By the time Scott Turow arrives at the Evanston Public Library, more than 200 people are packed into a lecture room designed for 144. Elderly women wedge themselves into whatever patch of floor space remains. Men in business suits sit uncomfortably on window ledges and behind the lectern. The usual ragtag assortment of activists distribute hastily scrawled protest signs.
Turow is here to face off against Cook County State’s Atty. Dick Devine on an issue that has consumed the Glencoe author in recent years: reforming capital punishment. Turow spent two years as one of 14 members of the Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment, a group formed to examine why Illinois was sending so many wrongly convicted men–13 since 1977–to Death Row. And Turow, whose self-discipline has given him two wildly successful careers–as a best-selling novelist and Loop attorney–not to mention a gig in a rock group, has forgotten his notes at home.
It hardly matters.
He launches into an extemporaneous and eloquent case for why Illinois’ system of capital punishment remains woefully flawed. He talks about his own experiences helping get Alejandro Hernandez of DuPage County, who spent 3 years on Death Row, released from prison, and Christopher Thomas of Lake County off Death Row. He defends a handful of reforms that he asserts are needed before a moratorium on executions is lifted, from videotaping police interrogations to conducting sequential police lineups instead of simultaneous ones. He takes a pointed shot at the Chicago Police Department, calling it, “in many ways, out of control.”
Age 53 is often the time when the accomplished start setting their ways in concrete. But for Turow it’s been a period of unanticipated philosophical and political transition. And it’s all on display this evening in Evanston.
He talks about the evolution of his own thinking on capital punishment, a journey that began as a slightly muddled “death-penalty agnostic,” someone who vacillated between opposition to execution and thinking it a sad necessity in horrific cases. He now firmly opposes it, he says, because he believes true reform is beyond the financial capacity or the political will of state lawmakers.
For the previous 2 1/2 years, Turow has lived the issue as a member of the commission, which in April issued a report suggesting 85 reforms in the state’s criminal-justice system. He has lived it through his own legal work. He also has lived it through the characters in his newest novel, “Reversible Errors,” whose plot revolves around a triple homicide and the convicted Death Row inmate who insists he is innocent.
Taking up his side of the Evanston debate, Devine argues society’s need for capital punishment and adopts a conciliatory tone toward certain reforms, but the hisses, shouts and protest signs suggest he’s not exactly speaking to the home-team crowd.
One question hanging in the air is: Why would Devine agree to participate in this extracurricular endeavor?
For that matter, why would Turow? Here’s a man who doubtless has better things to do with his Monday nights. He could call up Dustin Hoffman again to discuss when the actor is finally going to start filming “Personal Injuries,” based on a Turow novel to which Hoffman purchased the rights. Or start working on yet another best-selling tale of legal intrigue. Or pick up dinner for his wife, Annette, an accomplished artist–perhaps from Trotter’s To Go, which displays some of her pieces. Or to focus on the handful of white-collar crime cases he’s handling as a part-time law partner at Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal.
Yet another mystery is how he could tear himself away from the spectacular view of Lake Michigan he sees from his expansive writing den at home. Turow recently moved from the west side of Green Bay Road in Wilmette to the east side in Glencoe, which in North Shore parlance means, literally and figuratively, moving to the other side of the tracks. He now lives at the end of a short lakefront cul-de-sac in a $4.8 million contemporary home that is the picture of understatement after all the Vegas-style architecture along the way.
Turow is performing this civic duty in Evanston tonight because this is how he has always, often in less noticeable ways, lived his life. Never a wallflower when it comes to politics, he was critical of the Supreme Court’s handling of the 2000 presidential election, and has, with Annette, been active in school-board politics as well as in local political races.
Though he’s a self-described liberal Democrat, Turow has been a consistent defender of Gov. George Ryan amid his ever-widening licenses-for-bribes scandal, and he holds fundraisers and records radio ads for Republican candidates, including Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood in her unsuccessful primary bid to become governor. He also testifies before Congress, publishes seething op-ed pieces and attends press conferences about public policy matters.
“Scott is unusual in American culture in that he produces imaginative fiction and functions at a high level within the political and legal world,” says author Jim McManus of Kenilworth, a close friend. “In other parts of the world, especially in South and Central America and Europe, novelists and poets routinely are involved in politics and public policy. America is fairly unique in insisting on the separation between its imaginative artists and its politics.”
While Turow long ago began traversing the lines that separate the legal, the artistic and the political, never has he done so as actively as in the past year. One reason is that two men whose actions influenced Turow’s shift in position on the death penalty were seeking the state’s two top offices in last Tuesday’s election–Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan in the governor’s race and DuPage County State’s Atty. Joe Birkett in the campaign to succeed Ryan. Turow passionately opposed both candidates for what he considers a pattern of deliberate ignorance of facts and tolerance for misconduct that resulted in the wrongful convictions of Rolando Cruz and Hernandez in the 1983 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico.
No one was more surprised than Turow himself by how political he has become this fall on the issue of capital punishment.
“This came in sideways; I don’t envision myself in the future being as outspoken as I have been during this particular election campaign,” Turow conceded. “But I happen to have personal knowledge in this [Nicarico] case that strikes me to be extremely relevant, and I would not shut up. One of the things I say to myself is, ‘If I don’t do this, who will?’ Obviously, I value my legal career, but I don’t have to worry about preserving it.”
That’s the luxury afforded to someone who doesn’t publish duds. It also speaks to the industry of someone whose involvement in one career manages only to enhance the other.
Turow’s novels always have been informed by his personal experiences as a lawyer. “Personal Injuries,” for example, draws deeply from his participation in the notorious Greylord judicial-corruption case when he was an assistant U.S. attorney fresh out of Harvard Law School. Those in the Chicago legal community have made something of a parlor game out of identifying the bits and pieces of legal arguments, lawyers, cops, judges and real-life Cook County cases that figure into Turow’s make-believe Kindle County dramas.
“Reversible Errors” is no different. Numerous references in the book carry a familiar local ring: The fictional triple murder ends with three victims locked inside a restaurant refrigerator locker, similar to the notorious 1993 murder of seven people at a Brown’s Chicken in Palatine. The low-IQ defendant on Turow’s Death Row evokes Anthony Porter, the Chicago man who came within 48 hours of execution before he eventually was found innocent of a double murder by a group of journalism students, their professor and a private investigator. A final betrayal scene near the end of the book evokes Anthony Porter’s dumping of his bankrupted criminal defense attorney, Dan Sanders, in favor of Johnny Cochran and other come-latelies to the cause.
No character in any of his novels embodies so much of Turow as does the character Arthur Raven in “Reversible Errors,” he and others note. Raven is a corporate attorney who has been assigned to handle Death Row inmate Rommy “Squirrel” Gandolph’s final appeal. In the book’s opening, Arthur travels to meet Rommy for the first time in prison as a reluctant and skeptical advocate.
That about describes Turow’s mindset when a longtime friend and fellow attorney, Jeremy Margolis, approached him about joining the legal team that would handle Alex Hernandez’s third appeal. Margolis gave Turow an oversized box of case materials to read.
“He said he’d look at it but confided to me: ‘Where are we going with this? This guy has already been convicted by two juries,’ ” Margolis recalls. “He spent the next weekend, Thanksgiving weekend, poring over these records and came away angered, saddened and outraged all at the same time.” He joined the team.
The book borrows from various ignominious chapters of Chicago’s criminal justice history. There are scenes of police misconduct, false confessions, inmates with low IQs, and bad deals offered to innocent convicts. They are rounded out by unflattering references to a “rodent-faced investigative reporter from Channel 5” and an annoying slob of a reporter for the Tribune.
“Reversible Errors” also ruminates on love, on coming to terms with middle age and on Raven’s shortness of stature–all abiding themes in Turow’s own life.
Turow’s compatriots on the governor’s commission marveled at how their colleague always seemed to be tap-tap-tapping on his tiny computer, which they assumed were notes for author Turow rather than lawyer Turow. “Without a doubt,” laughed fellow panel member Roberto Ramirez, CEO of Tidy International, a janitorial service. “His fingers were going wild.”
Mike Waller, another commission member, was Lake County state’s attorney and sat on the opposite side of the negotiating table from Turow in 1999 during the appeal for Christopher Thomas, whose sentence Turow got reduced from death to 100 years in prison. “I’ve read all his novels, and I thought, ‘This is great, after that experience he’s going to write about some dunderheaded prosecutor named Walker,’ ” said Waller. (Prosecutor Walker has yet to turn up in one of Turow’s novels.)
Asked about his computer note-taking, Turow concedes only to an obsession with gadgets and insists that he uses writing to think through complex arguments. “I would write down things that I thought were memorable that I wanted to have in mind when I sat down to assemble arguments pro or con,” he says.
The occasion can arise at any time. One recent morning, for example, he woke up wondering whether supporters of capital punishment have some kind of Nietzschean strength to their arguments–in perhaps believing that life is not sacrosanct or enduring: We’re all headed for death sooner or later, the reasoning might go, so if it’s socially useful to end heinous criminals’ lives now rather than later, why not? He wrote it down.
Two years ago, at a dinner for Turow at the American Academy in Berlin, the remark of an elderly professor got the author thinking about how Americans tend to make cheerful assumptions about the permanence and viability of their democracy. The professor turned to Turow and said pointedly, “You see, in this country, we could never think about having a death penalty again,” the implication being that never again would Germans accept such a profound state authority that could be abused by someone of Hitlerean malevolence. Turow wrote it down.
Commission member Andrea Zopp, former first assistant in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and now a vice president at Sara Lee Corp., playfully calls Turow “a little too serious, a little too contemplative of just about everything.” She and other panelists rarely missed an opportunity to poke fun, especially when Turow would use one of those SAT words everybody else forgot years ago, like “hortatory” (marked by or given to exhortation). Those words usually silenced the room. Commission members would later make a point of incorporating “hortatory” into their own comments to see if Turow would notice. Some even counterattacked with a zinger or two of their own, like “precatory” (which, of course, means pertaining to or expressive of entreaty or supplication).
In his lighter moments, he makes annual trips with male friends to Las Vegas for golf and gambling, and attends as many hometown baseball games as he can squeeze into his schedule. In July, in a moment he calls one of the highlights of his life, he got to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the Cubs’ seventh-inning stretch.
He also spends a week or two each year touring with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band with a lineup of best-selling authors, including Dave Barry, Stephen King, Roy Blount Jr. and Amy Tan.
A visitor who had heard his Cubs game performance wonders aloud: “You don’t actually sing in that band, do you?”
“Well . . .” he says guardedly, “yeah.”
Colleagues on the commission agree that Turow pulled more than his share of the weight. Unlike some of his counterparts, he read nearly every word of the almost weekly readings distributed to them, and became mildly obsessed about whether the death penalty deterred murders.
“I have to admit I spent a lot of time on the commission sort of looking for that silver bullet that would allow me to stand with my seething emotions and say, ‘I’m this liberal, but I’m also for the death penalty,’ ” says Turow, helping himself to a fourth cup of coffee inside a 78th-floor Sears Tower conference room that abutted a cloud.
He thought if he could prove the argument that the death penalty ultimately saved lives, that would provide reason enough to support it. But no credible study has been definitive on that point. So Turow set off on his own intellectual expeditions. He asked the panel’s staff to compare Illinois’ homicide rates with Michigan’s, and Missouri’s with Wisconsin’s, to see if death penalty states had lower murder rates than non-death penalty states. They didn’t.
At the Evanston Public Library debate, Turow talks about the kinds of cases “that stop me cold” when he thinks about moral objections to capital punishment. One of his favorite examples is that of Henry Brisbon, whose tale of destruction was revisited in haunting detail at last month’s historic clemency hearings of nearly all the state’s Death Row inmates.
Known as the I-57 murderer, Brisbon was convicted of gunning down one young couple after running their car off the highway and ordering them to share a “last kiss.” Once in Stateville prison, he tricked a guard into opening his cell, then stabbed an inmate to death with a shank fashioned from a soup ladle.
Because of such cases, “My view when I started was that the death penalty was a regrettable necessity,” Turow tells the audience. “That’s how you have to judge the system. When people advocate capital punishment, these are the cases they stand behind.”
But by the end of his communal soul-searching on the commission and through the novel, Turow sided with a majority of panelists who believed Illinois would be best served without capital punishment. At the outset, only four stated they favored abolition.
“It was a position I arrived at after a significant period of difficult reflection,” he says.
Views on the issue already had been changing around the Turow dinner table. When her husband took on the Hernandez case in 1991 as a pro bono attorney, Annette Turow had little difficulty understanding what was wrong with the Hernandez conviction. But later she was less open to the argument that Christopher Thomas, clearly a first- degree murderer, deserved anything other than death.
“I think she, like most Americans, had a reflexive belief that capital punishment is appropriate,” he says. “When we began talking about Chris, it took a while to persuade her that it was not right to execute this young man.”
In 1994, Thomas fatally shot a 39-year-old man in Waukegan after robbing him of $61. Turow argued that if Thomas had had a decent attorney at the time of trial, information about his horrific upbringing in a crack house would have surfaced, he would have pleaded guilty and likely would have received 80 years in prison. Instead he got a death sentence.
“I think [Annette] very much agreed with me in the end,” he says. “But this was not a legal issue that had been dominant in our household. We had just begun sidling up to this over the years, and Thomas was the first clearly guilty first-degree murderer that I had represented.”
In the novel “Reversible Errors,” each character has a sense of what is just and attempts to pursue it, but desire, neurosis and ambition often alter their course. It is, in many ways, how Turow regards the real-life justice system–as generally populated by well-meaning individuals who attempt to follow their own, imperfect, moral visions of justice.
But Turow also takes pains in “Reversible Errors” to avoid alienating readers with a political message, recognizing that some are looking for interesting character sketches, some seek meditations on the human condition and others just want a thriller.
“I’m fearful that it will be viewed as a reductionist polemic, an act of puppeteering with an argument in mind,” he says before jetting off on a book tour around Italy last month. “My intention with the book was to write a non-doctrinaire treatment of the subject. I wanted it much more to document the extraordinary passions that surround these kinds of cases, some of which, obviously, were ones I myself experienced.”
The Evanston debate offers yet another glimpse into the intense emotions generated by the issue. The mother of one Death Row inmate, Ronald Kitchen, tearfully implores Devine to reopen her son’s case. Kitchen’s conviction of a 1988 quintuple homicide is based on the hearsay testimony of a jailhouse informer. His confession, he claims, came only after he was tortured by notorious Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge. Devine angrily defends the motives and the diligence of state’s attorneys and police officers who work under enormous pressure and for little pay on cases that rarely have a happy ending.
“If people are looking for any human institution that is completely free of error, they won’t find it,” he says.
One audience member challenges Turow to demonstrate more leadership in educating the pro-death penalty majority on the system’s flaws. Another suggests that the issue nobody wants to confront directly is whether any margin of error is acceptable in a process that can end with an irreversible result. Turow responds by saying that the death penalty proponents he most respects are people like attorney Bill Kunkle, who concede that if society is going to have capital punishment, eventually innocent people will be executed.
“We do all kinds of things in this society and permit them, knowing innocent lives are going to be lost–we put autos on the road, allow alcohol to be sold and allow prescription drugs to be sold,” Turow says. “But there’s such an overwhelming benefit to society that we do it anyway. So saying innocent lives are going to be lost is not the end of the story, but it does force those who favor the death penalty to define what [its] benefit is to society at large.”
Turow, who has taken a few risks in his personal, legal and artistic life, says it’s now clear to him that the risks and the costs of capital punishment are higher than he’s willing to accept.
“If the people of Illinois want a death penalty, they had better pay for it; reform is expensive,” he cautions near the end of his talk. “Otherwise it really is the roulette wheel and nothing more.”
