Opposing Executions, in Fiction and Real Life

November 30, 2002
By JODI WILGOREN

SKOKIE, Ill. - Scott Turow was in the Barnes & Noble here the other night to sign and sell books, but he ended up talking far less about his new novel, "Reversible Errors," than about what he sees as unfixable flaws in America's capital punishment system.

Before introducing Rommy Gandolph, the book's borderline-retarded black man who is only 33 days from execution for a triple murder that he did not commit, Mr. Turow told the real-life story of Alejandro Hernandez, a borderline-retarded Hispanic man wrongfully convicted of murder, one of 13 inmates freed from Illinois's death row.

He fielded questions not about Muriel Wynn, the ambitious prosecutor in the fictional Kindle County, but about Jim Ryan, the real-life Illinois attorney general whose bid for governor Mr. Turow vehemently opposed because of Mr. Ryan's aggressive pursuit of the Hernandez case. (Mr. Ryan, the Republican nominee, lost to a Democrat, Rod Blagojevich.)

"Punishment is so complicated by our emotions," Mr. Turow told 100 fans in the mall bookstore in this Chicago suburb near his home. "There's a permanent propensity in this system to convict the innocent." To those who believe that heinous criminals deserve the ultimate sanction, he said, "My response is, you tell me how to construct a system that catches those people and doesn't endanger the innocent and the undeserving."

Mr. Turow, 53, has long had a dual identity as author/attorney, working part time in his 77th-floor office in the Sears Tower as a partner in Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, while pumping out best-selling courtroom thrillers every three years. In the office of his $4.8 million lakefront home in Glencoe, Mr. Turow keeps a photograph from the day of Mr. Hernandez's release alongside a framed front page from The Kindle County Tribune - a prop from the Hollywood version of his debut novel, "Presumed Innocent" (1987). It is not unusual for Mr. Turow, who taught creative writing at Stanford before entering Harvard Law School, to begin an answer with, "I can talk about this as a lawyer or I can talk about this as a novelist."

Never, though, have his fiction and nonfiction lives been as intertwined.

Mr. Turow, a former federal prosecutor, began writing "Reversible Errors" a few months before Gov. George Ryan named him to a 14-member commission charged with studying the death penalty. He tapped out many of the novel's 433 pages on his tiny laptop as he rode the commuter train downtown to commission meetings. He turned in the first draft last December, around the time he was working on the introduction to the commission's 207-page report, which called for a sweeping overhaul of capital punishment. (Governor Ryan and Attorney General Ryan are not related.)

Between the report's April release and the Nov. 1 publication of his novel by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Mr. Turow has lobbied for death penalty reform in the United States Senate and the Illinois Legislature. As Mr. Turow continues his international book tour this month, state lawmakers are considering some of the 85 commission recommendations in a special session, and Governor Ryan is pondering whether to commute the sentences of 150 people on death row.

"The commission reflected, broadly, society in general," said Matthew Bettenhausen, the deputy governor who ran the commission, "and I think his characters in the book represent, broadly, with the views on capital punishment, the whole continuum of thought."

Many novelists, of course, routinely crib from experience, following the adage, "write what you know." But the timing in this case and the passion surrounding the subject blur the line between life and art.

It is book tour as stump speech as Mr. Turow toggles back and forth between the pro-death penalty perspectives of his character, Muriel Wynn, and his colleague on the commission, Michael Waller, the Lake County district attorney. Examples of police misconduct that he cites include the torture tactics that led to the firing of John Burge, a real-life Chicago policeman, as well as the investigative shortcuts of the fictional Larry Starzcek, the detective who botched the Gandolph investigation in "Reversible Errors."

"I'm certainly trying to sell books - my publishers pay me a lot of money, and I want to help them sell books - but I'm also taking advantage of the subject matter of the book to tell people how I feel," Mr. Turow said after inscribing more than 80 volumes, with stacks more awaiting his autograph. "I have some concern that the issue is kind of overwhelming the book. You'll forgive me, but I do have the illusion that this is a work of art and there's more to it than the public policy debate."

He began his work on both the commission and the novel as a death penalty "agnostic," having helped to save a condemned man who was innocent and get a guilty client's sentence changed from death to life. He also refused to join protests against John Wayne Gacy's execution in 1994. Two years of intensive research on actual cases through the commission, and of deep reflection through the various characters' viewpoints in the novel, led him to join the narrow commission majority favoring abolition.

Instead of taking an absolutist moral approach, Mr. Turow argues that the very impulse that makes the public want the death penalty for heinous crimes prevents the system from careful discernment in those cases. That emotion clouds justice: it is not only that the system does not work, but that it never could.

"We have to accept our limited abilities to deal with evil," Mr. Turow said. "As human beings, we're going to sustain ourselves not by living in punishment, but by living our lives, by being in love, by trying to be better."

After publishing "One-L," a memoir of his first year at Harvard Law, while still on campus in Cambridge, Mr. Turow said he had shied from writing about anything too close to his real life. Indeed, "Reversible Errors" is not modeled on the Hernandez case. But just as Kindle County's Trapper's Park is modeled on Wrigley Field, and its river is recognizable to Chicagoans, the novel's plot and theme include many tidbits from the Illinois death penalty debate.

Rommy Gandolph, the exonerated convict, trades the plodding Raven for a celebrity lawyer for his civil suit, just as Johnnie Cochran swooped in at the end to represent Anthony Porter when he was freed two days before his execution date. In the novel, the accused is caught with a victim's cameo; in real life, one of the Illinois exonerated had a watch taken off a body. Starzcek, the fictional detective, tries to freeze a confession out of his suspect by opening a window in the interrogation room, a tactic borrowed from a real death-row inmate's claim.

"Reversible Errors" has gotten mixed reviews, with some critics complaining that its prose is more purple than its predecessors' and others questioning the use of four different narrators and alternating scenes from the 1991 investigation and the 2001 post-conviction appeals. When Mr. Waller, the Lake County prosecutor, read it, he said he disagreed with the character Muriel Wynn's perspective that the real killer, Erno Erdai, probably would not have been sentenced to death.

And that, Mr. Turow said, is symbolic of the problems in the capital punishment system - prosecutors in different locales make different judgments on similar cases.