NEW BOOK — Marc Bookman’s A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays

“The more peo­ple know about how the sys­tem of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment real­ly works, the less sup­port they will have for that pol­i­cy,” says Marc Bookman, the author of A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. Bookman’s crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed col­lec­tion of essays — described by Publishers Weekly as ​“a cogent and har­row­ing primer on what’s wrong with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” — chan­nels his decades of cap­i­tal lit­i­ga­tion expe­ri­ence into 12 sto­ries that exem­pli­fy the sys­temic fail­ings of the death penal­ty, from racial bias and an inca­pac­i­ty to come to grips with men­tal ill­ness to bad lawyer­ing, bad judg­ing, and an epi­dem­ic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Bookman is the co-founder of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation (ACCR), a non-prof­it death penal­ty resource cen­ter. Prior to found­ing ACCR in 2010, he was a fix­ture in the homi­cide unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, rep­re­sent­ing defen­dants who faced the death penal­ty. In his time in the homi­cide unit, the Defender Association was lim­it­ed to han­dling 20% of the city’s mur­der cas­es. Ninety men and women went to death row from Philadelphia dur­ing that peri­od, but not one Defender Association client was sen­tenced to death. 

While A Descending Spiral address­es the con­stel­la­tion of issues that caused Philadelphia to be an out­lier in its pur­suit of the death penal­ty, the col­lec­tive mes­sage of his sto­ries, gath­ered from juris­dic­tions across the coun­try, is that the prob­lems are not idio­syn­crat­ic; they are endem­ic. As Kirkus Reviews writes, ​“Bookman cre­ates a clear, com­pre­hen­sive por­trait of a bro­ken sys­tem, and the cas­es he high­lights make for fascinating reading.” 

Anthony Amsterdam, whose Supreme Court argu­ment in Furman v. Georgia led the Court to strike down all exist­ing death-penal­ty statutes in 1972, said that A Descending Spiral ​“achieves a dis­pas­sion that is more inci­sive and com­pelling than any overt advo­ca­cy.” ​“In these remark­able essays,” Amsterdam writes, Bookman’s ​“gift for exquis­ite irony and his spare, tren­chant prose are the per­fect tools for expos­ing the injus­tices of a legal sys­tem that kills haphazardly.”

When Bookman reflects on the fac­tors that made Philadelphia a sym­bol of death-penal­ty excess, he point­ed to the com­bi­na­tion of the city’s his­to­ry of overzeal­ous pros­e­cu­tors and its fail­ure to ade­quate­ly fund defense rep­re­sen­ta­tion. ​“The death penal­ty in Philadelphia has always been kind of a myth, kind of a way for politi­cians to look like they were being tough on crime,” he said. ​“And here’s the kick­er: Over an 11-year peri­od, the pub­lic defender’s office rep­re­sen­ta­tion saved the tax­pay­ers more than $200 mil­lion in exces­sive incar­cer­a­tion costs. But still, to this day, the City of Philadelphia only gives the defender’s office 20 per­cent of the cas­es. They are pen­ny-wise and pound-foolish.” 

Bookman points to Virginia’s recent abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty as evi­dence of the impact of strong rep­re­sen­ta­tion. ​“Virginia just got rid of the death penal­ty, and Virginia his­tor­i­cal­ly exe­cut­ed more peo­ple than any oth­er state in the coun­try, includ­ing Texas. But in 2004, Virginia decid­ed to fund region­al cap­i­tal defend­er offices — they brought in expe­ri­enced death-penal­ty lawyers to han­dle cap­i­tal cas­es, who basi­cal­ly shut down the death penal­ty in Virginia to the point where there were no death sen­tences there over the last decade. Pennsylvania is not putting one red cent into that kind of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. And so we’re spend­ing huge amounts of mon­ey [on lit­i­gat­ing capital appeals].”

There is no sin­gle thing that goes wrong in death-penal­ty cas­es, Bookman notes, which increased the com­plex­i­ty of craft­ing the essays in the book. In an inter­view with The Crime Report, he explains, ​“I would start out writ­ing an essay about a bad lawyer, but the essay would also quick­ly expose racism, or a pros­e­cu­tor who hides evi­dence, or the courts that pur­pose­ly over­look a prob­lem with the case. And that’s the amaz­ing thing: any cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment case almost nev­er has just one prob­lem. In these cas­es, all of the prob­lems tend to coalesce.” 

He also stressed the impor­tant role of the pros­e­cu­tor, and the need for account­abil­i­ty for those who with­hold evi­dence or engage in oth­er mis­con­duct. ​“The book describes a num­ber of cir­cum­stances where pros­e­cu­tors inten­tion­al­ly hid evi­dence or inten­tion­al­ly didn’t turn over excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence. And if we catch some­one inten­tion­al­ly hid­ing evi­dence, and we pros­e­cute that per­son for obstruc­tion of jus­tice, I guar­an­tee you few­er pros­e­cu­tors are going to hide evi­dence. How do we deter theft? We pros­e­cute it. How do we deter any crime? We prosecute it.”

Bookman believes that as the pub­lic becomes more informed the about the real­i­ties of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, the like­li­hood of its abo­li­tion increas­es. ​“I’m hope­ful because I can look at the data and see that sen­tences are going down and exe­cu­tions are going down. And the expla­na­tion for that is the more peo­ple know, the less they are enam­ored of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The more we know that lawyers screw up, that peo­ple false­ly con­fess, that juries make mis­takes, that race dis­crim­i­na­tion has per­me­at­ed our jus­tice sys­tem, the more all those things come into the public’s view and the less enam­ored they become.”