Reaction
First Reads…
OLSON
“A fascinating treatment of some of the Supreme Court’s seminal criminal-law cases, complete with the invariably intriguing facts, characters, and circumstances that made each case so unique and compelling.  A great read for lawyers, students, and the general public alike. [This has] the makings of a great true-life television series.”
TED OLSON, former U.S. Solicitor General
MOYERS
“This book is a lightning strike. It quickens the mind, illuminates the landscape, and guarantees you will see things differently—in this case, how the jagged edges of justice come to bear on decisions of life and death. Clancy and O’Brien are journalists at the top of their class, where facts matter and reporting can read like a novel.”
BILL MOYERS, journalist, author, and managing editor, Moyers & Company
TOOBIN
“A thoughtful and fascinating look behind the headlines of some of the most grisly—and important—murder cases at the Supreme Court.”
JEFFREY TOOBIN, writer for the New Yorker, legal analyst for CNN
HUGHES
“The most knowledgeable and informative book about crime and capital punishment available today.”
JOHNNY HUGHES, U.S. Marshal, District of Maryland
CAIN
WALTERS
“Takes the smoke screen out of the capital-punishment debate and dishes out the realities: the challenges to judges and lawmakers posed by awful crimes, competing pressures on the scale of justice, and the role of victims in determining punishment. A great read and more. . . . An important book.”
BARBARA WALTERS, ABC News
SUTER
“I read the book.  I like it.  I think it will be of value to students, professors and those interested in criminal law…a fine book that is balanced. Congratulations to Tim and Martin.”
WILLIAM SUTER, Clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court
LANE
“Murder at the Supreme Court takes you backstage as the Justices grappled with the biggest death-penalty cases of the last half-century.  The details are sometimes gory but always fascinating.”
CHARLES LANE, Washington Post columnist, author of Stay of Execution
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“A multifaceted look at murder cases at the highest levels of law.  Although the book is a serious study of evolving death-penalty jurisprudence, unsparing journalistic prose grounds accompanying events in the stark, gruesome facts underlying these precedent-setting cases.  The result is an odd but effective mix of stomach-turning true-life crime stories and sophisticated analyses of Supreme Court decisions.  A broad range of pivotal issues provide the meat for dissection and discussion, including the disparate impact of race in sentencing, the death penalty’s applicability to juveniles, the rights of the survivors of victims to be heard at sentencing, the constitutionality of methods of execution, and the question of when and for what reasons death penalty sentences can be appealed. “
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Dec. 3, 2012