People are offering competing visions of what happened in the past. And the justice system is willing to accept either of those competing visions and to impose consequences as a result. When you think of it that way, it's a little bit startling, because we want to believe that there is one truth and, therefore, one justice, whereas, if you have practiced law as long as I have, you realize that there is actually a range of acceptable outcomes.

People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller.

I am a law student in my first year at the law, and there are many moments when I am simply a mess.

Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it.

I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.

The issue is not whether there are horrible cases where the penalty seems "right". The real question is whether we will ever design a capital system that reaches only the "right" cases, without dragging in the wrong cases, cases of innocence or cases where death is not proportionate punishment. Slowly, even reluctantly, I have realized the answer to that question is no- we will never get it right.

Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on.