Because the Death Penalty Information Center's website is such a trusted source, a post there gets a lot of notice and those of us who write about the death penalty know that we're lucky to get mentioned there. Earlier this week, DPIC mentioned Fighting for Their Lives on their "What's New" page and also under "Books" and "Representation." If you haven't visited it yet, take a look at their site and all the valuable material available there.
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Very nice review of Fighting for Their Lives in Publishers Weekly's December 24th issue:
Sheffer (In a Dark Time: A Prisoner’s Struggle for Healing and Change) takes readers beyond the courtroom and execution chambers to explore how capital defense attorneys cope when they can’t save a client. Whereas a doctor might take comfort in knowing that it’s up to biology whether a person lives or dies, that an individual’s fate lies in the hands of a human construct, the justice system, can make a lost case—and thus a lost life—all the more difficult for these lawyers to accept. “Post-conviction defense attorneys enter the case to provide a final firewall of protection... to determine if the defendant received a constitutionally fair trial,” often “under the pressure of a looming execution date.” Most of the leading practitioners she interviewed for the book have lost multiple clients, but even though they realize, “intellectually, that the execution is not [their] fault,” emotional acceptance is elusive. The book is unexpectedly moving, as when an inmate consoles an attorney who has run out of options, and the author is especially adept at uncovering the ethical and professional nuances of these cases. Sheffer’s sobering and intimate study will appeal to legal professionals as well as human rights advocates. (Mar.) Here's a sneak preview of the Kirkus review of Fighting for Their Lives. The full review will be available in March.
Sheffer portrays a cycle that the lawyers seem to repeat: Cases are taken, hopes for victory are evoked, trust is built with clients, and then the sentence is upheld. Disappointment and helplessness often go together in these accounts, especially as final decisions are handed down. A searing account of rights and laws, crime and punishment. My colleague from Holt Associates, Pat Farenga, has continued John Holt's work in all sorts of ways, and in January he will be bringing out a collection of essays in which people write about John's impact on their lives and work. I'm pleased that my piece, "What I'm Left With," will be included there.
Here's Pat's description of the book: John was a different kind of teacher, to be sure, and this book shows how his personal and intellectual journey led him to support alternatives to school, not alternative schools, as a hopeful path for education. The book contains essays by people who knew John personally and were influenced by him, worked with him, or were taught by him. There are 16 essays by a variety of people, including Dr. Thomas Armstrong (author of Neurodiversity), Strobe Talbott (president of the Brookings Institute), Berrien Moore (director of the National Weather Service), and people long associated with homeschooling and GWS, including Larry and Susan Kaseman, Wendy Priesnitz, Susannah Sheffer, Aaron Falbel, Vita Wallace, Theo and Anita Geisy, and Peter Bergson. I plan to have this book published and ready for sale by mid-January 2013. The first audiences to hear about the material in Fighting for Their Lives were those who attended the session on "How Should Communities Respond to Those Harmed by the Death Penalty?" at last year's International Institute for Restorative Practices conference, and, some months afterward, the law students who attended a training offered by Amicus - Assisting Lawyers for Justice on Death Row, Both groups were clearly interested in the excerpts that they heard and were eager for more.
I then had the opportunity to talk further about the material, and the issues it raises, with the others who chose to sit at the "trauma table" at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in March. The symposium offers the useful feature of special-interest tables at meals, so that you can easily find others who want to talk about what you want to talk about. Yes, it could be said that it's a strange group that voluntarily sits at the trauma table, but I've found the conversations at that table to be reliably fascinating. It was exciting to talk with these folks, who felt like colleagues in the deep sense of the term, about what it had been like to interview capital defense attorneys about their emotional experience of the work. Others at the table who had engaged in related explorations -- like the one who facilitates a group for medical professionals to talk about the impact of their work -- were intrigued by the areas of overlap in what we were observing and thinking about. I'm looking forward to more opportunities to talk about these experiences and ideas in the coming months. |
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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