Proximity to Death

"The dry boards of a Georgia courthouse creak into life when a lawyer, in defiance of a society that no longer cares, goes about the tough, unpopular work of trying to keep us from killing the person seated next to him." On a misty September morning in rural Georgia, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian found himself cast in a role that he had never imagined for himself: an expert witness in the sentencing trial of a convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. He had no idea that his brief testimony that day would take him deeply into the criminal justice system, to many other courthouses where unequal struggles take place between those who would condemn prisoners to death and those fighting to overturn the Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye. Before the end of William McFeely's journey out of history into the reality of the death penalty, he would encounter lawyers battling to end lives and to save them, jurors caught in between, and convicts whose lives are at stake. At the heart of this vivid account is a remarkable group of lawyers in Atlanta led by a lean Kentuckian named Stephen Bright. With much personal sacrifice and little solemnity, they work to make the law protect their clients from the state's instruments of death. Proximity to Death compels the reader to look at capital punishment in an uncompromisingly intimate way--through the actions and decisions of those with no time left for arid debate.