TUROW AND THE DEATH PENALTY

"The death penalty is probably the one legal issue that everybody has an opinion about," Scott Turow said. The best-selling novelist is out on the lecture circuit promoting his latest book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, "Ultimate Punishment," which he describes as "a memoir by way of an essay." I caught his lecture the other night on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Although Turow, 53, still considers himself an "agnostic" when it comes to making moral judgments about the death penalty, his arguments against execution were wholly persuasive. I'll leave them for the book to elucidate. Equally fascinating to me was his point that over the years he's "taken all positions"; he went from a complete idealist who believed in the essential goodness of human nature when he was a student at Harvard Law to a total Hobbesian who believed the opposite when he became a federal prosecutor in his native Chicago. Since then, however, he has reversed his views again and now does pro bono work as a defense attorney in capital cases while continuing to write his books.

When I asked him what he made of the fact that many nations do not have the death penalty, he pointed out that the reasons had less to do with morality or even with the idea of deterrence, which he discounts in any case, than with their lower murder rates and, more interesting, their political legacies. The various European countries and most of those in South America that do not have the death penalty have had long histories of unstable, authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Execution by the state as a means of political control left those nations with a deep distrust of the death penalty, he said. The United States, by contrast, with its long history of stable, democratic government, has rarely resorted to such draconian rule. Thus the death penalty was not freighted with the kind of political baggage that discouraged it.

RANDOM NOTES

Best title for the governator: Der Gropenfuhrer ... Most overlooked TV commentary: chocolate 'Sex' ... Sounds good but: pure baloney ... Stan Herd: busy environmental earthworks artist ... Nothing brilliant but: still worth it ...  Last and least: why all that Seinfeld bother?

Postscript: When Britney Spear poses nearly nude, it confounds some writers. "To be clear," an MSNBC commentary notes, "there's nothing inherently amoral or scandalous about manifesting your sexuality for a mass audience." What the writer objects to is the pop star's poor command of English in an interview that accompanies her photos. Odd thought: Should a writer who manifests his commentary for a mass audience try for plain English himself? Or should he get an editor to manifest it for him?