at the Audiobook Tea on Saturday.) A respected criminal
lawyer, he has been involved with the death penalty for more than a decade,
including successfully representing two different men convicted in death penalty
prosecutions. He recently served on the Illinois commission investigating the
administration of the death penalty and influenced Gov. George Ryan’s
unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 164 death row inmates on his last
day in office.
“I was principally preoccupied with writing my novel
Reversible Errors when I was sitting on the committee,” Turow says.
“Then, when I finished, I had been really self-conscious about not turning the
novel into a didactic work and realized I had a lot to say about the death
penalty.”
What started as an essay for the New Yorker turned into
Ultimate Punishment. “The trick with the book was to keep it short. My
idea is that most writing about the death penalty tends to take a point of view
and try and justify it or goes on ad nauseam. My strategy was to talk about it
from the point of view of someone who’s divided about it and address the
arguments without getting lost in an ocean of statistics or welter of historical
detail. I wanted to write a fairly economical and somewhat dispassionate
discussion about what I think is a fairly difficult issue that stirs up deeply
contending strains.”
Chicago resident Turow
has been to several BEAs in the past (last year, he performed with the Rock
Bottom Remainders band—for whom he is “supposedly a singer”), but he’s
particularly excited about this year’s event. “It doesn’t happen often that the
entire literary world comes to Chicago.”
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