I got my copy of Prof. David Dow's Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row on Wednesday night. I finished it up last night.
This is an excellent book about the system, and how that system does not and cannot work. It is (in my opinion) written directly to those who are either pro-capital punishment or, as he described himself at the beginning of his capital defense work, 'agnostic' toward the death penalty. The stories he recounts are personal, touching, compelling, and shocking - and meant to force the reader to confront humanity in all its ugliness and beauty.
The system is wrong because it is arbitrary, because it is not justice being carried out, it is 'lightening striking.' As he sums up at the end - the death penalty is not the rule of law, it is the rule of the mob.
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