MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: This is KPBS Midday Edition, I am Maureen Cavanaugh. Readers and filmgoers first got to know Scott Turow from his best-selling novel of lust, murder, and legal corruption called Presumed Innocent. Since that time, Turow has written a series of legal thrillers, as well as nonfiction books, all while continuing to work as an attorney. His latest novel, identical, and is a hot topic in the world of law and justice. It takes a second look at an old murder case, and the man convicted, to settle lingering doubts about who was really guilty. I spoke with Scott Turow this morning, here's that interview: [AUDIO FILE PLAYING] MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Scott Turow, welcome. SCOTT TUROW: Thank you Maureen, I am glad to be with you. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: The question of who is really guilty, whether the right people have been convicted, has become a major issue in the legal system in recent years. Do you see that concern changing our legal system in any way? SCOTT TUROW: I think, candidly, it has had a tremendous impact on the public perception of the death penalty. A huge number of exonerations around the country are based for the most part on DNA evidence, certainly not exclusively. It has given a lot of people pause in thinking about the death penalty. It works both ways. There was an article in the New York Times this weekend about how rape victims have gone untested, and with the result that serial rapists have been walking around. Definitely, it has had an impact on our criminal justice system. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I want to talk to you more about the death penalty in a moment or two, but I'm wondering, do you think these re-evaluations, whether it is a death penalty case or someone who is wrongfully convicted of any crime, are they creating less trust in the legal system, or the fact that these cases are ultimately resolved and corrected, does that create more trust in the legal system? SCOTT TUROW: I don't think Americans need an excuse to distrust the legal system. They are very skeptical about lawyers. There certainly, generally speaking, very trusting and grateful to law enforcement. But it has produced an atmosphere where jurors in particular want scientific evidence before they want to convict somebody. To me, that tends to suggest that there is less faith in the bear accusation, and that is good. That is the way the system is supposed to work. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Besides taking on current legal issues, your latest novel Identical also has themes from ancient mythology. Tell us about that. SCOTT TUROW: Well, like most novels, Identical is a stew of various things I had on my mind ranging from perception to politics, to archaic stuff from my own family life. That in particular, the death of a twin brother in childbirth, that has always preoccupied me. I think it had mythological size in my own life, so naturally I would gravitate towards to the Greek myths, in particular Castor and Pollux, where most of us know better by the name of the Gemini. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: So indeed the novel is about identical twins, tell us more about it. SCOTT TUROW: Identical follows the case of Castrianos, who is being released from prison at the start of the present-day storyline after serving twenty-five years for murdering his girlfriend, daughter of a wealthy guy in politics. As he is released, the murder victim inherited his father's money, and starts making public statements saying that he was not the only person responsible for the murder, but also his brother Paul, who happens to be running for mayor at the time. So the accusation and to being a pivotal feature of the election campaign. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Your writing deals a lot with the question of justice, and how our legal system tries but often fails at arriving at it. Many people who look at this outside of the legal system often point to legal technicalities getting in the way of the pursuit of truth and justice. Is that the problem? SCOTT TUROW: They're all kinds of problems with our legal system, including the expectations. I have been working on a little piece about divorce court, people in divorce court expect justice. But you'll never get it, because you have got two people who feel deeply wronged. You'll never deal out a justice that is satisfactory to both sides. There are all kinds of reasons that the justice system is perceived as billing. One of the things that you learn practicing law as long as I have, is the fact of the matter is that what is just is a range of possible outcomes. In a criminal case, a just outcome is very often that the defendant is acquitted or convicted. Both are possible and just. A lot of people have a hard time accepting the moral imprecision of the law. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: In Presumed Innocent, your first novel which was a huge success and went on to be a movie with Harrison Ford, did you, at that point or after, consider giving up practicing law? You were a celebrated author at that point. SCOTT TUROW: I had gone to law school after being a writer. I was a writing fellow at Stanford. One of the things that drove me there was my dissatisfaction with the writing life, the isolation of it. I was in some ways almost superstitious about going back to the lonely life of the rider, where your confronting the blank page. The other thing that had taken me to law school was a passion for the questions that the law asks. That survives to the present day. My wonderful publisher Roger stress got on an airplane to meet me. As we were driving back to the Sears Tower, where my law office was, Roger said to me, promise me one thing. That you won't quit your job as a lawyer. Don't do anything precipitous. I thought it was great advice. Eventually I figured out how to accommodate practice in writing. The balance has shifted deeply towards writing, but I still enjoy both pursuits. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: What are some of the questions that the law asks that still intrigue you today? SCOTT TUROW: Well, some of them are how to make rules that are supple enough to accommodate the full range of human situations, including situations that you never could imagine, but that are still there. How do you engage in a truth finding process, where at least in the criminal system and most of the justice system, you're trying to have the truth discovered by a group of lay people who are not experts by definition in the field. The theatrics, advocacy, ethical limits of what is fair and unfair for lawyers to do. I think all of these things all invite other questions, and they never really stop preoccupying me. How do you know when a client who walks into your office is telling the truth, or the truth is the client sees it, do they really know better, and even if what they are telling you is what they believe to be true, would anybody else agree with that? These are just things that go on internally in a lawyer's life, that are always wonderful to contemplate. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: One of the biggest questions that the legal system is facing is one that you touched upon earlier, the death penalty. You're on the Illinois commission on death penalty reform. You wrote a nonfiction book about the death penalty called Ultimate Punishment. We have recently heard about executions that have gone horribly wrong in Oklahoma and Arizona. Is the death penalty a workable form of punishment in the US anymore? SCOTT TUROW: I don't believe so. I came onto the commission pretty firmly uncommitted about the death penalty. After studying at pretty much nonstop for two years, I realized it is a system that is never going to work. It won't work because Americans want from the death penalty, they want a statement. They want a statement that for the ultimate evil, there can be ultimate punishment. There are just too many obstacles in the way that the system operates for us to get unequivocal moral statement out of the machinery of death. Americans will never get what they want, they don't want to convict innocent people. They don't want to accept the risk which is always inherent in the death penalty system. They don't want the penalty to be applied arbitrarily, but the saying that there is no rich man on death row remains true. Geography, gender, race of the victim, there are all kinds of factors that will always influence the application of the death penalty so that it does not make an unequivocal moral statement. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Here in California, a federal appeals court, at least one judge has said that the state penalty is unconstitutional, I merely because executions almost never happen. Now there's a push to streamline death penalty appeals process here in California. Do you think that can happen? SCOTT TUROW: All of this is like Yogi bear saying hey boo-boo all over again. We go through this attempt to streamline the death penalty. Nobody can bear to do that, because you want to be absolutely certain before you put someone to death that they have been afforded all legal rights and that the system has come up with an infallible answer in this case. Streamlining only means cutting down on the rights of defendants and increasing mistakes. As I said, that sounds good, and I understand the point that even people on death row for eleven years is probably cruel and unusual in itself, but when you streamline and find out that you just executed an innocent man, nobody will think that streamlining was a good idea. The system is full of all of these kinds of push and pulls. They can never be reconciled. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: You have been head of the Author's Guild, and as such, you have been criticized as not supporting the emergence of e-books. What is your stance on that? SCOTT TUROW: Well, that is not true. The truth of the matter is, most of my reading is e-books. I have been concerned about the rise of Amazon, and the impact that Amazon and its pricing policies in particular are having on bookstores and the publication of physical books. I am also concerned about what happens when Amazon ends up being the dominant vehicle for most Americans to get literature. The science right now in this dispute that Amazon is engaged in are not good. I have heard a lot of great things about Amazon, they are wonderful company, but they are not really interested in, like any other business, they are not interested in anything besides what is good for Amazon. Trying to get people to understand that some of their policies are difficult for having a diverse literary culture in this country has been difficult. They really have the medical phone, because they are so rich and powerful, but it is not e-books. I like e-books, it is the distribution system that devalues physical books and put bookstores out of business that concerns me. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: You said you want to make sure that writing is still a profession that people can pursue and actually be paid for. SCOTT TUROW: My goal as president of the Authors Guild is to protect writing as a livelihood. I welcome the rise of independent authors and self published authors. I agree that Amazon's platform has made that easier. I give them credit for a lot of things, and I am glad that there are independent co-authors making it outside of the barricades of traditional publishing. That is a good thing. But, I also know that is one in 100 of the people who self publish. Most people end up without any kind of significant remuneration through years of effort. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I want our listeners know that you will be here in San Diego discussing and signing copies of your latest novel, Identical at a special ticketed event at QUALCOMM headquarters tomorrow night at 6:30 PM. You can contact Warwick's Books for more information. It has been a pleasure to speak with you, thank you so much. SCOTT TUROW: Thank you so much for the time, I really enjoyed it.
Readers and film-goers first got to know writer Scott Turow from his best-selling novel of lust, murder and legal politics called "Presumed Innocent." Since that time, Turow has written a series of legal thrillers as well as non-fiction books, all while continuing to work as an attorney.
His latest novel, "Identical," handles a hot topic in the world of law and justice. It takes a second look at an old murder case and the man convicted to settle lingering doubts about who was really guilty.
Scott Turow Book Signing
Tuesday, August 5 at 6:30 p.m.
Qualcomm
5775 Morehouse Drive
San Diego, CA 92121
This is a ticketed event
Excerpt from "Identical":
Paul — September 5, 1982
Many years from now, whenever he thinks back to Dita Kronon's murder, Paul Gianis's memories will always return to the start of the day. It is September 5, 1982, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, a lush afternoon with high clouds lustrous as pearls. Zeus Kronon, Dita's father, has opened the sloping grounds of his suburban mansion to hundreds of his fellow parishioners from St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in the city for their annual celebration of the ecclesiastical New Year. Down the hill, in the grassy riverside meadow that serves as a parking lot, Paul arrives with his mother and his identical twin brother, Cass. The next few hours with both of them, Paul knows, will be an ordeal.
On the driver's side, Cass is out of the old Datsun coupe instantly. "I need to find Dita," he says, referring to his girlfriend, Zeus's daughter.
Their mother climbs from the passenger seat with Paul's assistance, watching her other son sling his suit coat over his shoulder and bound up the hill.
"Theae mou," she mutters in Greek and quickly makes the sign of the cross after invoking God in dismay.
"Mom," Paul says, now that his brother is gone, "what are we doing here really?"
Lidia, their mother, condenses her thick eyebrows, as if she doesn't understand.
"You refuse to come to this picnic every year," he says, "because of how much Dad hates Zeus."
"No more than I," quietly answers Lidia, who rarely concedes priority in anything. Together, with Lidia hanging on to her son's arm for support, Paul and she start up the gravel path toward Zeus's vast white house with its low-pitched gables and Corinthian columns. "This picnic is for the church, not Zeus. I've missed many of our former neighbors, and I have not been face-to-face with Nouna Teri in months."
"You talk to Teri every day."
"Paulie mou ," — literally 'My Paul,' — "I didn't make you come here."
"I had to, Mom. You're up to something. Cass and I both know it." "Am I?" asks Lidia. "I didn't realize that when you received your law degree, you also became a mind reader."
"You're going to make some kind of trouble about Dita." "Trouble?" Lidia snorts. At 63, their mother has grown somewhat stout, but she retains a regal manner, a tall woman with fierce dark eyes and a wide spray of graying hair pushed back from her brow. "Dita makes enough trouble by herself. Even Teri admits that, and the girl is her niece. If Cass marries Dita, your father will never speak to him again."
"Mom, that's just old-country nonsense like believing in the evil eye. Cass and I aren't going to carry on your crazy feud with Zeus. And we're twenty-five years old. You have to let Cass make his own decisions."
"Who says?" answers Lidia, adding a sudden chuckle and a squeeze of Paul's bicep to lighten the mood. That is their mother's idea of wit, laughing when she says something she means.
At the top of the hill, the picnic is a sensory barrage. The gums and spices, still smoking in the censers after a brief religious service, mingle with the aromas of four whole lambs roasting over oak, while the frenetic, high-pitched music of a bouzouki band lances the air to welcome the hundreds of guests crowding onto the lawn.
Teri, Zeus's sister, their mother's best friend since Lidia and Teri were both seven years old, awaits them with her scarecrow mop of dyed yellow hair. She embraces Paul and his mother. Zeus's son, Hal, is beside Teri, greeting the guests. At forty, Hal is fat and awkward and overeager, the kind of person who always approaches you in the pathetic hapless manner of a slobbering dog. Even so, Paul re- tains a soft spot for Hal, whom Cass and he used to follow around like puppies twenty years ago, in the days before a quarrel about the lease on Paul's father's grocery divided their families. Like Paul, Hal seems willing to ignore all that. He hugs Paul's mother, whom he still calls "Auntie Lidia," and chats idly with Paul before Teri leads Lidia away. A covey of their friends awaits them in the deep shade of one of the many blue-and-white-striped tents pitched across the lawn. Reluctantly, Paul heads into this jumble of people from his childhood whose old-world ways and ponderous expectations he's always longed to escape.
