Customer Reviews

Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment

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Reviews of this book will do little to prepare you for the reality of reading it. I qualify my star rating because - as its author freely admits - it is often badly written.

Mello does not assert that death row is populated by innocents - far from it. He is a man who cares about those sentenced to death and the injustice of their position. This is not the casual professional care of the hack lawyer but the deeply dyed-in-the-wool care of a man who believes the law should deliver on its promises.

Mello does not smoulder at the injustice frequently handed out by those paying lipservice to due process. He does not just burn with rage at it. He is incandescent with rage - so much so that he veers towards and teeters on the brink of incoherence at times. His snarling and vitriolic attack on former Justice Lewis Powell is almost a case of the ad hominem attack raised to an artform. Many of his former colleagues at Florida's CCR fare little better than the hapless Powell.

This is all the more surprising because his background as an appellate attorney and law professor would suggest that a more measured tone and more orderly development of argument might be expected. His anger does not make for easy reading but the reader who perseveres will be amply rewarded.

Mello has two central themes. The first asserts that those sentenced to death are routinely denied the kind of due process envisaged by the spirit of the Bill of Rights. Rather, he says, the deference of federal courts to States's Rights has led to a situation where those accused of capital crimes can expect no more than token observance of procedural due process.

His second theme is a painstaking refutation of the complaint that defense lawyers spin out the appeals process to buy time for their clients and thus defeat the ends of justice. He shows how the 10-15 years of appeals which are the norm in capital cases spring primarily from the system's failure to abide by the requirements of due process and its overeagerness to placate public sentiment regardless of the requirements of justice.

I suspect that writing this book was a necessary catharsis for Mello. His involvement in capital appeals must have made him feel like Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby - once you get entangled in the system there seems to be no way of escape.

Mello writes this book from the perspective of a former post-conviction death penalty attorney. While all that he says is true about our unjust and "stacked" system of capital defense work, I worry that his personal conculsion - to personally "opt out" of the system, will result in even more executions. It must be hard to continue to work in a system that is stacked against your clients from the very beginning....but I'm not sure if refusal to participate is the answer. Perhaps an alternative...but not an answer.

This book is truly a find. The pace is at times frantic, personal, heartwrenching. Mello is at times humble, at times arrogant, at times self-righteous, at times self-deprecating. I found myself engrossed, not so much because I felt "sorry" for anyone. It was not like with Dead Man Walking, where the characters drew me into their world. I found that I did not want to enter this world, but was pushed into the world of the lawyers, the judges, and horrifyingly, those who committed the crimes. A must read, though enter the door at your own risk...

For Mello, capital punishment is "government-sponsored homocide." He sees the system as being an "unambiguous disgrace to civilized humanity; besides being classist and indecent, it is racist." I couldn't agree more. And that's why I found this book so compelling to read. Mello places his first-hand analysis of "government-sponsored homocide" in a legal, cultural, philosophical, and ethical context. Though our common sense may say that capital punishment is the best, most justifiable consequence for cold hearted murder, we must use our uncommon sense to see the larger picture.

Government-sponsored homocide is not like a crime of murder--even though both seek retribution, but it's a systemic form of murder in which death is seen as a solution to problems in our society and world. As long as we hold to this solution, we'll never be able to understand man's inhumanity to man. We'll simply take the "common sense" route to soloving complex problems with simplistic answers.

Many readers will say that Mello is too biased in his analysis. But with well over 3,000 men and women in this country facing a death sentence (nearly 400 in Florida alone), and with a president who resided over 100 death sentences in Texas, we have to think much more critically about what type of country and culture we're livng in and allowing to develop.

Reading Mello helps us think about this "anathema to civilization." He does it with passion, insight, and years of committed work. Even though he has stepped down from being a capital public defender, I think his book will be useful to generations to come who can join others to take on anti-death work.

For a good book from the prespective of death row: "A Checkered Past" by William Van Poyck, on death row in Florida. The book is available via amazon.com.

This book won the American Society of Indexers' award for excellence in indexing. The H.W. Wilson Award was presented to the indexer, Laura Moss Gottlieb of Madison WI and to the publisher, University of Wisconsin Press.

This book doesn't hold a candle to Von Drehle's "Among the Lowest of the Dead." I picked this book up hoping to be informed and possibly persuaded that the death penalty is a poor system. The author's uninteresting discussions about personal conflicts with people and organizations made me less than empathetic to his point of view.