REVIEWS | Fictionalizing Recent Death-Row History



A Reverence for Redemption: Establishing Actual Innocence or Reversible Error

Reversible Errors
by Scott Turow
Farrar Straus Giroux, New York
433 pages, $28.00
Criminal Defense Weekly. Oct. 12, 2002.

By Jordan Elgrably

Attorneys rarely have time to read fiction these days, it seems, but if you read anything at all for entertainment, you’ll be warmly surprised by Scott Turow’s latest novel. In fact, you might find that Turow (who has practiced law since the late ‘70s—first as a Chicago prosecutor before going over to the defense side) has much more in mind than spinning a good yarn. For without question, this is a literary novel, which has as its purpose the demonstration of a new way of seeing the world.

While the book’s narrative construction appears conventional on the face of it, what is striking here is the nuance of character, the very shadings Turow applies to criminal justice professionals who are fallible to a (wo)man. His novel approach lies in the extent to which every protagonist or antagonist is fully three-dimensional; drawn, that is, with complete human fallibility. If defense attorney Arthur Raven is Turow’s alter ego, for instance, the author doesn’t stop at candid descriptions of Raven’s height (short!), hair line (receding!), and success with women (don’t even go there!). To me what seems most novel about this work of fiction is that it seamlessly combines all the usual conceits of a literary work with the more or less predictable demands of a serviceable suspense thriller.

This is Raymond Chandler and Hemingway in one rollercoaster narrative.

Now that the work has been effusively praised and we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at the issues Turow raises. Rommy “Squirrel” Gandolph is a Death Row defendant, known as a “Yellow Man,” who has just about exhausted every possible appeal. At the end of his days, the State assigns corporate lawyer Arthur Raven and his new young associate, Pamela Towns, to Gandolph’s case. With 33 days before execution, Raven and Towns have little hope of unearthing any new evidence; besides which, there is the inconvenience of Squirrel’s jailhouse confession, shot on videotape by lawman Larry Starczek.

Why bother, some might ask, and I’m sure just about every reader will. But then you have to wonder, what is Turow going on about in over 400 pages?

The reality is that Turow has carefully crafted his story based on many of the known facts of infamous Cook County, Illinois cases, in which police and prosecutors overzealously put away several innocent men in the 1980s and 1990s. Thanks to Cardozo Law School’s Innocence Project (the brainchild of O.J. attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld) and the Center for Wrongful Conviction at Northwestern University, over 100 “Yellow Men” have been exonerated nationwide, based on claims of actual innocence or reversible error. Almost always, DNA testing provides the basis for defense claims that the State must reverse the convictions of men who seem doomed for the death house.

Scott Turow always wanted to be a serious novelist, and even considered going freelance while a creative writing student at Stanford, before he began practicing law. Instead, according to his publisher’s biography, Turow became “a partner in the Chicago office of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, a national law firm with 600 lawyers. Mr. Turow’s practice centers on white collar criminal litigation. Mr. Turow devotes a substantial part of his practice now to pro bono work, including representations in cases involving the death penalty. In one of these matters, Alejandro Hernandez, co-defendant of Rolando Cruz, was exonerated after 11 years in prison.”

Rolando Cruz and Hernandez were in fact tried and convicted in Cook County. Turow sets all of his Illinois novels in the fictional Kindle County, but few locals can miss the similarities. Arthur Raven becomes amorously involved with a former judge convicted of taking bribes; Cook County had such a judge. But while in reality we would know little or nothing about such a person’s “recovery” or rehabilitation, Turow has the luxury, in the fiction process, of exploring just what makes such a person tick, and how they make their way back from the valley of the damned.

You might expect a lot of characters in white and black hats in a legal thriller, but in Reversible Errors, every hat is multicolored — some with more shades of gray than others. When the corrupt judge comes clean with Raven, out of prison now after a seven-year hitch, we learn that, “I don’t think the money changed the outcome of any of those cases. No one can say for sure, least of all me, and that’s what makes what I did so insidious. But it was a system, Arthur, almost like a tax. The lawyers got rich, so the judges were entitled to a share.”

It would be fair to say that Scott Turow, the omniscient narrator, saves reverence for nothing and no one in the legal field; instead, his reverence is reserved for the stark possibility of redemption. Indeed, it is the novel’s real killer, the hidden hoodlum, who admonishes Raven never to give up on a man’s one-in-a-million capacity to turn his life around, against all odds.

With Rommy Gandolph, we’ve got a defendant out of his depth, who has an IQ not much above retarded. Such defendants, as we know, have been relatively easy prey for coerced confessions; and in fact several of the exonerated men who left Death Row in the past year or two have been victims of coerced jailhouse confessions, later thrown out on appeal.

Turow would know a bit more than the average defense attorney about the holes in the criminal justice system; he was one of 14 people who spent nearly two years on the Ryan Commission on Capital Punishment, trying to determine exactly how and why so many defendants were nearly executed by the State of Illinois, despite their actual innocence. Ultimately, that commission—and this novel—tell us in almost Dickensian depth how and why the system is flawed, and how race and class and education play a role in whether the accused gets life, or death.

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