"On a misty September morning in rural Georgia, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian found himself cast in a role that he had never imagined: an expert witness in the sentencing hearing of a convicted kidnapper, rapist and murderer.

He had no idea that his brief testimony that day would take him deeply into the criminal justice system, to many other courthouses where unequal struggles take place between those who would condemn prisoners to death and those fighting to overturn the Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye.

Before the end of William McFeely's journey out of history into the reality of the death penalty, he would encounter lawyers battling to end lives and to save them, jurors caught in between, and convicts on the verge of becoming dead men walking.".

"At the heart of this vivid account is a remarkable group of lawyers in Atlanta led by a charismatic Kentuckian named Stephen Bright. Dedication does not begin to describe the personal sacrifice demanded by their efforts to erect legal barriers between their clients and the state's instruments of death.".

"Before his journey ends, McFeely will have done more than witnessed trials and experienced the desolation of a high-security prison. He will have met Carzell Moore, Kenny Smith, William Brooks, Tony Amadeo - convicts who have lived on death row. Proximity to Death compels the reader to look at capital punishment in an uncompromisingly intimate way - through the actions and decisions of those with no time left for arid debate."--BOOK JACKET.