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.
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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. |
AuthorSusannah Sheffer is the author of several books and articles, most recently Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys (Vanderbilt University Press, 2013) Archives
October 2013
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