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Author, Persumed Innocent and Personal Injuries
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit Series Director
"The father of the legal thriller," Scott Turow is best known for Presumed Innocent, which was made into a hit film starring Harrison Ford. Turow is also a leading lawyer in his native Chicago, frequently involved in death penalty litigation, the controversial subject that he takes on in his latest book, Reversible Errors.
Barbara Lane: Here we are the day after Election Day and Illinois, like California, unlike practically anywhere else in the country, went solidly Democratic. Do you have any comments on the election?
Turow: There's a case that Reversible Errors germinates from - a real good-guy, bad-guy case, in the sense that two innocent men were on death row for about 12 years. The Illinois election was an odd piece of justice. The prosecutor in that case was running for governor and his chief assistant for attorney general. This had never been an issue with much traction before, and there were some of us who really worked to make it an issue. So I was very pleased to be getting the emails that I received today, in which the subject line was, "Payback!"
Lane: Are you referring to the Alejandro Hernandez case? You were involved in this case about 10 or 11 years ago and it inspired your latest book. Tell us about it and your role in that case.
Turow: Any case that goes on from 1983 to 1995 is a complicated case. In February 1983, a little girl was abducted in broad daylight from her home and found two days later, sexually brutalized and beaten to death. In a classic instance of tunnel vision - a frequent phenomenon in these kinds of cases, the most recent being the "angry white man in the white van" - the police decided they were looking for Hispanics. They had started, as usually is the case, with good reason, but as a result Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez were arrested and tried, convicted and sentenced to death without any physical evidence against them ever existing.
They were convicted in January 1985. In June 1985, a very similar murder occurred about 25 miles from where the first little girl had been killed. They caught the killer this time, and he was willing to agree to a natural life sentence. The prosecutor said, Look, it isn't going to do you any good to plead to natural life if you killed anybody else; you'd better tell us everybody you've killed and we'll try and arrange deals. It turned out that he committed two more rapes and two more murders. One of the murders was of a nurse, the other was the little girl for whose murder Cruz and Hernandez were already on death row. The Illinois state police investigated the confession, and concluded that it was clearly true, amply corroborated, and the prosecutor, who lost yesterday, refused to accept the confession, and spent ten years fighting to keep these men in the penitentiary and on death row.
Their first conviction was thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct, which remained a hallmark of these cases. There were second and third trials for both Cruz and Hernandez; Alex was eventually convicted a second time and sentenced to 80 years because, as the judge said, there was no evidence against him. That's what you get when there is no evidence against you. Rolando was sentenced to death again. I came in after Alex's second conviction and represented him on appeal, and there were a lot of gymnastics. It took years and years and years - Rolando's conviction was affirmed and reversed - but the bottom line is that the men were freed and three of the prosecutors and four of the cops were indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice. They were ultimately acquitted, but I think there were probably some second thoughts.
Lane: You weren't appointed to this case - this was a pro bono case for you?
Turow: Yes.
Lane: What percentage of your work now is pro bono?
Turow: More than half my time as a lawyer, generally speaking, has been spent in the last ten years working on either pro bono cases or public matters.
Lane: You were part of a commission that the governor of Illinois established in the year 2000. He declared an indefinite moratorium on executions, and this commission was to look at death penalty cases in the state of Illinois. Tell us how you came to be appointed to that commission and about its work.
Turow: One reason I was appointed was because 13 men have been exonerated since Illinois reestablished capital punishment in 1977. The governor wanted at least one lawyer of one of those exonerated 13 to be on the commission, since you have a unique point of view and have represented somebody who was sentenced to death and was innocent. I had gone on after the Hernandez case to do another case - a young man named Christopher Thomas - that was very different, in the sense that my client was guilty. I just couldn't understand how he had ended up on death row in a state where only one in every 50 first-degree murders ended up on death row. I'm not the world's greatest death penalty expert, but I obviously knew a lot about death penalty litigation at this point. The governor asked if I would serve, and it's exactly the kind of stuff that I am looking around to do.
Lane: There was a spectacular outcome to the work of that commission because just a couple of weeks ago, Governor George Ryan announced a mass hearing of clemency appeals for 142 of the 158 death row cases in the state.
Turow: The governor is a very interesting man. He has been under attack almost since he took office because of a corruption investigation concerning his former office. I know not what happened in the secretary of state's office while the governor was there, but as a person he was very, very moved by signing the one and only death warrant to sign. He found it an extraordinary experience, which didn't agree with him viscerally - he was trained as a pharmacist and has always been involved with healing before he went into politics. He saw politics as an extension of that, that he was helping people. I think the governor is very much opposed to the death penalty. At one point he announced that he was considering blanket commutations of all 158 death sentences in the state. The hue and cry organized by the prosecutorial communities caused him to back down a little bit, but I would still expect him to commute many of them before he leaves office.
It was not the death penalty moratorium as much as the corruption investigation that kept him off the ballot yesterday. His real problem was that he so antagonized his base in the Republican Party with things like the death penalty moratorium. He also went to Cuba; he vetoed a bill that prevented Medicaid mothers from receiving abortions; he did a lot of things that I thought were very principled. So his Republican base was eroded; he could not have won the primary.
Lane: Are you morally opposed to the death penalty?
Turow: I'm not morally opposed to the death penalty. Indeed, for many years I referred to myself as the "death penalty agnostic," and it's certainly where I was when I began writing Reversible Errors and when I began my service on the commission. I don't think that executing somebody like John Wayne Gacy, or whoever committed the killings in the Beltway area, is the product of what I would call an "alien morality." In other words, I think that the morality that regards crimes of such a horrific nature as appropriately answered with some ultimate and absolute punishment, is certainly part of a moral system that is a piece of Western tradition. I still can't tell you if it's what I would do if I were in charge of the world, but I can certainly recognize that morality and I will not call the people that want to do that barbarians, immoral or indecent.
The problem is that individual cases are always what incite the American public to believe in capital punishment - the sniper case being the latest example. That is not the way to judge the issue. I'll concede for purposes of argument that it's moral and appropriate to execute the sniper, whoever the sniper is, but then how do you construct a system that will achieve that result? The purpose of doing this is supposedly to make a moral statement. That places on the justice system a burden of precision, which the justice system is incapable of meeting. If you say "ultimate punishment for ultimate evil," you've got to identify precisely what ultimate evil is and who committed it. And if you, every now and then, execute the innocent or the undeserving, then you undermine that morality. I don't think a system can be devised that only punishes an ultimate evil, without occasionally ensnaring the innocent or the undeserving.
Lane: When you talk about specific cases inspiring specific reactions, in California we had the Polly Klaas case, which then inspired the Three Strikes Law, which many people have spent the ensuing years fighting. But we're not talking about a guy who stole three pizzas and went to jail for life. What do you think about the Three Strikes Law?
Turow: I do not like mandatory sentencing; human beings are just too varied. To try to deal in advance with not only what has not happened but in many cases hasn't even been imagined, is foolish. I have constitutional objections to putting somebody away for life because they stole videotapes from Kmart; I don't think that's any kind of proportionate punishment.
Lane: In your experience on the commission, did you come to believe that executions bring solace to the family and friends of the victim?
Turow: I didn't know that much about victims' perspectives, and while I was a prosecutor, which is how I started my career as a lawyer, there was no federal death penalty. Aside from a couple of glancing contacts with cases that were decided under state law, I didn't have any involvement. It was one of the real benefits of the years that I spent on the commission that I got to meet, talk with and listen to victims and understand what mattered to them. Not all surviving families of murder victims want the death penalty; it's about two out of three. There is very little vigorous academic research that has been done, but the anecdotal accounts are such that it provides solace for the families. At the end of the day there are a few large concerns for the victims' families: One, there is no loss like losing someone to a murderer. Losing someone to disease, losing someone to a typhoon - that's horrible - but when somebody makes a conscious, deliberate decision that this person you love is going to die, you never can be reconciled to that. It's a meaningless death, and it would make it more meaningless if the murderer were ever to murder again. So the first thing they want is an absolute assurance that there won't be a recurrence. They argue that the legal system is dynamic and there's always a chance that these people would get out.
Second, and in some ways a bigger issue, is that it drives them nuts to think that the person who killed can still get up in the morning, see the sky, hear the birds sing, mom can come to visit and say "I love you," when their loved one can never enjoy that. What the victims' families want is not revenge in the classic sense that it's going to make them feel better to see this person suffer; what they want is the kind of justice that is embodied in the notion of restitution, namely that the criminal should not end up better off than his victim. That's why they think execution is just.
I don't quarrel when people say, "This made me feel better." The death penalty is something that almost no one in this society feels indifferent about. The main theme of Reversible Errors is that as a penalty it is profoundly symbolic to everyone, especially the participants in the process. The case, as one character remarks, is never about the defendant, it's always about you. Because the death penalty is taken by all of us as reflecting our deepest failures as a society, in a democracy we cannot allow the question about whether we should have a death penalty or how it should be applied - you can't turn the power of the state over to a small group, even though there are people whose losses scour our hearts, people with whom I for whom would not want to trade places with for 30 seconds.
Lane: Reversible Errors has a very complex plot, and some very vibrant characters.
Turow: The central figure of Reversible Errors is Rommie Gandolph, an almost mentally retarded, borderline personality disorder figure who is near execution when another inmate in the same prison confesses that he in fact committed the murder for which Gandolph is about to die. The plot is carried out through the points of view of four different people who are involved with the case: the defense lawyer appointed by the court, Arthur Raven; the prosecutor, Muriel Wynn, who has gone from being a young lawyer to now ten years later being on the verge of being elected the prosecuting attorney; the detective who investigated the case, Officer Larry Starczek; and the judge who sentenced Gandolph to death, Gillian Sullivan, who in the strange turnabouts of life, or at least life in Kindle County, has gone to the penitentiary as a result of the corruption investigation that was the subject of my last novel, Personal Injuries.
Lane: Arthur Raven is kind of a nerd; he is an unlikely hero who doesn't have the passion and charm that some of your previous protagonists have had. Tell us about the choice to have a character like him at the center of the novel.
Turow: I may have been influenced by who some of the lawyers were in some of the cases. I just knew who this guy was. I regard it as a challenge to present a reader with somebody with whom they are not initially inclined to identify - not somebody who they want to be. But I wasn't trying to be deliberately contrary; I just wanted somebody who would grow. Obviously the title gets many meanings, but one of them is the capacity of people to reverse their prior mistakes, and there is a lot of conversation in the novel about what in the world is the purpose of being here if not to try to get better and be better, and with the necessary reverberation of what does it mean to give up that on another human being and kill them. I wanted Arthur to have plenty of opportunity to change.
Lane: As with your earlier works, there is a moral ambiguity at the heart of this novel.
Turow: I think that's how it is. For many years I didn't want to write about the Hernandez case because quite frankly I don't think it's representative; I'd never seen prosecutors behave the way these prosecutors had behaved, and bear in mind that I was really in charge of the appellate division of the U.S. Attorneys Office. I didn't want to write a book about the white-hat, good-guy gang of lawyers that freed these men, even though it is kind of inspirational - so many people worked so hard to save the lives of these men, knowing they were innocent. I wanted to write about what I thought was more normal: the intense contest that these cases provoke between essentially well-intentioned people on both sides. It's much more meaningful to me to expose whatever frailties there are in both the people and the system, when everybody means well, than when somebody is as cravenly ambitious as the man who was defeated yesterday.
Lane: Again you have strong women in your novel - Gillian Sullivan and Muriel Wynn. Are you drawing on types that you've run across in your practice or do these characters come to you without using examples from real life?
Turow: The tough, ambitious, intelligent female prosecutor is going from being a fantasy 20 years ago toward being a reality, which one can encounter in prosecutor's offices all over the country. I was drawn in Muriel's case to the idea of writing about female ambition, which generally speaking still provokes a lot more strong reactions and disapproval than it does when it's a man who is as ambitious. Gillian I have a kind of author's pride in because I don't think I've ever seen anybody like her before in somebody else's fiction. Certainly her personal circumstances are very real. For me there is always a character who runs away with the novel - just expands. Gillian certainly was that character in this book.
