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A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays
Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes—including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian’s advocacy)—but few people with firsthand knowledge of America’s “injustice system” have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life. Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays “notable” author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly “ordinary” capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts—revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system’s weaknesses—purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny—is a recipe for injustice. Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic , Mother Jones , and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral .
240 pages, Hardcover
Published May 27, 2021
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January 1, 2022
By nearly every metric, the death penalty is a failure. It has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective as a deterrent to capital crimes. Counterintuitively, it is far more expensive to put someone to death than it is to lock them away for the rest of their lives. This expense is in large part due to the years of trials and appeals ostensibly meant to ensure fairness and prevent wrongful executions, but nearly 200 death row inmates have been exonerated since the 1970s, many of whom were victims of prosecutorial or police misconduct uncovered outside of the traditional judicial processes. And, as with most punitive criminal justice policies in the United States, our harshest form of punishment falls disproportionately on poor Black Americans. As a policy matter, the death penalty is virtually indefensible.
But the death penalty remains good politics or, at least, it is perceived to be by some politicians who want to promote ‘law and order’ and ‘tough on crime’ images. (Recall the Trump administration making a big to-do about restarting federal executions after a 17-year hiatus.) Crime victimization can be highly visceral, whether experienced directly or vicariously, and the retributive characteristics of capital punishment appeal to a vengeful side of the American body politic. Many, if not most Americans feel that horrific crimes demand harsh punishment. This feeling can be amplified when the victims are children or the crimes evoke outrage in a given community. In such cases, details about cost, racial disparities, or the lack of future deterrence pale in comparison to the moral certainty that a perpetrator deserves to die. When it comes to the death penalty, feelings often don’t care about facts.
Nevertheless, while hundreds of inmates around the nation remain on death row, a diminishing number have been put to death in recent years. The states and the federal government executed 11 people in 2021, the fewest since 1988. According to Gallup, a slim majority of Americans still support the death penalty, but there doesn’t seem to be a national groundswell of support for increasing executions.
The loudest proponents of executions seem to be governors who have been defiant defenders of their states’ execution practices despite growing concerns about substitute “cocktails” used for lethal injections. In 2012, the European Union stopped exporting the preferred execution drug to the United States because of their opposition to capital punishment. In the years since, many states have “botched” executions using alternative and sometimes secret drug protocols that torture the condemned as they die. These failures undermine the “more humane” rationale that led to the widespread adoption of lethal injection over the electric chair, gas chamber, hanging, or firing squad.
Despite all this, the death penalty endures.
It is within this cruel and contradictory milieu that Marc Bookman, executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, has published A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. A longtime capital defense practitioner, Bookman provides a compelling and damning account of the system’s repeated failures to provide the fairness, certainty, and finality that should result from a just process. In these 12 short essays, Bookman vividly recounts injustice after injustice while avoiding both the dense formalism that plagues so much legal writing and the high-handed tone of a polemic. A Descending Spiral’s strength is its level-headed dissection of procedural dysfunction that is endemic to American death penalty adjudication.
If there is a common theme throughout the book it is the maddening arbitrariness in how the state kills people. Judges overrule juries’ preference for life imprisonment. A defendant’s claim of innocence is effectively an aggravating factor that makes the death penalty more likely if he is found guilty. Appeals courts, charged with ensuring the fairness of trial court proceedings, seem almost annoyed with their role and rubber stamp their approval of the sentence irrespective of the facts in a given case. And though legislatures and courts have decided that the mentally incompetent should not face our harshest punishment, prosecutors and judges ignore galling, stomach-turning evidence of mental illness to move the inmate closer to death. And this is the system before one begins to factor in individual racial and gender prejudices that too often play a role in how marginalized people are mistreated within our criminal adjudication system.
In one essay in particular, “The Lawyer Who Drank His Client to Death,” Bookman weaves together how law, poverty, local politics, judicial indifference, and human frailty condemned a man to die. The defendant, Robert Holsey, had a history of serious mental impairment—which, by law, should have exempted him from the death penalty—on top of severe trauma and victimization. He was indigent, so the accused cop-killer was assigned a lawyer who happened to be debilitated by a quart of vodka per day alcoholism. Holsey was deprived of his constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel, which should have been ameliorated on appeal, but wasn’t. At every stage of his case, the legal and institutional protections built into the system to prevent his death failed. He wasn’t innocent, but neither should he have been put to death under the understanding of the law at the time.
A death penalty proponent might criticize A Descending Spiral as a collection of cherry-picked stories describing outlier cases in an otherwise just system. And certainly, Bookman does not make the case that all capital defendants deserve mercy or claim that most of them are innocent. He does contend that these stories “are more the rule than the exception[s],” and his extensive experience would likely convince a sympathetic reader.
However, a skeptical reader would not likely be swayed that death penalty cases are representative based solely on the information in these 12 essays. Yet that really is not a weakness of the book. Bookman’s examples, like Robert Holsey, convincingly demonstrate that the system is unable to correct errors and enforce its own fundamental protections, so whether or not these stories are as common as he claims, the impediments to justice remain endemic to American capital punishment. Put another way, Bookman shows that the American death penalty is so inherently flawed that it is incapable of achieving basic standards of justice by its own rules.
I doubt many Americans lost sleep over the executions of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh or serial killers like Ted Bundy. No one doubted that they were guilty, they fully comprehended their actions and culpability, and they didn’t appear remorseful for what they did. Perhaps if death row were limited to men like them, the case for the American death penalty would be stronger. But their infamous crimes and their high-profile, well-documented trials are not representative of who normally faces the death penalty and how they are prosecuted. A Descending Spiral lays bare the state’s compromised machinery of death: it is unfair, unjust, and unsustainable. The sooner the American public understands the death penalty for what it is—not what we’d like or imagine it to be—the sooner we can join much of the rest of the world in putting this archaic form of punishment behind us.
But the death penalty remains good politics or, at least, it is perceived to be by some politicians who want to promote ‘law and order’ and ‘tough on crime’ images. (Recall the Trump administration making a big to-do about restarting federal executions after a 17-year hiatus.) Crime victimization can be highly visceral, whether experienced directly or vicariously, and the retributive characteristics of capital punishment appeal to a vengeful side of the American body politic. Many, if not most Americans feel that horrific crimes demand harsh punishment. This feeling can be amplified when the victims are children or the crimes evoke outrage in a given community. In such cases, details about cost, racial disparities, or the lack of future deterrence pale in comparison to the moral certainty that a perpetrator deserves to die. When it comes to the death penalty, feelings often don’t care about facts.
Nevertheless, while hundreds of inmates around the nation remain on death row, a diminishing number have been put to death in recent years. The states and the federal government executed 11 people in 2021, the fewest since 1988. According to Gallup, a slim majority of Americans still support the death penalty, but there doesn’t seem to be a national groundswell of support for increasing executions.
The loudest proponents of executions seem to be governors who have been defiant defenders of their states’ execution practices despite growing concerns about substitute “cocktails” used for lethal injections. In 2012, the European Union stopped exporting the preferred execution drug to the United States because of their opposition to capital punishment. In the years since, many states have “botched” executions using alternative and sometimes secret drug protocols that torture the condemned as they die. These failures undermine the “more humane” rationale that led to the widespread adoption of lethal injection over the electric chair, gas chamber, hanging, or firing squad.
Despite all this, the death penalty endures.
It is within this cruel and contradictory milieu that Marc Bookman, executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, has published A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. A longtime capital defense practitioner, Bookman provides a compelling and damning account of the system’s repeated failures to provide the fairness, certainty, and finality that should result from a just process. In these 12 short essays, Bookman vividly recounts injustice after injustice while avoiding both the dense formalism that plagues so much legal writing and the high-handed tone of a polemic. A Descending Spiral’s strength is its level-headed dissection of procedural dysfunction that is endemic to American death penalty adjudication.
If there is a common theme throughout the book it is the maddening arbitrariness in how the state kills people. Judges overrule juries’ preference for life imprisonment. A defendant’s claim of innocence is effectively an aggravating factor that makes the death penalty more likely if he is found guilty. Appeals courts, charged with ensuring the fairness of trial court proceedings, seem almost annoyed with their role and rubber stamp their approval of the sentence irrespective of the facts in a given case. And though legislatures and courts have decided that the mentally incompetent should not face our harshest punishment, prosecutors and judges ignore galling, stomach-turning evidence of mental illness to move the inmate closer to death. And this is the system before one begins to factor in individual racial and gender prejudices that too often play a role in how marginalized people are mistreated within our criminal adjudication system.
In one essay in particular, “The Lawyer Who Drank His Client to Death,” Bookman weaves together how law, poverty, local politics, judicial indifference, and human frailty condemned a man to die. The defendant, Robert Holsey, had a history of serious mental impairment—which, by law, should have exempted him from the death penalty—on top of severe trauma and victimization. He was indigent, so the accused cop-killer was assigned a lawyer who happened to be debilitated by a quart of vodka per day alcoholism. Holsey was deprived of his constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel, which should have been ameliorated on appeal, but wasn’t. At every stage of his case, the legal and institutional protections built into the system to prevent his death failed. He wasn’t innocent, but neither should he have been put to death under the understanding of the law at the time.
A death penalty proponent might criticize A Descending Spiral as a collection of cherry-picked stories describing outlier cases in an otherwise just system. And certainly, Bookman does not make the case that all capital defendants deserve mercy or claim that most of them are innocent. He does contend that these stories “are more the rule than the exception[s],” and his extensive experience would likely convince a sympathetic reader.
However, a skeptical reader would not likely be swayed that death penalty cases are representative based solely on the information in these 12 essays. Yet that really is not a weakness of the book. Bookman’s examples, like Robert Holsey, convincingly demonstrate that the system is unable to correct errors and enforce its own fundamental protections, so whether or not these stories are as common as he claims, the impediments to justice remain endemic to American capital punishment. Put another way, Bookman shows that the American death penalty is so inherently flawed that it is incapable of achieving basic standards of justice by its own rules.
I doubt many Americans lost sleep over the executions of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh or serial killers like Ted Bundy. No one doubted that they were guilty, they fully comprehended their actions and culpability, and they didn’t appear remorseful for what they did. Perhaps if death row were limited to men like them, the case for the American death penalty would be stronger. But their infamous crimes and their high-profile, well-documented trials are not representative of who normally faces the death penalty and how they are prosecuted. A Descending Spiral lays bare the state’s compromised machinery of death: it is unfair, unjust, and unsustainable. The sooner the American public understands the death penalty for what it is—not what we’d like or imagine it to be—the sooner we can join much of the rest of the world in putting this archaic form of punishment behind us.
July 11, 2021
"There has always been a strong presumption in criminal justice that the system got it right the first time: that defense lawyers did a competent job, prosecutors acted honorably, judges conducted a fair trial, and juries accurately determined the facts. The reality of the presumption, though, is hard to assess. "
In "A Descending Spiral," Marc Bookman educates the reader on the unfairness and imperfections of America's judicial system, and especially when it comes to deciding to implement the death penalty. In these 12 essays, Bookman covers police brutality and misconduct, corruption, mental illness, the factors behind false confessions, racism and xenophobia, as well as, the role unbiased police officers/lawyers/judges/juries could play in these cases.
For those who have previously read or watched documentaries on incarceration and the death penalty, a lot of the information in this book will be familiar, but still shocking. It feels unacceptable that we're in the 21st century and Black jurors are still kept off juries and that detectives accused of misconduct usually come out of these accusations unscathed. And the saddest part is that this trust towards the system, makes it impossible for those wronged by it to challenge it and turn their lives around.
"Some losses, like liberty, can't ever be repaid and some wrongs can't ever be made truly right."
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC!
In "A Descending Spiral," Marc Bookman educates the reader on the unfairness and imperfections of America's judicial system, and especially when it comes to deciding to implement the death penalty. In these 12 essays, Bookman covers police brutality and misconduct, corruption, mental illness, the factors behind false confessions, racism and xenophobia, as well as, the role unbiased police officers/lawyers/judges/juries could play in these cases.
For those who have previously read or watched documentaries on incarceration and the death penalty, a lot of the information in this book will be familiar, but still shocking. It feels unacceptable that we're in the 21st century and Black jurors are still kept off juries and that detectives accused of misconduct usually come out of these accusations unscathed. And the saddest part is that this trust towards the system, makes it impossible for those wronged by it to challenge it and turn their lives around.
"Some losses, like liberty, can't ever be repaid and some wrongs can't ever be made truly right."
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC!
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May 15, 2021Here's my interview with Marc Bookman at the Los Angeles Review of Books. https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/artic...
September 19, 2021
Excellent collection of essays the span the wide spectrum of capital trials and public defense. The author provided a wealth of thought provoking commentary in this collection. Very enlightening.
June 11, 2021
Marc Bookman’s essay collection A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays (The New Press, 2021) is a brutal and illuminating look at the death penalty in the United States. Bookman is the executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, an organization dedicated to reducing the number of death sentences in Pennsylvania. Prior to this, he worked as a defense attorney in the Homicide Unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia. Bookman brings his wealth of real-life experience to “illuminate the misconduct, the biases and racism” that are inherent within the process of capital punishment in many states... https://truecrimeindex.ca/2021/06/11/...
June 9, 2021
I cannot praise this book enough. This is an amazing work on two levels – each essay tells a compelling human story in its own right about a particular case, and then, when the twelve essays are put together as a whole, provides a compelling story about the death penalty from a broader policy perspective. The author faced a real challenge – providing enough of the law and realities of capital litigation so that someone unfamiliar with the area could understand what is happening, while not losing the literary feel of narrating the injustice of a particular defendant’s case. Quite simply, he nailed it. His wry writing style is both entertaining and informative as he has a true feel for how to let the reader connect to what it is about a case that shows why we as the reader should care. In short, I will be singing A Descending Spiral’s praises to lawyers and non-lawyers alike; it truly is one of the best books I’ve read in recent memory.
February 19, 2022
A solid book and a solid argument against the death penalty in America. I did find these stories a little dense, but they're also written from the perspective of a legal expert so I can understand that. I would love to see some citations for these stories, and places to find more info on the cases discussed here.
March 13, 2023
This book should be read by anyone who is interested in whether or not the death penalty is a fair punishment. Some of the things in this collection of facts about certain cases is truly shocking. I hope this book will make people think about how in some cases it does not appear that justice is really served for either side.
February 28, 2022
It was fine but not exhaustive enough critique of death penalty.
Focuses on specific outlier cases, which though it creates a human connection to the process, does NOT address larger moral, financial, and political arguments gainer capital punishment that are more effective
Focuses on specific outlier cases, which though it creates a human connection to the process, does NOT address larger moral, financial, and political arguments gainer capital punishment that are more effective
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April 18, 2021Thanks to NetGalley and The New Press for providing an ARC!
August 5, 2021
Important look into the criminal justice system in the US. I liked the essay format that allowed for deep dives into various issues and biases that plague true justice in the US.
January 12, 2022
The criminal justice system is broken and the evidence is most compelling when the government is hell bent on taking a life.
January 25, 2025
“Putting such people on death row instead of in secure treatment facilities is an embarrassment to our humanity.”
January 9, 2022
The reputation of the author preceeds him. Considering his background and long career in dealing with death penalty cases as an advocate and teaching about the same, it is no wonder that this book is very well written and insightful. The book consists of 12 essays which discuss separate cases and does an in depth yet concisely put analysis of the systemic failures which prevents justice from prevailing. The beauty of the book lies in the fact that it brings to the fore the interplay between issues like influx of immigrants, gender stereotypes, mental health with bias based on race by jury and judges, concealment of evidence by prosecution, botched investigations, inadequacy of defence counsels, judicial over ride of jury decsion, political agenda of judges in promoting a certain view etc. The cases chosen for discussion by the author help in expanding the horizons of the reader.
The narrative is simple with an easy flow and thus, suitable for readers of any age or background who are looking to understand the flaws in the justice system of USA a little better. However, readers looking for academic benefit would find it lacks citations and thus, does not enable one to go back and examine the court judgements for a detailed reading. Touching upon various important aspects related to justice system in general and death penalty in particular, this book has provided food for thought for me and acts as a good starting point to read and undertsand these issues.
Would definitely recommend it!
The narrative is simple with an easy flow and thus, suitable for readers of any age or background who are looking to understand the flaws in the justice system of USA a little better. However, readers looking for academic benefit would find it lacks citations and thus, does not enable one to go back and examine the court judgements for a detailed reading. Touching upon various important aspects related to justice system in general and death penalty in particular, this book has provided food for thought for me and acts as a good starting point to read and undertsand these issues.
Would definitely recommend it!
August 4, 2024
An absolutely essential read for everyone. Couldn’t recommend enough.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews