A gripping, clear-sighted, necessary examination of the principles, personalities, and politics of a fundamental dilemma within American democracy written with all the drama and intellectual substance of Turow's celebrated fiction.

As a pioneer of the modern legal novel and a criminal lawyer, Scott Turow has been involved with the death penalty for more than a decade. In this vivid account of how his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow describes his own experiences with capital punishment. Along the way, he provides a brief history of America's ambivalent relationship with the ultimate punishment, analyzes the potent reasons for and against it, including the role of the victims' survivors, and tells the powerful stories behind the statistics.