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Conviction: A Novel

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Overview

When the body of nine-year old Thuy Sen is found in the San Francisco Bay, the police quickly charge Rennell and Payton Price with her grisly murder. A twelve-person jury, abetted by an incompetent defense lawyer, is nearly as quick to find the brothers guilty, and to sentence them both to die for their crimes. Fifteen years later, overworked pro bono laywer Teresa Peralta Paget, her husband Chris, and stepson Carlo, a recent Harvard law graduate, become convinced not only that Rennell didn't receive a fair trial but that he may well be innocent. Racing against the clock and facing enormous legal obstacles, Teresa, Chris, and Carlo desperately try to stay Rennell's execution, taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court, and to an enormously moving and powerful conclusion. From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

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. (Feb. 1) Forecast: Patterson still carries enough reader clout to put this one on the bestseller lists, but he comes very close to presenting material too dense to hold the attention of a large popular audience. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Richard North Patterson

Richard North Patterson graduated in 1968 from Ohio Wesleyan University and has been awarded their Distinguished Achievement Citation. He is a 1971 graduate of the Case Western Reserve University's School of Law, and a recipient of their President's Award for Distinguished Alumni. He has served as an assistant attorney general for the state of Ohio; a trial attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco; and was the SEC's liaison to the Watergate special prosecutor. More recently, Patterson was a partner in the San Francisco office of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, now Bingham-McCutchen. In 1993, he retired from the practice of law to devote himself to writing. He has served on the boards of his undergraduate and law schools, the National Partnership for Women and Families, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, PEN Center West, and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and was chairman of Common Cause, the grassroots citizens' lobby founded by John Gardner. Patterson studied fiction writing with Jesse Hill Ford at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; his first short story was published in The Atlantic Monthly and his first novel, The Lasko Tangent, won an Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1979. Between 1981 and 1985, he published The Outside Man, Escape the Night, and Private Screening. His first novel in eight years, Degree of Guilt (1993), and his Eyes of a Child (1995) were combined into a miniseries by NBC TV. Both were international bestsellers, and Degree of Guilt was awarded the French Grand Prix de Litt�rature Polici�re in 1995. The Final Judgment (1995), Silent Witness (1997), No Safe Place (1998), and Dark Lady (1999) all became immediate international bestsellers. Protect and Defend (2000), about the controversial nomination of the first woman to be chief justice and her entanglement in an incendiary lawsuit regarding late-term abortion and parental consent, became Patterson's seventh consecutive international bestseller and received a Maggie Award from Planned Parenthood for its treatment of issues regarding reproductive rights. Balance of Power confronted one of America's most divisive political and social issues--gun violence--and was chosen by USA Today as its book-of-the-month selection for November 2003. Conviction (2005) focused on the law and politics of capital punishment. Exile (2007) dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was nominated for South Africa's leading literary award. The Race (2007) concerned a dramatic campaign for president and was Patterson's eleventh consecutive New York Times bestseller. His next novel, Eclipse, deals with human rights, Africa, and the geopolitics of oil, and will be published in January 2009. Patterson has appeared on such shows as Today, Good Morning America, The CBS Morning Show, Inside Politics, Washington Journal, Buchanan and Press, Greta Van Susteren, and Hardball. His articles on politics, literature, and law have been published in the London Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. A frequent speaker on political, legal, and social issues, in 2004 Patterson spoke at Washington, D.C., rallies in support of reproductive rights and against gun violence. His papers are collected by Boston University. Patterson lives in San Francisco and on Martha's Vineyard with his wife, Dr. Nancy Clair.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

1.12 MB

Number of Pages

528

eBook ISBN

9781588364432

Excerpt from: Conviction by Richard North Patterson

In fifty-nine days, if the State of California had its way, the man inside the Plexiglas booth would die by lethal injection.

Teresa Peralta Paget paused to study him, the guard quiet at her side. Her new client stood with his back to them. He was bulky, the blue prison shirt covering his broad back like an oversize bolt of cloth. A picture of enthrallment, he gazed through the high window of the exterior wall at the San Francisco Bay, its water glistening in the afternoon sun. She was reluctant to distract him; the man's sole glimpses of the world outside, Terri knew, occurred when his lawyers came to see him.

The others were out of it now; the last set of lawyers had withdrawn after their latest defeat. The final desperate efforts to keep Rennell Price alive what she thought of as the ritual death spasms ordained by the legal system had fallen to Teresa Paget. This was their first meeting: but for his solitude, she could not have picked her client out from the other men huddled with their lawyers in the two rows of Plexiglas cubicles. It resembled, Terri thought, an exhibit of the damned sooner or later, in months, or more likely years, the impersonal, inexorable grinding of the machinery of death would consume each one in turn.

But perhaps not, Terri promised herself, this one. At least not until she had burnt herself down to the nerve ends, sleep-deprived from the effort to save him.

To her new client, she supposed, Terri might appear a mere morsel for the machine, insufficient even to slow its gears. She was small barely five feet four and slight, with olive skin and a sculpted face, which her husband stubbornly insisted was beautiful: high cheekbones; a delicate chin; a ridged nose too pronounced for her liking; straight black hair, which, in Terri's mind, she shared with several million other Latinas far more striking than she. There was little about her to suggest the steeliness an inmate might hope for in his lawyer except, perhaps, the green-flecked brown eyes, which even when she smiled never quite lost their keenness, or their watchfulness.

This wariness was Terri's birthright, the reflex of a child schooled by the volatile chemistry which transformed her father's drinking to bru- tality, and reinforced by the miserable first marriage which Terri, who had no better model, had chosen as the solution to her pregnancy with Elena. Her personal life was different now. As if to compensate for this good fortune, she had turned her career down a path more arduous than most lawyers could endure: at thirty-nine, she had spent the last seven years representing death row inmates, a specialty which virtually guaranteed the opposition and, quite frequently, the outright hostility of judges, prosecutors, witnesses, cops, governors, most relatives of the victim, and by design, the legal system itself not to mention, often, her own clients. Now that stress and anxiety no longer waited for her at home, Terri sometimes thought, she had sought them out.

What would be most stressful about this client was not the crime of which he stood convicted, though it was far more odious than most especially, given certain facts, to Terri herself. Nor was it whatever version of humanity this man turned out to be: her death row clients had run the gamut from peaceable through schizophrenic to barking mad. But this client represented the rarest and most draining kind of all: for fifteen years, through a trial court conviction in 1987, then a chain of defeats in the California Supreme Court, the Federal District Court, the Federal Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court, Rennell Price had claimed his innocence of the crime for which the state meant to kill him.