Michael A. Mello  Foreword by David Von Drehle

bn.com Price: $14.36 Retail Price: $17.95 You Save: $3.59 (20%)   In-Stock: Ships within 24 hours  Format: Paperback, 398pp. ISBN: 0299153444 Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Pub. Date: March  1999 A Reader's Catalog Selection The 40,000+ best books in print

Buy it now! Add this item to your shopping cart. You can always remove it later.  Safe Shopping Guarantee!

Write your own Review

ABOUT THE BOOK

Description from The Reader's Catalog
A former fulltime capital public defender in Florida tells how the system works--and why it''s wrong. "The real death penalty enterprise is a Rube Goldberg contraption kept clanking perpetually by the fuel of caffeinated lawyers and their cousins the poll-driven politicians. Michael Mello is a witness from inside the machine"--from the Foreword by David Von Drehle

From The Publisher
After fourteen years as a death row lawyer in Florida, Michael Mello has seen enough. Dead Wrong is a candid and compelling account of his decision to withdraw from "the machinery of death" - the American capital punishment system. Telling stories of cases he worked on - including those of confessed serial killer Ted Bundy and of "Crazy Joe" Spaziano, wrongly convicted but still on death row after twenty years - Mello provides an inside view of death row lawyering as no one has done before. He describes how he and others fought to make the post-conviction system work, ensuring inmates the right to a fair appeal. Alternately impassioned, angry, and haunted by the victims, crimes, and criminals, Mello draws us into the legal maze of appeals, death warrants, stays of execution, and executions. Though Mello is unflinching in his recognition of the brutal realities of capital crimes, his book is a powerful indictment of the death penalty enterprise in America. He is appalled at the lack of vigilance in a system that routinely punishes guilty and innocent alike. And, practicing in Florida, he saw the state''s death penalty cost to taxpayers rise to an estimated average $3.2 million per execution - six times the average cost of life imprisonment.

Reviews
From Publisher's Weekly - Publishers Weekly  
Fourteen years of "deathwork" as a public defender appealing capital convictions in Florida have convinced Vermont Law School professor Mello (Against the Death Penalty) that the U.S. system of capital punishment is just plain evil. This blistering, well-annotated critique of a legal system "so rigged that it can't even be trusted to ensure that it is killing the right person" is an often manifesto-like explication of his recent decision to abstain from "deathwork" altogether. Writing in "a language that my mother could read" and citing poets, philosophers and musicians when his own words fail, Mello is both passionate and eloquent. When he's over the topin a single sentence that rambles for 28 pages or in the obscenities he applies to certain judgeshe's railing against the perceived injustice and perverseness he has had ample opportunity to experience up close, and which, he says, has claimed lives in error. One of his clients was executed ostensibly because Mello did not file certain claims soon enough. Another has spent 20 years on death row for, Mello explains, a crime he never committeda media expos saved his life. Far from romanticizing the defendants or their crimes, Mello keeps the focus on the system: regardless of actual guilt or innocence, convicts die, he argues, because of procedural technicalities, the performance of their attorneys or the political aspirations of governors and judges. Mello's searing, intense and personal witness forces readers to confront the seemingly faulty mechanics lurking behind the ultimate judicial process. Author tour. (Jan.)
 

RELATED TITLES

More on this subject
Nonfiction