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Conviction |  |
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Conviction | |
In Conviction, Patterson, a former trial lawyer, makes a case against the death penalty; more specifically, against the labyrinthine and counterintuitive laws governing it. The central thrust of Conviction -- that an innocent man can be put to death because today''s legal system provides no mechanism to spare him -- faces bipartisan political hostility. As governors campaigning for the presidency, neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush did anything to stop the executions of mentally retarded prisoners. In 1992, in an Arkansas prison, Ricky Ray Rector set aside a slice of pecan pie from his last meal, to eat after he returned from his lethal injection. In 2000, Oliver David Cruz died in the Texas death chamber even after lawyers cited his IQ of 63 and his three attempts at completing the seventh grade as evidence that he was useless in his own defense.
The cause celebre of Conviction is Rennell Price, a hulking, sad-eyed, slow-witted product of the San Francisco ghetto who, along with his Svengali brother, Payton, has been sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl. Swooping in 15 years after Rennell''s conviction is a Justice League familiar to Patterson''s readers: crusading attorney Teresa Peralta Paget, along with her law partner and husband, the famous Christopher Paget, and Chris''s son, Carlo, now a lawyer, too.
Terri and the gang have two months to derail what increasingly seems like the inevitable execution of Rennell, who they claim is retarded. Rennell''s account of the crime is limited to the crude refrain "I didn''t do that little girl!" A key witness has died, and the physical evidence is too degraded to test for DNA, but Terri has determined that Rennell''s lawyer at the original trial was a lazy cocaine addict, and in an 11th-hour confession, Payton proclaims Rennell''s innocence and fingers another suspect in his place. Terri argues that that''s enough for the courts to re-examine the conviction, but the game is stacked. Terri''s appeals climb the judicial ladder, eventually involving another of Patterson''s recurring characters, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Caroline Masters. Masters gets to duke it out with a not-so-veiled Antonin Scalia clone, a capital punishment zealot aptly named Justice Anthony Fini. Adding drama to the mix is Terri''s teenage daughter, Elena, whose abuse Patterson fans will remember from Eyes of a Child. She''s outraged that her mother would defend a convicted child molester.
It''s high stakes and low drama played out in a middlebrow arena -- blue-state values served up red-meat style, hold the purple prose. Deliciously, Patterson spends the first third of Conviction piling on proof that Rennell is a sick predator worthy of being put to death. A less confident plotmeister might shrink from the task Patterson then hands himself -- to rehabilitate Rennell in the story''s middle section, rendering him sympathetic enough to care about. The last third of Conviction offers a revelatory tour of the dark side of the American justice system.
But buzz-sawing through a thriller requires different reading muscles from parsing the limits of habeas corpus and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Acts. A reader''s eyes can be forgiven for skipping over a few didactic paragraphs before Patterson gets back to the action. His argument is clear. The law, he says, is bloodthirsty. The best chance to save the wrongly condemned rests with our governors, and you can see for yourself how often those guys stroll down Mercy Street. The defendant is an afterthought.
Patterson is a terrific novelist whose only bar to greatness is, as with many other popular authors, a slavish devotion to plot. His characters aren''t quite stereotypes, but they often seem to be conceived less as individuals than as narrative conveniences. Same with the dialogue. Regardless, Conviction, though not Patterson''s best, has its rewards. That it tilts more toward educating than entertaining can be blamed on his decision to push an agenda. But give him credit for backing an underdog. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but at this point in the evolution of our great republic, it isn''t mightier than 50cc of potassium chloride.
Reviewed by Bob Ivry
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From AudioFile
Payton and Rennell Price are sentenced to death for the brutal murder of 9-year-old Thuy Sen, who choked to death on semen. Now, 15 years later, pro bono lawyer Theresa Peralta Page has 59 days to find factual, legal, or moral error and determine if a reliable sentence was rendered, possibly saving her client from execution. Patricia Kalember narrates with such subtle nuance about the doubts that exist in the case that each time we hear Rennell Price say, "I didn''t do that little girl," it becomes eerily evident that being innocent may not be enough to save his life. Orwellian legal complexities of the death penalty, so brilliantly presented, serve to raise compelling and challenging questions. K.A.T. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
From Booklist
Former trial lawyer Patterson, who has tackled such weighty issues as abortion (Protect and Defend, 2000) and the Second Amendment (Balance of Power, 2003), now turns his keen eye to the issue of the death penalty. Terri Peralta Paget has just taken the case of Rennell Price, who is on death row for the murder of a nine-year-old girl. Rennell and his older brother, Payton, were convicted 15 years ago of sexually abusing the girl and killing her in the process. But as Terri goes over the case and talks to the detective in charge of the initial investigation and the lawyer who handled Rennell''s subsequent appeals, she starts to have doubts about Rennell''s mental capacity and his guilt. Physical evidence placed the victim at the scene, and the prosecution''s star witness, Eddie Fleet, named the brothers as her killer, but the same lawyer, an incompetent cokehead who mishandled their defense, represented both Rennell and Payton. As with his previous novels, Patterson examines a complex issue through the lens of a compelling, gripping story. Readers familiar with his characters (many of whom have appeared in his previous novels) and those looking for a powerful courtroom drama will not be disappointed. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Download Description
<P>In his acclaimed career as a perennial bestselling author, Richard North Patterson has established himself as one of our most important voices in fiction and a keeper of the American conscience. He consistently writes novels that are intensely dramatic and deeply thought provoking. Now, in <i>Conviction</i>, Patterson tackles one of the most emotional and complex of all legal debates: When, if ever, does the state have the right to exact the ultimate punishment–and is the death penalty a crime unto itself?</P><P>Fifty-nine days. That’s how long Rennell Price has to live–after spending fifteen years on death row for the horrifying sexual assault and murder of a girl whose body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. But attorney Terri Paget, who has fought her own way out of hopelessness and abuse, has dedicated her life to fighting for people like Rennell Price. This time, Terri has a client she believes may actually be innocent, which means that an unpunished killer may still be free.</P><P>“I didn’t do that little girl” is all Rennell Price has ever said in his own defense. In a trial, Rennell, along with his older brother, Payton, was found guilty of the heinous crime, and the conviction has been upheld through one appeal after another. But as Terri spends time with Rennell and re-creates the events that put him on death row–beginning with the first minutes of the police investigation–she starts to understand the forces that shaped Rennell and the reason he has never been able to defend himself adequately.</P><P>As Terri prepares for a last appeal, she gets a new weapon for her battle–fresh evidence suggesting that another man, not Rennell, helped Payton commit the atrocity. But the grim machinery of capital punishment is already in motion, involving precedent and politics reaching from California to the highest court in the nation. As more people are drawn into Terri’s last-ditch battle, and as agendas and personalities clash while time is running out for Rennell Price, this much is clear: The serious doubts about Rennell’s guilt may not be enough to save him.</P><P><i>Conviction</i> raises issues of ethics, political expediency, and personal trauma that will shake readers to their core. For here, in a novel of vivid characters on both sides of the law and profound tension on every page, Patterson illuminates the mysterious precincts between justice and truth–where the fate of one man involves not only his own life and the lives he has affected but the moral life of a nation.</P>
编辑推荐 From Publishers Weekly
After focusing on gun control and tort reform (in Balance of Power) and late-term abortion and Supreme Court nomination (in Protect and Defend), Patterson takes on the death penalty, exploring its uncertainties and injustices from the perspective of San Francisco lawyer Christopher Paget—hero of the author's first book, The Lasko Tangent—and Paget's lawyer wife, Terri. The horrific crime on which the novel hinges is the killing of nine-year-old Thuy Sen, whose body is found in San Francisco Bay. The medical examiner quickly ascertains that the little girl did not drown but choked to death on semen. After Thuy Sen's picture is broadcast on television, an elderly eyewitness identifies her dope-dealer neighbors Payton and Rennell Price as the killers. This story is told in flashback after Terri Paget, who specializes in representing death row inmates, takes on the 15-year-old case, representing Rennell, who has 59 days before he is to die by lethal injection. Rennell is a hulking retarded black man whose sullen passivity inspires little sympathy in anyone. Over the next several months, Teresa comes to believe in Rennell as she fights not only to stop his execution but to prove him innocent. It's a compelling story, but Patterson's true interest is in the legal details. He mostly succeeds at explaining the often Orwellian legal complexities of the death penalty, but the price he pays as a novelist is high. Many readers will skip over vast sections of the book, but those who stick with it will find the ending moving and come away with a greater understanding of a controversial issue.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From AudioFile
Payton and Rennell Price are sentenced to death for the brutal murder of 9-year-old Thuy Sen, who choked to death on semen. Now, 15 years later, pro bono lawyer Theresa Peralta Page has 59 days to find factual, legal, or moral error and determine if a reliable sentence was rendered, possibly saving her client from execution. Patricia Kalember narrates with such subtle nuance about the doubts that exist in the case that each time we hear Rennell Price say, "I didn't do that little girl," it becomes eerily evident that being innocent may not be enough to save his life. Orwellian legal complexities of the death penalty, so brilliantly presented, serve to raise compelling and challenging questions. K.A.T. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Former trial lawyer Patterson, who has tackled such weighty issues as abortion (Protect and Defend, 2000) and the Second Amendment (Balance of Power, 2003), now turns his keen eye to the issue of the death penalty. Terri Peralta Paget has just taken the case of Rennell Price, who is on death row for the murder of a nine-year-old girl. Rennell and his older brother, Payton, were convicted 15 years ago of sexually abusing the girl and killing her in the process. But as Terri goes over the case and talks to the detective in charge of the initial investigation and the lawyer who handled Rennell's subsequent appeals, she starts to have doubts about Rennell's mental capacity and his guilt. Physical evidence placed the victim at the scene, and the prosecution's star witness, Eddie Fleet, named the brothers as her killer, but the same lawyer, an incompetent cokehead who mishandled their defense, represented both Rennell and Payton. As with his previous novels, Patterson examines a complex issue through the lens of a compelling, gripping story. Readers familiar with his characters (many of whom have appeared in his previous novels) and those looking for a powerful courtroom drama will not be disappointed. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
专业书评
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Richard North Patterson is a pop novelist who wants to change the world. In 12 previous novels, Patterson has taken on date rape (he's opposed), Watergate-style corruption (also opposed), child abuse (ditto), gun control (he's in favor), late-term abortion (see Protect and Defend for his stance on that) and an evil that Washington knows intimately -- the publicly financed sports stadium. One can hardly blame him for trying to slay society's dragons. One can, however, fault him for trying too hard.
In Conviction, Patterson, a former trial lawyer, makes a case against the death penalty; more specifically, against the labyrinthine and counterintuitive laws governing it. The central thrust of Conviction -- that an innocent man can be put to death because today's legal system provides no mechanism to spare him -- faces bipartisan political hostility. As governors campaigning for the presidency, neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush did anything to stop the executions of mentally retarded prisoners. In 1992, in an Arkansas prison, Ricky Ray Rector set aside a slice of pecan pie from his last meal, to eat after he returned from his lethal injection. In 2000, Oliver David Cruz died in the Texas death chamber even after lawyers cited his IQ of 63 and his three attempts at completing the seventh grade as evidence that he was useless in his own defense.
The cause celebre of Conviction is Rennell Price, a hulking, sad-eyed, slow-witted product of the San Francisco ghetto who, along with his Svengali brother, Payton, has been sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl. Swooping in 15 years after Rennell's conviction is a Justice League familiar to Patterson's readers: crusading attorney Teresa Peralta Paget, along with her law partner and husband, the famous Christopher Paget, and Chris's son, Carlo, now a lawyer, too.
Terri and the gang have two months to derail what increasingly seems like the inevitable execution of Rennell, who they claim is retarded. Rennell's account of the crime is limited to the crude refrain "I didn't do that little girl!" A key witness has died, and the physical evidence is too degraded to test for DNA, but Terri has determined that Rennell's lawyer at the original trial was a lazy cocaine addict, and in an 11th-hour confession, Payton proclaims Rennell's innocence and fingers another suspect in his place. Terri argues that that's enough for the courts to re-examine the conviction, but the game is stacked. Terri's appeals climb the judicial ladder, eventually involving another of Patterson's recurring characters, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Caroline Masters. Masters gets to duke it out with a not-so-veiled Antonin Scalia clone, a capital punishment zealot aptly named Justice Anthony Fini. Adding drama to the mix is Terri's teenage daughter, Elena, whose abuse Patterson fans will remember from Eyes of a Child. She's outraged that her mother would defend a convicted child molester.
It's high stakes and low drama played out in a middlebrow arena -- blue-state values served up red-meat style, hold the purple prose. Deliciously, Patterson spends the first third of Conviction piling on proof that Rennell is a sick predator worthy of being put to death. A less confident plotmeister might shrink from the task Patterson then hands himself -- to rehabilitate Rennell in the story's middle section, rendering him sympathetic enough to care about. The last third of Conviction offers a revelatory tour of the dark side of the American justice system.
But buzz-sawing through a thriller requires different reading muscles from parsing the limits of habeas corpus and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Acts. A reader's eyes can be forgiven for skipping over a few didactic paragraphs before Patterson gets back to the action. His argument is clear. The law, he says, is bloodthirsty. The best chance to save the wrongly condemned rests with our governors, and you can see for yourself how often those guys stroll down Mercy Street. The defendant is an afterthought.
Patterson is a terrific novelist whose only bar to greatness is, as with many other popular authors, a slavish devotion to plot. His characters aren't quite stereotypes, but they often seem to be conceived less as individuals than as narrative conveniences. Same with the dialogue. Regardless, Conviction, though not Patterson's best, has its rewards. That it tilts more toward educating than entertaining can be blamed on his decision to push an agenda. But give him credit for backing an underdog. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but at this point in the evolution of our great republic, it isn't mightier than 50cc of potassium chloride.
Reviewed by Bob Ivry
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
