Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys

How do attorneys who represent clients facing the death penalty cope with the stress and trauma of their work? Through conversations with twenty of the most experienced and dedicated post-conviction capital defenders in the United States, Fighting for Their Lives explores this emotional territory for the first time. What it is like for these capital defenders in their last visits or phone calls with clients who are about to be taken to the execution chamber? Or the next mornings, in their lives with their families, in their dreams and flashbacks and moments alone in the car? What is it like to do this work year after year? (These attorneys had, on average, spent nineteen years doing capital defense.) 
 Through vivid interviews amplified by the author's responses and commentary, these attorneys reveal aspects of their internal experience that they have never talked about until now. How do capital defenders manage the weight of the responsibility they carry? To what extent do they experience symptoms of trauma in the aftermath of losing a client to execution or as a result of the cumulative effects of engaging in capital defense work? What motivates them, and what do they draw upon, in order to keep engaging in such emotionally demanding work? Have they considered practicing other types of law? What can we learn from capital defenders not only about the deep and long-term effects of the death penalty but also about broader human questions of hope, effectiveness, success, failure, strength, fragility, and perseverance?

Biographies & Memoirs

Sheffer, Susannah

Professionals & Academics

Vanderbilt University Press

Explores how children write when free to follow their own paths and what kinds of guidance they find helpful, and offers examples of work by young writers who have contacted the author in search of advice.

Writing Because We Love To

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Heinemann

Recent reports claim adolescent girls' self-esteem fades in their teenage years. But the statements above are those of adolescent girls - the difference is they are homeschooled girls, girls who learn at home and in the community rather than by going to school. Why are these girls able to hold on to the strengths they had as children? Why do they seem so skillful at handling disagreements? How are they able to resist challenges to their sense of self? In this book Susannah Sheffer analyzes the fifty-five in-depth interviews she conducted with homeschooled girls, doing so from a perspective not yet considered in the current debate. Rather than suggesting home-schooling as a universal solution, Sheffer provides the experiences and views of homeschoolers to illuminate those of girls in school.

A SENSE OF SELF: LISTENING TO HOMESCHOOLED ADOLESCENT GIRLS

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Recent research has shown that many adolescent girls come to distrust their own perceptions. This book shows that homeschooled adolescent girls have a much stronger sense of self.

A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

First-person memoir of a man who spent 17 years in Massachusetts prisons after being convicted of armed robbery and attempted murder. Close look at his efforts to understand his crime and create the conditions for his own rehabilitation. Discussion of criminal psychology, prison education. Mix of psychological study and literary memoir.

In A Dark Time: A Prisoner's Struggle For Healing And Change

Politics & Social Sciences

Harrison, Dwight

Social Sciences

Stone Lion Pr

This Kind of Knowing is built of driven lines where we explore mysterious tensions, "in the cage where the heart paces." From the very beginning, in "Caving," these poems are alive, "like something blooming,/ like something you never imagined/ but realized with surprise/ that you could, actually, love." Thumb through the back issues of Bear River Review. for some of the pieces from This Kind of Knowing.Susannah Sheffer is a staff writer at the national organization Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, and also works with teenagers, helping them to understand their lives through writing. In addition to This Kind of Knowing, check out her new nonfiction title,  Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys (Vanderbilt University Press, 2013).

This Kind of Knowing

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Cooper Dillon Books

Susannah Sheffer writes poems for the same reason people place pebbles on headstones - to mark both the loss and its marking, to acknowledge that grief has physical weight and to release a little bit of it, to "leave evidence" and "show what we mean." And her poems are like those stones: small, solid, timeless, wholly themselves and whole unto themselves. If life is going to break us, Sheffer is going to spend hers producing durable things. - Eric McHenry, author of Odd Evening "We all know how complicated/the heart is, how it.../expects to be swindled" - yet, Susannah Sheffer reminds us, we "cannot say no to it." I'm in awe of the craft of these poems, how throughout this work, dualities are not only masterfully revealed but also honored. The speaker in the poems acknowledges the duality of everything and does so with the smooth ease of acceptance. Here, the broken glistens like pieces of glass held up to light. This book's seductive poems are the maps of feelings that give you "somewhere else to go." I will return to these poems again and again. - Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of Capture Theory

Break and Enter

Kelsay Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sheffer, Susannah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sheffer, Susannah