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Author, Presumed Innocent and Personal Injuries
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit Series Director
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Lane: Which of your protagonists do you feel closest to, and why? And which of your characters' viewpoint is least sympathetic to you personally?
Turow: The protagonist of my last novel, Robbie Feaver, who in many ways is just a crook, is the person whose viewpoint was - in spite of his enormous capacity for kindness - the most alien to me. In terms of sensibility, in many ways the closest to me is Sonny Klonsky, who was the protagonist in The Laws of Our Fathers and a major character in The Burden of Proof. Between Sonny and the male protagonist there - Seth Weissman - you've got a lot of the way I look at the world.
Lane: What was your role in the film Presumed Innocent, and what did you think of Harrison Ford's acting job?
Turow: Sydney Pollack bought the rights and I had breakfast with him when I was in Los Angeles, probably on the book tour for Presumed Innocent, and I said, "Who are you thinking of?" He said William Hurt, who at that time was hotter than a firecracker and I thought was great. And he said, Or Harrison Ford. And I said, Oh God, Indiana Jones… Ultimately it was Harrison, and I thought his performance was terrific and he's a quite charming, decent guy.
Lane: Did you write the screenplay?
Turow: I had nothing to do with the screenplay. The screenplay was really written by Alan Pakula, who directed the film. They did it with the book propped open in front of them. About 80 percent of the dialogue in the movie comes straight out of the novel, so it's hard for me to complain about it.
Lane: How do you construct your books? Do you write from beginning to end?
Turow: No. I'm completely childish in the way I put books together. When I was writing on the morning commuter train while I was a prosecutor, I very quickly realized that I was not well enough connected to the material to write in sequence because it just took too long to get started. At that time Presumed Innocent had the unlikely title of Trespass with Force and Arms. I had 25 minutes every morning to write - it could be a piece of dialogue that I imagined, a description of a place or notes for an encounter between two people. Only through the great good fortune of the invention of the personal computer was I able to put all that in order eventually. That's still the way I do it. In the initial stages, I have no clue where it's going to fit in. Some of it never does.
Lane: Your novels take place in the fictional Kindle County, which most people will recognize has a lot to do with Cook County, Chicago. One of Chicago's favorite sons is Saul Bellow. Talk about his influence on your work.
Turow: I was very absorbed with Bellow: I am very ambitious, he was certainly the most famous writer in Chicago, and undoubtedly the most respected novelist in the United States during much of the time that I was coming of age. Because my father grew up probably within a block of where Bellow lived, in many ways his sensibility was a far more articulate one of my parents' world. For all these reasons I read Bellow, just seeking to understand it all: what was literary greatness, what was the secret of his success, what was the view of these people I didn't really understand - they were my parents.
After Bellow won the prize for Nobel Literature, Rolling Stone decided it would be a great idea to do an interview with him, and my friend Michael Rogers hired me. I was by then a first-year law student and I buried Bellow with letters and phone calls. Finally one day I got the brilliant idea of calling person-to-person, and I was such a fan that as soon as I heard the voice at the other end of the line I said, "Oh please Mr. Bellow, I've sent you these 16 letters, you've got to let me do this, I know more about your work than anybody else, I love you…" And one of the great things in Bellow is the sort of tyranny of petty bureaucrats - when Moses Herzog has an accident on Lakeshore Drive, the cop pulls out his license and addresses him as Moses, this famous professor - so here we are on the phone and I launch into my spiel, and all of a sudden the operator interrupts and she says to the Nobel Laureate in Literature, "Wait a minute, are you Saul?" He owned up to the fact that he was Saul, but he wouldn't do the interview.
Lane: Speaking of your family, I read somewhere that your grandfather's comments were inspirational to you in terms of the way you think and write about corruption.
Turow: They were really inspirational to me in terms of my role as a prosecutor and the judicial corruption cases that inspired Personal Injuries. My grandfather once told me a story of being swindled out of most of his life's savings. I said to him, "Grandpa, why didn't you sue?" He looked at me and said, "A poor man like me? I can't afford to buy a judge." That was his view of what justice was in the circuit court of Cook County; it was to the highest bidder. He wasn't far from wrong of course. I arrived at the U.S. attorney's office determined to do something about judicial corruption.
Lane: Do you think that the corruption is in part responsible for the fact that the death penalty is so fraught with error and might not be fixable?
Turow: No. I don't think corruption is a problem that has a major impact on the death penalty. The fundamental problem in capital punishment is that there is a paradox. The Supreme Court has said that the death penalty should be reserved for essentially the worst of the worst. They have outlawed per se application of the death penalty to all first-degree homicides; there has to be a criterion of selection, a narrowing of the death penalty. You can talk about the Klaas case, you can talk about the sniper case. The irony, or the paradox, is that the death penalty is supposed to be applied to those cases that evoke the strongest feelings of anger, fright and repugnance. And in that environment, like the environment that existed in the Beltway three weeks ago, prosecutors, police officers, judges, juries are most challenged in exercising detached judgment. The nature of the cases themselves make the system error-prone, and that is a problem that will never, ever be solved. Early in Reversible Errors there is a passage where Arthur says that it's not just the case that power corrupts, evil also corrupts. I knew that I had announced the theme of the novel when I wrote the passage, but I wasn't quite sure how it would apply itself. There are some circumstances that are too fine a test for our system of justice and we do ourselves no service by not recognizing that they challenge our necessary weaknesses as human beings.
Lane: We're witnessing a rush to judgment and a rush to execution in the case of the 17-year-old sniper John Malvo. What does it say about our culture, in terms of the death penalty?
Turow: Young Mr. Malvo is likely to get his case determined, in principle at least, by the U.S. Supreme Court, probably this term or next. The issue of whether or not the Constitution will tolerate the execution of someone who is under 18 years old at the time of the crime is now ripe for adjudication - if the justices of the Supreme Court have declared it to be a relic of the past, something they say the Constitution cannot tolerate. The court's decision last June banning constitutionally the execution of the mentally retarded, because among other things they lack the capacity to fully appreciate the gravity of their conduct, raises the same question vis-à-vis how fully formed does a human being have to be before we have to think that the law can fix blame and the life. I don't know whether it's focused there or not; this will hinge, as it usually does, on Justice O'Connor. Most of the states that have the death penalty do not allow the execution of 17-year olds. Maryland does not. There is a reason for that. Anybody who has ever owned a 17-year old knows that they are not adults, and they are just people who are still very much in the process of becoming.
Lane: And we are reminded of John Walker Lindh?
Turow: He was held responsible for his conduct. Intriguingly, having adolescent daughters who have acted out a bit, President Bush's initial remarks were along the lines of "that goofy kid," until some of his aides grabbed him by the lapels and tried to get him to focus on what they perceived to be the gravity of the situation.
Lane: Do you think many of those convicted of the death penalty are brain damaged, under the influence of drugs or alcohol or both at the time of the offense and have either no memory or disjointed memories of the offense?
Turow: In my experience that observation is very much true. Again the law allows little excuse, but with the young man that I represented who had committed the crime - one of the real problems was that he was stoned. In some ways it took him years to tell me the truth about what had happened, but there was a lack of clarity even then, because I'm not sure that he remembers what happened at that moment that he pulled the trigger.
Lane: How do you feel about recent attempts to carry out DNA testing on death row inmates and the fears of inmates causing some to decline from the testing process?
Turow: One of our recommendations in Illinois was that DNA testing ought to be available for any defendant who wants it in his case. The reality is that when you are on death row, you will ask for anything that is going to delay the case. Hope springs eternal among defendants, frankly the great majority of whom are guilty and are in that wildly imaginative group we call criminals and think that they will take that test and that maybe something strange will happen in the lab. Very often it does prove to be their undoing.
I never thought this system was perfect, but several things that have happened in the last 20 years have been shocks to me, and finding out how high the error rate is in cases as a result of DNA testing has been one of those things. A lot of the DNA exculpations come about in rape cases and you have people who presumably have an opportunity to observe, that you would think would lead to highly reliable identifications, but the fact of the matter is that under the stress of that kind of hideous event, people do not observe well. I have been shocked at the fallacies of eyewitness testimony.
