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, including successfully representing two different men convicted in death-penalty prosecutions. In Ultimate Punishment, a vivid account of how his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow describes his own experiences with capital punishment from his days as an impassioned young prosecutor to his recent service on the Illinois commission which investigated the administration of the death penalty and influenced Governor George Ryan's unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 164 death row inmates on his last day in office. 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, as he moves from the Governor's Mansion to Illinois' state-of-the art 'super-max' prison and the execution chamber.

Fascinating, Slim, poignant and hugely powerful musing on America and the death penalty . . . a forensic and yet heartfelt and even troubled examination of the cases for and against capital punishment, and its spare and elegant prose will leave no side in the debate feeling short-changed . . . The book’s power lies in Turow’s own initial ambivalence – and there is no reason to suspect this is literary artifice . . . He never hectors or judges and yet effortlessly steers the reader to the close, Gripping and lucid consideration of America’s continued application of the death penalty, The strength of his book is that it is the product of genuine open-mindedness rather than of an opinion firmly held from the very outset . . . his book makes a case against capital punishment all the stronger for not being strident, By the end of the second page of this compelling book I had almost recanted my lifelong stance against capital punishment. Two pages later I had regained myself. Most readers will probably feel the same about the cases that have caused such joltings of sentiment . . . this is how Scott Turow, with the consummate skill of the thriller writer, portrays the reasons why a society might struggle over the question of capital punishment

Scott Turow is the world-famous author of six best-selling novels about the law, from Presumed Innocent to Reversible Errors, which centres on a death penalty case. He lives with his family outside Chicago where he is partner in the firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.