Starred review from November 3, 1997
Fourteen years of "deathwork" as a public defender appealing capital convictions in Florida have convinced Vermont Law School professor Mello (Against the Death Penalty) that the U.S. system of capital punishment is just plain evil. This blistering, well-annotated critique of a legal system "so rigged that it can't even be trusted to ensure that it is killing the right person" is an often manifesto-like explication of his recent decision to abstain from "deathwork" altogether. Writing in "a language that my mother could read" and citing poets, philosophers and musicians when his own words fail, Mello is both passionate and eloquent. When he's over the top--in a single sentence that rambles for 28 pages or in the obscenities he applies to certain judges--he's railing against the perceived injustice and perverseness he has had ample opportunity to experience up close, and which, he says, has claimed lives in error. One of his clients was executed ostensibly because Mello did not file certain claims soon enough. Another has spent 20 years on death row for, Mello explains, a crime he never committed--a media expose saved his life. Far from romanticizing the defendants or their crimes, Mello keeps the focus on the system: regardless of actual guilt or innocence, convicts die, he argues, because of procedural technicalities, the performance of their attorneys or the political aspirations of governors and judges. Mello's searing, intense and personal witness forces readers to confront the seemingly faulty mechanics lurking behind the ultimate judicial process. Author tour.
December 1, 1997
After a decade and a half as a postconviction lawyer for death row convicts in Florida, Mello, now a Vermont Law School professor, decided he "could no longer participate in this mess of a legal system." The final straw was the near-execution of client "Crazy Joe" Spaziano: an execution prevented when a two-week probe by the "Miami Herald" produced exculpatory evidence. "Dead Wrong" blends memoir and expose, using two Mello clients (serial killer Ted Bundy and Spaziano) as "the twin polarities of capital punishment"; it closes with serious analysis of what dedicated attorneys should do in the face of tightening legislative and funding restraints that virtually guarantee execution of innocent people. ((Reviewed December 1, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)