Among the Lowest of the Dead
Drehle, David Von
AMONG THE LOWEST OF THE DEAD: THE CULTURE OF DEATH ROW David Von Drehle Times Books/ 469 pages / $25 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA T he best things in this book are the courtroom and the law...
...In the cases of Goode and Bundy, it might have meant the fulfillment of what in their last moments they had barely begun...
...This next cell, then sorrowfully confessing the book offers no new philosophical, theotheft to his lawyer...
...The death David Von Drehle—formerly a reporter for penalty should be abolished, according to theMiamiHera/d and now an editor at the Von Drehle, because it has proved Washington Post—has a good news- impossible to apply consistently...
...Perhaps, though equality under the law seems to have something to do with justice...
...Von Drehle dwells in the Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in Madrid...
...And inevitably there are mistakes of commission as well of omission: Von Drehle relates in outrageous detail the case of two half-brothers, framed in the shoddiest manner, who spent more than eight years on death row and came within 16 hours of electrocution...
...We follow them through the filing of petition after petition, the issuance and overturn of stay after stay...
...Unfortunately, these are the subjects that take up the most space, in part no doubt a reflection of journalistic realities: Access to death row and its residents is a lot harder than access to lawyers...
...Racial discrimination follows a discernible pattern...
...man's sense for pacing and detail...
...AMONG THE LOWEST OF THE DEAD: THE CULTURE OF DEATH ROW David Von Drehle Times Books/ 469 pages / $25 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA T he best things in this book are the courtroom and the law office to make his incidentals: Inmates making case, the closest thing to a thesis that this booze out of orange juice, and zip loosely organized book possesses: that guns out of radio antennae and match capital punishment in the United States, heads...
...We learn what prompted them to oppose capital punishment (the hunger for justice, predictably) or to support it (bitterness, prejudice, and opportunism, also predictably...
...A life term—provided that it truly meant life in prison—might accomplish even more than putting somebody dangerous and despicable away forever...
...This is not, at least not for the most part, the work of meddlesome public defenders filing spurious appeals, but follows from the genuine confusion of judges and juries...
...In other respects, despite all the legislative and judicial guidelines, whether or not a man dies seems an arbitrary decision...
...As Ernest van den Haag put it: "If the death penalty is morally just, however discriminatorily applied to only some of the guilty, it remains just in each case in which it is applied to a guilty person...
...Von crimes that brought them to death row...
...Drehle, keen to show that he is no bleedBundy's remains a grabber, even after ing heart, informs us twice that Bundy the 'TV movie and numerous books, and was a "very bad" person...
...Everybody knows that rehabilitation is impossible, and in any case, the thought of certain people ever walking free, no matter how well adjusted counseling can make them, is intolerable...
...There is no soon-to-be-electrocuted man is "in his attempt to raise sympathy for the conanger stage...
...But is redemption entirely a lost cause...
...to get sentenced to the chair—or the chamber, injection, noose, or bullet...
...demned as a group: True penitents and Almost as entertaining are the stories self-improvers are clearly exceptions of the convicts, their victims, and the among the "vile" and "warped...
...First there are the well-known racial Least compelling are the portraits of disparities: Killers of whites are many prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, times more likely than killers of blacks activists, and politicians, and the wearisome epic of their struggle over Old Sparky, as Florida's electric chair is known...
...It is on these grounds that Justices Blackmun and Powell, who supported a constitutionally reformed death penalty in the 1970s, have recently called for its abolition...
...Struggling to avoid the end, the criminal will not face up to what he has done...
...A warden, who has logical, or constitutional arguments read his Kiibler-Ross, observing that a against the ultimate sanction...
...No one with a firmly made-up mind will find it changed by reading Among the Lowest of the Dead, but the undecided (like the abolitionists a minority, if the polls are accurate) may find themselves nudged toward the "anti" side—not so much by the legal arguments as by the unsentimental yet humanizing portraits of the guilty...
...and of Bundy on his death watch, dropping his defiant and supercilious persona to ask a minister, "Do you really believe God forgives...
...We read of Arthur Goode, having written gloating letters to the parents of the boys he raped and murdered, and having preened at his last press conference, finally saying he is sorry once he is strapped into Old 70 The American Spectator July 1995 Sparky...
...the survival instinct crowds out remorse, not to mention moral reflection...
...Retentionists have an answer for this class of objection...
...Perhaps it is only the imminence of death that provokes such changes of heart, but perhaps it is more the finality of punishment...
...But clearly the aims of deterrence and symbolism are harmed when accomplices get executed while mass murderers get to live...
...Serial murderer Ted Bundy swip- as illustrated by Florida, has failed to ing cookies from the child killer in the work as its proponents have wished...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
