A tele­vi­sion Mini-series based on the fic­tion nov­el ​“Reversible Errors,” a best-sell­ing book by award-win­ning author and cap­i­tal defense attor­ney Scott Turow, will air on CBS on Sunday May 23, and Tuesday May 25, 2004. The sto­ry is about a cor­po­rate lawyer whose world is turned upside-down when he is assigned to draft the final appeal of a poten­tial­ly inno­cent inmate near­ing his exe­cu­tion date. Although ​“Reversible Errors” is not about an actu­al cap­i­tal case in the U.S., the nov­el and the CBS mini-series encap­su­late many of the issues that raise ques­tions about the accu­ra­cy and fair­ness of the death penal­ty, includ­ing false con­fes­sions, inno­cence, and race. In an inter­vew about the movie and about how his expe­ri­ences shade this fic­tion work, Turow, who served as a mem­ber of the blue-rib­bon Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment, stat­ed:

​“The (death penal­ty) sys­tem can be no more pre­fect than we are as people…However, I think for me the biggest rev­e­la­tion, even beyond the par­tic­u­lars of false con­fes­sions or false eye-wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tions, was the fact that the very mon­strous crimes that get pros­e­cut­ed in mur­der cas­es often end up being a path­way to error because we’re all so fright­ened. We all want to go back to our sense of secu­ri­ty, and it’s easy to make mis­takes. We’ve done it. We’ve done it a lot.
…
​“Like every oth­er lawyer I see the world through my cas­es. The expe­ri­ence of sit­ting on [for­mer Illinois] Governor George Ryan’s Commission on Capital Punishment had me look­ing at a whole uni­verse of cas­es. Suddenly, I was in a posi­tion to make sys­temic judg­ments instead of just judg­ments about the iso­lat­ed, indi­vid­ual cas­es I worked on as a lawyer. The most strik­ing thing to me was just try­ing to make sense of who got sen­tenced to death and who didn’t. I start­ed read­ing through the first-degree homi­cide cas­es and I couldn’t make any sense of it – and it wasn’t because good peo­ple weren’t try­ing to do the right thing. Yet, it ends up being a moral hodge­podge.”

Turow is the author of sev­er­al best-sell­ing books, includ­ing his most recent work, a non-fic­tion book titled ​“Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty.” (CBS Press mate­ri­als, May 2004) See Resources. See also, Innocence.

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