News

Catching up on News

10/13/2013

I've been lax about updating this news section, as I've been posting reviews and other news on the Facebook page. Here's a roundup of some reviews and news from the past few weeks:

This review in Book News, which covers scholarly and reference books. I especially appreciate that this review says Fighting for Their Lives has a "readable style," as that's something I value highly.

Article in the Swarthmore Daily Gazette about the reading and talk I gave at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility last month. The group of students and faculty who attended this talk asked thoughtful questions and were a pleasure to speak with -- and these were people who chose to spend a beautiful Friday afternoon indoors listening to talk of difficult subjects -- my kind of people!

Colman McCarthy's review in the National Catholic Reporter. Check out the interesting discussion that is developing in the comments section.

Bringing ideas together

8/14/2013

I wrote a couple of months ago about some readers' assumptions that the lawyers in Fighting for Their Lives work mostly to exonerate clients who have been wrongfully convicted. The issue of wrongful conviction and innocence has gotten a lot of public attention, relative to other issues associated with the death penalty, and I suspect it's also harder for people to imagine why attorneys would fight so hard for the lives of clients when innocence is not the issue. So I'm always pleased when a reviewer or reader recognizes and notes this aspect of the book's material.

Meanwhile, in my other line of work I spend a lot of time with teenagers, sometimes even discussing exactly these issues, as I do when I facilitate a "Harm and Punishment" discussion group at North Star. I know that young people can care deeply and reflect thoughtfully about questions of victims and offenders and how respond when people have been harmed or caused harm.

Mark Flowers' review of Fighting for Their Lives in School LIbrary Journal's Adult Books 4 Teens blog brings together both of these ideas: he points out that capital defense attorneys don't only work to exonerate the innocent, and he explains why he thinks Fighting for Their Lives is a good book for teenagers. I'm grateful to him for doing so.

Two new reviews

8/1/2013

Two new review of Fighting for Their Lives in the past week: this one, in Spanish, written by a journalist I met while at the 5th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Madrid, and this one just posted on Reading the End, a book review site. An excerpt:

The book’s not really about the death penalty, but about the toll that capital defense takes on the lawyers who do it for many years. Sheffer starts by talking about their motivation: What would motivate anyone to take a job with not-great pay, terrible hours, and almost no victories? Some of the lawyers say they need the adrenaline rush of a job that’s urgent. Many of them say that they are motivated by a particular narrative that they have of their responsibility to the world.

I ask what attracts him to aligning with and working on behalf of those who have less power. He is silent for a few moments. … “Those are the stories in fiction and nonfiction that move me. … And that’s not because each individual story is so compelling; it’s just that that’s the narrative that moves me and motivates me, … great sacrifice for others.”
…It’s an interesting way of sounding for one’s own motivation: listening for which cultural stories, which myths and legends, are most compelling.

This last sentence is an example of something I really loved about Sheffer’s authorship. While direct quotes from her subjects comprise a lot of the book, she’s also good at finding commonalities between responses and highlighting for the reader what she found most interesting in the responses she received.

... Sheffer knows that capital defense attorneys and their stress and trauma are not the main story when you talk about capital punishment. The interviewees are constantly expressing this as well, how their stories and their pain are nothing compared to what the families of the victims, the families of the clients, and the clients themselves are going to. But Fighting for Their Lives sheds fascinating light on a part of the story of capital punishment that I, for one, have never read about before. Recommended.

Poetry Sunday

7/14/2013

This Kind of Knowing is given a wonderful mention on Poetry Sunday at Women's Voices for Change. Take a look, and enjoy browsing around the site while you're there.

Listen to a radio interview

6/24/2013

Here is a podcast of the interview I did this morning with Bill Newman, host of The Bill Newman Show in Northampton, Mass. Bill is a thoughtful and well-prepared interviewer and his questions got at many of the core issues in Fighting for Their Lives. (My part of this show starts at about 16 minutes into the hour.)

Connections near and far

6/20/2013

The 5th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Madrid was an opportunity to meet capital defense attorneys who practice in many challenging locations, including Iran, China, and India. Many of the details differ, but I think the core emotional impact is the same. This photo shows me reading aloud from the book but doesn't show the many interesting conversations that I was able to have with capital defenders and human rights activists from around the world, as well as with other colleagues from the death penalty abolition movement. I was glad for the chance to see colleagues from the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO), who have just released an important report called "Lightening the Load of the Parental Death Sentence on Children." I've very much valued the opportunity to assist QUNO a bit in this effort and hope their report is widely read.

Was he guilty?

6/7/2013

I’ve been thinking about a comment I received at a recent event where I was reading a short passage from Fighting for Their Lives. I read the scene in which one of the attorneys is having a final phone call with a client and is apologizing for not being able to stop the execution that is about to happen. The client responds, “It’s OK, son, you did your best.”

I often choose this scene as one of the few to read aloud at public events because it’s short and vivid, captures so many of the themes of the book, and people often respond powerfully to it. That was true this time as well. But as she was expressing to me how powerful she found the passage, a woman from the audience then said – referring to the client in the scene -- “I just have a feeling that guy was innocent.”

He wasn’t, and I said so. I’ve been noticing as I speak about the book that people are often more familiar with the issue of possible innocence, and with lawyers who work to exonerate those who have been wrongfully convicted, than they are with other aspects of the death penalty and with the moral and personal questions that arise when the person facing execution is clearly guilty. With this particular scene and this particular audience member’s response, it struck me that perhaps it was exactly this display of humanity and caring on the part of the prisoner – his making an effort to comfort and reassure the attorney even though he himself was the one about to be killed – that led the listener to imagine that he must be innocent. It’s harder to make sense of the idea that a man could have been guilty of a terrible crime and also (many years later) capable of that particular compassionate exchange.

Most of the clients referred to in Fighting for Their Lives were guilty. As I say in chapter 8, “These are not attorneys who focus primarily on trying to exonerate prisoners claiming innocence. … When they strive to prevent executions, they know they are more often than not fighting for the life of someone who did commit a terrible crime, someone whom a lot of other people consider monstrous and unworthy of help or care.”

So what is that like? Well, that's longer than a blog post -- that took a whole book to answer.

Where poems come from

5/28/2013

This week I'll be at the Bear River Writers' Conference, a wonderful annual gathering whose focus -- unlike many summer writers' conferences -- is on generating new work. Many of the poems in my recently published chapbook, This Kind of Knowing, got their start at Bear RIver.

One More Question

4/19/2013

At the end of the talk at the State University of New York at Albany's School of Criminal Justice this past Monday, Professor James Acker comes up to ask one of the final questions of the evening and then to thank the audience members for coming.

Earlier in the day, I had the opportunity to speak to two of Jim's classes and to enjoy the lively conversation. Among many other publications, Jim is co-editor of the book Wounds That Do Not Bind: Victim-Based Perspectives on the Death Penalty, and he has been instrumental in establishing the Capital Punishment Research Initiative.

What does it feel like?

4/17/2013

Law professor Susan Bandes reviewed Fighting for Their Lives in Jotwell yesterday. Jotwell is "The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)," and it's a great honor to be in that category for someone as smart and thoughtful as Susan Bandes. Here's the start of the review:

The question of how it feels to do the work we do receives little attention in mainstream legal literature. We tend to treat the very acknowledgement of our work’s emotional aspects as downright unlawyerlike — a challenge to law’s rational and rigorous essence. Yet as this book beautifully illustrates, the question of how it feels to do our work cannot be cordoned off from the issues at the center of the teaching and practice of law: what it means to be an ethical, zealous, effective counselor and advocate with a satisfying, sustainable legal career.

Susannah Sheffer sheds light on all these issues, though she sets out to answer a narrower question: what it is like to be a capital defense lawyer specializing in post-conviction challenges. What is it like for these lawyers, she asks, not in the courtroom or the offices of the capital habeas unit, but “in the middle of the night, in the pit of the stomach, in their last visits or phone calls with clients who are about to be taken to the execution chamber, in the mornings after, in their lives with their families, in their dreams and flashbacks and quiet moments alone?” What is it like to do this work in the face of incomprehension and even hostility from the larger community? What motivates such lawyers and how do they keep doing what they do? Sheffer explores these issues in conversations with twenty capital defense lawyers in this insightful and deeply affecting book.

Read the whole review.