Word: turow
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Talk about hyping a book. But Errors is no crude anti-capital-punishment tract. Moral ambiguity is at the heart of Turow's fictional Kindle County, where the truth is never the whole truth and justice is often merely a point of view. The story of how a wrong man is sentenced to death for a triple murder is told through the eyes of four flawed characters: the middle-aged, despairingly single Raven; Muriel Wynn, the cynical prosecutor; Larry Starczek, a hard-boiled cop; and Gillian Sullivan, a judge known for taking bribes. Turow never promised it was pretty...
...book's central drama of an innocent man facing execution comes just as doubts about the fairness of the capital-punishment system are spreading nationally. "Even [Supreme Court] Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has said she is disturbed at the number of innocent people on death row," says Turow, wiping sweat from his forehead after a golf game near his home on Chicago's North Shore. Golf is the only time Turow doesn't work. He writes his novels on the train to his office, works all day on the 77th floor of the Sears Tower for clients...
...idea for the new novel came from the case of Alejandro Hernandez, who was sentenced to death for the 1985 rape and murder of a young girl. Turow was alerted to the case by a friend. When he read the evidence--which largely rested on a single sentence in English spoken in the midst of a conversation in Spanish--and learned that a convicted child murderer had already confessed to the girl's killing, he says, "I became virtually unhinged. I couldn't believe this was happening in America...
...happens more often than anyone wants to admit. Turow eventually won Hernandez's acquittal, making him one of 13 people on death row in Illinois who have been exonerated since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. In 2000, Governor Ryan declared an indefinite moratorium on executions and appointed Turow to the death-penalty commission...
...Turow is not morally opposed to the death penalty; nor were a majority of the 14 members of the commission. According to Turow, detailed reviews and cross studies showed "no evidence that killing a killer makes murder less likely." The stronger argument for the death penalty, in the commission's view, was that it provided solace to some of the victim's relatives. "Until the commission," says Turow, "I didn't really understand what it means for some twisted creep to change your life forever." But the mounting evidence of unfair application of the ultimate penalty to minorities, along with...