Scott Turow is best known for his novels, which infuse legal situations with heated emotions. He's rather like a less-overblown John Grisham. And, like Grisham, he has the legal chops to support his work. As someone who's worked as both a prosecutor and later an advocate for death-row inmates, Turow is perhaps uniquely qualified to write Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflection on Dealing with the Death Penalty. The book is an analysis of the death penalty's legitimacy and validity written by a man who once spent two years on Illinois's Commission on Capital Punishment.

Republican Gov. George Ryan formed the commission on which Turow served after declaring that the state's capital punishment system was fraught with errors. He then called moratorium on the death penalty - the first of its kind. Considering, then, Turow's professional experience as it applies to the dealth penalty, it's no big surprise that he decides he's against it. But instead of lecturing about the penalty's evils, he uses his attorney's skills in the most intriguing way possible: he builds his case against the penalty by stacking conflicting arguments against one another, keeping the most logical and relying on them for his conclusions. He refers to himself as a death-penalty "agnostic" and debates the reasons put forth that support and oppose capital punishment.

But his approach reads less like a legalese gimmick and more like a genuine quest for insight, and as a result, the book feels important. Turow becomes a smarter version of the average American, understanding of the gut-level desire for "justice," while conscious of the flawed court systems in states that sponsor capital punishment, where the least lucky and poorest convicts often line death rows that should be filled with the guiltiest. By the middle of the book, it's genuinely difficult to tell which way he's leaning, which is refreshing, considering that most books dealing with this topic have a clear opinion from the start.

Turow balances the more emotional arguments for and against the death penalty with more pragmatic concerns, such as dangers of accidentally executing the innocent and whether or not the penalty deters criminal activity. On these fronts, he lets numbers and real-world data shape his logic, showing how capital punishment doesn't affect crime statistics and how guiltless people can get railroaded by the system. Along the way, he includes stories from his time on the Illinois commission, and a visit to a super-max prison to meet the most hardened murderers.

Turow's book carries the air of a man seeking an answer to a difficult question, and to his credit, he seems to include all factors in his conclusion. His final revelations are all the more convincing because he allows the reader into his thought process. In the end, he presents the death penalty as invalid because of the imperfect system that administrates it, which has a rate of error so high that no society with a conscience could allow it to decide whether convicts live or die.