PROXIMITY TO DEATH - Softcover

On a misty September morning in rural Georgia, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian found himself cast in a role that he had never imagined for himself: an expert witness in the sentencing trial of a convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. His brief testimony that day would ultimately lead him on a personal journey into the criminal justice system, to confront the actions and decisions of lawyers battling for and against the death penalty, convicts whose lives are at stake, and jurors forced to decide who shall live and who shall die.

William S. McFeely is Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen; Grant: A Biography, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Parkman Prize; Frederick Douglass, which received the Lincoln Prize; Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom; and Proximity to Death.