The Hanging Judge - Softcover

The Hanging Judge is the first fictional account of a death penalty trial seen from the perspective of the presiding judge and the cohort of insiders who animate the process. Set in western Massachusetts, the plot emerges through the eyes of the arresting police officer, the judges clerks and colleagues, the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the witnesses, the victims families, and the defendant himself. Most importantly, the book presents the viewpoint of the judge on the bench, caught up in the tragicomic cross currents of his personal life and facing the near impossible task of giving both the defense and the prosecution their "truly fair" trial. The contemporary plot unfolds in unsettling parallel with the real-life story of two luckless Irish immigrants, Dominic Daley and James Halligan, prosecuted in an atmosphere of violent anti-Catholic bigotry and hanged after a one-day trial in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1806. In the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder, the book is "a page-turning mystery full of romance and humor, which takes us inside the fraught and rather secretive world of a judges chambers" and carries with it "the heft of authenticity."