Crime and the Ultimate Punishment

The United States, alone among advanced democracies, still enforces the death penalty. The public's support for capital punishment, however, seems to be dropping in the face of numerous recent exonerations of wrongly convicted death row prisoners. So now the argument gets serious. When does a crime warrant the death penalty? Some say the ultimate punishment should be reserved for "the worst of the worst," the most horrific cases – yet attorney and best-selling author, Scott Turow, says that's exactly what can make for its undoing. Turow's new nonfiction book, Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on the Death Penalty, is about his shift from a self-declared "agnostic" on the death penalty to his current belief that it can never be made fair and accurate enough. Turow served as one of 14 members of the March 2000 Commission appointed by Illinois Governor George Ryan to consider reform of the capital punishment system.
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