title: Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment
author:  Michael A. Mello 
description: After fourteen years as a death row lawyer in Florida, Michael Mello has seen enough. Dead Wrong is a candid and compelling account of his decision to withdraw from "the machinery of death" - the American capital punishment system. Telling stories of cases he worked on - including those of confessed serial killer Ted Bundy and of "Crazy Joe" Spaziano, wrongly convicted but still on death row after twenty years - Mello provides an inside view of death row lawyering as no one has done before. He describes how he and others fought to make the post-conviction system work, ensuring inmates the right to a fair appeal. Alternately impassioned, angry, and haunted by the victims, crimes, and criminals, Mello draws us into the legal maze of appeals, death warrants, stays of execution, and executions. Though Mello is unflinching in his recognition of the brutal realities of capital crimes, his book is a powerful indictment of the death penalty enterprise in America. He is appalled at the lack of vigilance in a system that routinely punishes guilty and innocent alike. And, practicing in Florida, he saw the state's death penalty cost to taxpayers rise to an estimated average $3.2 million per execution - six times the average cost of life imprisonment.
zlib_text: A Time to Kill 
  John Grisham 
   
   
  Near the rural town of Clanton, Mississippi, little Tonya Hailey is brutally raped, beaten, 
  and left for dead by two drunken and remorseless men. The rapists are almost 
  immediately caught in a road side bar, where they have been bragging of their exploits. 
  When the men appear in court days later, Tonya’s father Carl bursts out of the courthouse 
  basement, and executes them with an assault rifle. Murder or executions? Justice or 
  revenge? Carl trusts his life to only one man in town—local criminal lawyer Jake 
  Brigance, who dreams of famous cases, headlines, and the big time. Jake is about to face 
  the fight of his life, and he knows it. Not only is he up against Rufus Buckley—a tough, 
  ambitious district attorney who realizes that a murder conviction could help him gain 
  higher office—but he has a much bigger problem: the rapists are white, the judge is 
  white—and Carl is black. This is a trial sure to change forever the lives of everyone 
  involved.