The Hanging Judge (49 page)

BOOK: The Hanging Judge

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Central to my efforts was the late Yale Law School professor Charles L. Black Jr.’s book
Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake
(W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1974). This small volume still offers the most pointed analysis of capital punishment I know of. My novel may be viewed, in part, as an attempt at a fictional version of his excellent book.

Last and most important is my beloved wife, Nancy. We live together; mornings, we write together. Then, we have lunch together, and we talk about our writing together. Her eyes, her voice, and her smile are the most beautiful things I have ever known. Without her, there would, of course, be no book, but that would be small beans, since without her, there would be nothing at all. With her, there is everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
ichael Ponsor graduated from Harvard, received a Rhodes Scholarship, and studied for two years at Pembroke College, Oxford. After taking his law degree from Yale and clerking in federal court in Boston, he began his legal career, specializing in criminal defense. He moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1978, where he practiced as a trial attorney in his own firm until his appointment in 1984 as a US magistrate judge in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed him a life-tenured US district judge. From 2000 to 2001, he presided over a five-month death penalty trial, the first in Massachusetts in over fifty years. Judge Ponsor continues to serve as a senior US district judge in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Western Division, with responsibility for federal criminal and civil cases in the four counties of western Massachusetts.
The Hanging Judge
is his first novel.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Biel Parklee

ISBN 978-1-4804-4190-3

Published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com

Open Road Integrated Media
is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.