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.
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“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.