Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer Book

Two words come to mind with this book, ambition and justice.

I think we can all agree that ambition is a good thing, responsible for pushing the individual to achieve. Yet it can be good for oneself and bad for others. If I say I want to be the richest person in the world, without qualification, then the means I use to try to achieve my goal can destroy lives. For ambition to be ethical, it must take others into consideration.

The ideal individual ambition, for society, is one that depends upon providing a benefit to others. For example, Lincoln's ambition was to be respected by others. This ambition could not be achieved if he showed disregard or contempt; it demanded his attention to what others valued. We know him as a great man, but more important is his ambition was realized in his lifetime, and it kept him (and the country) going through dark times.

What of justice? We all feel a need to see justice done. This drives the plots of so many books, movies and plays. It feels good to see a wrong righted, in many cases a wrong driven by inconsiderate ambition. But what of institutionalized justice; the courts? There is a practical need for it to exist to handle the volume of wrongs that are done and the protection of the public by the imprisonment of those proven dangerous. How easy, though, to believe that a court of law is always a court of justice.

The professional life of Andrea Lyon brings together ambition and justice in a perfect match. Her burning desire to be an eminent practitioner of the law combines with a deep sense of the value of each human life to create an angel by comparison to the norm.

It can be difficult for people to deal with the next door neighbor, so it is to be expected that those mired in poverty, whose aspirations are crushed early in life, are easily placed within the arms of the "justice" system that puts them away to be forgotten, if not to be put to death. Recent years have seen one of the two major political parties warmly embrace "law and order" with harsh mandatory rules that eagerly take away the leeway given a judge in favor of strict, absolute sentencing that seeks to lock up and throw away the key. Anger has taken the place of justice and our prisons burst with inmates, many of whom do not belong there. This production line for incarceration is antithesis to the justice Lyon seeks.

Lyon takes us through her life by taking us through her days on the job. She goes to see a convict with the intention of finding out all that can be discovered about the circumstances of the crime, not being put off by the fact that a court has made a decision. Against the word hopeless she pits persistence and determination through investigation. Time and again her approach is vindicated in the salvation of the individual who is liberated, if not in body then in mind, by seeing real justice done.

This book is a perfect companion to Steve Bogira's Courtroom 302. That book documents the dis-functional operation of the same Cook County, Illinois court system where Lyon has done most of her work. Lyon is expert at painlessly slipping in the procedures and workings of the law and lawyers so we can understand why things have arrived at the state they are in.

Addressing the graduating class of Antioch College in 1859, Horace Mann famously said "be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity". Though Andrea Lyon was not there to hear those words, that spirit informs her ambition. Humanity has won a victory through her work.