Indie authors are often accused of handing out 5-star reviews to one another. And that is sometimes true. ‘Review exchange’ groups for indie authors can easily be found. In reality, this typically means exchanging 5-star reviews, whether or not you read each other’s – or like each other’s – books. I don’t agree with this practice and can understand why it causes some readers to distrust our reviews.

But…

Then I started thinking about the mainstream world of fiction and its PR. You know those endorsements that can be found on almost all mainstream fiction books these days? For example:

Most often, the authors doing the endorsing have not read the book in question. This is all PR, done through their publicists and publishers. The goal is to get readers – us – to think these bestselling authors loved the book we’re looking at. The industry assumes that, if you love the endorsing author, you’ll be more likely to purchase the books he/she endorses. And they’re right.

But…

How is that different from handing out 5-star reviews to fellow writers?

In my opinion, it’s not different at all. In fact, celebrity endorsements carry more weight than unknown reviews, yet no one is accusing mainstream authors of deceit.

I truly love the indie community. Sure, a few are not particularly good at their craft and some resort to questionable behaviors. But that’s true of any community, any profession. For the most part, the authors I interact with are talented, incredibly supportive, and honest. All they want is to be noticed, for their words to be read.

We are all responsible for our own choices. Reviews are a convenient measure of a book’s popularity. Endorsements are an interesting, but ultimately useless, look at the circle a particular author travels within. Read them, if you like. Just remember, a book with 100 5-star reviews and a dozen celebrity endorsements is not necessarily better suited to you than a book with one 5-star review, a dozen 4-star reviews, and a few 3-star reviews. Or no reviews at all.

Thanks for reading.

The best fiction allows me to lose the line between the author and the story. They’re tangled together, inseparable. Does the author love cheese fondue or is it just the character? Has the author been skydiving and felt that rush of adrenaline, ran a marathon, rescued feral cats? Does the author hate oatmeal, love cherry pie?

A well-written book will often make the author and the narrator feel like one and the same. Authors need to be aware of this, because it can sometimes backfire.

I recently read a book I won’t name because I hated everything about it. This book was filled with the most unlikeable characters I’ve ever come across. The pages overflowed with vitriol. The characters spewed bigoted statements at every turn, as if their insight into their city and its people was fact rather than opinion. All the characters shared these intolerant, prejudice views. Because of this, the characters and the author easily became tangled in my mind. I not only disliked the book, I disliked the author.

I don’t know whether the author shared his characters’ opinions, though I find it unlikely that he’d be able to – or want to – give every character this same mindset if he did not agree. Had the author given only one character this trait, preferably not the narrator, he and his characters would not have fused together as they did.

Books like this make me wonder how much of myself I spill onto my own pages. Hopefully, I don’t leave readers spitting nails, as I was while reading the unnamed book. For those who have read my books and wondered if it’s me or the character, I thought I’d share a couple secrets today.

Some of my readers know I have late-stage Lyme disease, with neurological complications. A few of the symptoms I contend with show up in two of my characters.

Corinne, from Hit List, suddenly lost her mind. She can’t hold onto a thought, is easily distracted, and has forgotten much of her past.

Corinne sucked in her bottom lip. The wallpaper behind Dr. Endicott’s head had little pastel flowers scattered about. She’d had flowers in her garden once. Now just weeds grew there. She’d been telling Ian that they needed to pull out those weeds and buy new plants. Hadn’t she told him that?

My symptoms are nowhere near as extensive as Corinne’s. I’m not quite that crazy – yet.

Corinne shuddered. An image flickered like a dying light bulb in the recess of her mind. Too elusive to grasp. Too intrusive to ignore. Words attached to strange voices skittered just out of reach.

Corinne’s character came to me easily. My own frustration with my brain’s malfunctions showed up in her character. This caught me by surprise and was completely unintentional. Corinne popped into my head one day with a story and, somewhere along the way, the two of us intertwined. This is not to say that she and I are the same. Her life and personality is absolutely not autobiographical in any way. But bits of me are sprinkled in there.

The other character with flashes of my Lyme symptoms is Nicki from No Justice: A Michael Sykora Novel and Beyond Salvation: A Michael Sykora Novel. When Nicki talks to Michael, she often jumps from one topic to another so fast that Michael has a hard time keeping up.

Michael had gone to Sal’s and rented a Toyota Camry for the night. He didn’t plan on doing anything illegal but he also figured that it wasn’t wise to be driving around Dover Street in a flashy Porsche.

“Pick a topic and stick to it for five minutes. You’re making me dizzy.”

This, I will confess, is a trait I intentionally gave Nicki. I do this exact thing to my husband all the time. I can be midsentence and suddenly shift to something else. Sometimes I do it because my brain loses the original thought. Other times I’m not even aware I’ve done it. Nicki, of course, isn’t dealing with Lyme brain. But she is a high energy character, whose mind works quickly. A more coherent version of my flightiness became a good fit for her character.

And now you know. Bit and pieces of me are scattered throughout my books. Pick them all out, fit them together, and I’ll be fully exposed.

No doubt, if I asked ten people this question, I’d get at least five different answers. Each of us has our own limit, and tolerance varies widely. Maybe a better question would be, how much is enough?

For me, as a reader, the answer is I need enough detail to make me feel the emotion but not so much that I’m overwhelmed by it. On the surface, I know that’s kind of vague. I need to dissect it into pieces to give a clearer answer.

If I’m reading a thriller about a killer who cuts his victims into pieces, I do not need five pages of detail on how he does it. (And I’ve read books that offer excruciating, endless pages of graphic detail.) For me, the experience becomes like those slice-and-dice movies – nothing left to the imagination. I want enough detail about the killer and his behavior so that I can understand both his motivation and the victim’s fear. I do not need so much detail that the entire book becomes page after page of bloody madness. At that point, I’ve lost the story. The victims become nothing more than a prop to support the violence.

On the opposite spectrum, if I’m reading a book about a man suffering post traumatic stress after being attacked by a gang, I don’t want to simply be told in a sentence or two that five gang members jumped the man and beat him up. In order to understand the PTSD, I need to feel some of that same terror felt by the man in the story. And that requires details.

When I write, I try hard to provide enough detail for readers to understand the emotions, without being unnecessarily graphic. I know that I overstep the boundaries for some readers, while not going far enough for others. In fact, I’ve received emails and reviews to verify this.

My novel Enemies and Playmates is about domestic abuse and a young woman’s struggle to escape. This is a difficult topic to write and read about. The realism needs to be there and I had an inside view to offer. My first draft was, admittedly, way over the line. Too much detail made it a painful read. Yes, readers needed to understand the abuse, see it, feel it. I wanted readers to be horrified, to empathize, to understand how a woman, a family, can become victims. The characters demanded that realism. I also wanted the story to show hope, resilience, love. I didn’t want the details in the abuse scenes to overpower the story. Several revisions later, I had scaled it down to what is now the finished product.

Not long ago, a reader argued that the abuse scenes were completely unnecessary. His opinion was that I could have stated the husband abused his wife and children and left it at that. No details whatsoever. In essence, he thought I should write about abuse without writing the abuse. I couldn’t disagree more. Reading is about stepping into another world, another person’s life. Without the details, most people are not able to take that leap. If I tell you that Alex is a bad man and beats his wife, you’ll know that on an intellectual level but you won’t feel it. If I show you Alex slamming his wife’s head into a wall, you will feel it. And you won’t forget.

So, yes, I show detail. I let my characters lead the way. I want you to know them. My hope is that I hold enough middle ground to please most readers.

We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict. ~ Jim Morrison

Most people are aware of cult activity, getting their information from the headlines and news reports. We’ve heard the stories of Jonestown and seen the vivid images of all those bodies; Charles Manson and the young women who happily and gruesomely murdered for him; the Heaven’s Gate cult led by Marshall Applewhite, whose followers committed mass suicide in order to reach an alien spacecraft. We sit back and wonder what kind of person would blindly follow another to his/her death. The news rarely tells us this. Most news, print and TV, is guilty of sensationalizing stories. We think we know the story but we’ve only scratched the surface.

If you think this could never happen to you or someone you love, you might be right. You might also be very wrong. I recently read two fascinating – and horrifying – nonfiction books that take readers into the heart of these cults. One of the things that struck me was the ordinariness of most of the members. Few, if any, set out to join a cult. They were searching for something and cult leaders are adept at filling those needs. The other things that struck me were the fear, isolation, desperation, and absolute lack of support and protection.

The two books I read were A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown and Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints.

A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown, the author, Julia Scheeres, sifted through 50,000 pages of recently released documents, as well as audio tapes recorded by Jim Jones and his members, so that we could better understand why nearly 1,000 people committed mass suicide by drinking poison. The way in which Jim Jones devolved from a man with good intentions to a paranoid, controlling, vicious murderer is fascinating – in a morbid sort of way. Some members willingly followed and supported his insanity. I found this incomprehensible. Others desperately wanted out but had no way to escape. This, for me, was the most heartbreaking part of the story. This is the part the news doesn’t tell us. These people did not all willingly drink the ‘Kool Aid’.

Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints takes on a recent story, one that is still simmering. The author, Sam Brower, is a private investigator who took on this case before the FBI did. His inside view is shocking. I admit to knowing little about this before reading the book. I’d heard about Warren Jeffs and his church, and, of course, I’d heard about child services removing hundreds of children from their “innocent” parents. After reading this book, I would never use the term innocent. Complicit is a more accurate term.

This cult has a different feel. Warren Jeffs is the prophet for the FDLS, an offshoot of the Mormon Church. (I want to emphasize that this “church” is not a part of or accepted by the mainstream Mormon religion.) This cult does not recruit and few “outsiders” are allowed to join. The FDLS members are born into their cult, which can be far worse than being recruited. These members know no other life, no other world.

This story truly horrified me. While most media spins this as a “polygamist religion”, this cult is really about the abuse of children and women. Yes, the cult hides behind religious freedom and believes in polygamy. But that is an issue of convenience. What they aren’t telling us is twelve-year-old girls are being married off to men in their thirties, forties, and fifties. These girls cannot refuse. Women are treated as baby factories and nothing more. They are assigned husbands and often taken away and assigned to new ones later on. Members are purposely deprived of education, isolated, and taught that the world outside of their protective walls is evil. And, as all this goes on, our government tiptoes around them because of “religious freedom”. I was not aware that dressing something up as a religion gave a person the freedom to abuse at will.

While Warren Jeffs has been arrested, thanks in large part to the work of Sam Brower, this cult still thrives. The children, and the children’s babies, were returned to their parents, returned to a life of abuse. This is a story everyone needs to read.

In my novel Beyond Salvation, I explore what happens when religion is twisted to meet the needs of a cult leader. Sara Rivers is a teenage runaway, part of a throwaway culture most of us are unaware of. People like her are perfect prey for cult leaders. Fortunately for Sara, she had Michael Sykora looking out for her. If only everyone did.

Okay, I know it’s fiction, but the same rules apply. Unless you’re reading fantasy, where all the Elfkin ‘people’ never have bad breath. Or science fiction, where the characters live on planet Colgate and merely breathing the air continually freshens their breath. In those instances, I could take the leap and ignore the morning breath factor. Otherwise, if I’m reading a story taking place in the world as I know it, I’m always going to think, Ick, morning breath!

I have a similar reaction when I watch a movie and the woman wakes up in the morning with her make-up intact. Even her lipstick is perfect! The scene instantly snaps me back to the reality of smeared mascara and pale lips. I know – it’s fiction, it’s a movie, she’s an actress. But I don’t want to be reminded of that. I want to get lost in the story, in the moment. I want to go with the characters to wherever they lead me. I want to believe in them. And scenes like this, in books and in movies, remind me that it’s all pretend.

Many people argue that fiction is an escape. And it is – to a point. I’m intentionally stepping out of my world, leaving behind my dirty laundry, bills and PMS, so that I can travel somewhere else, see through another person’s eyes. But escaping my reality does not mean escaping reality altogether. If what I’m reading is taking place on planet earth, in the world as I know it, I expect certain things to remain true. Most people have to work for a living. People need to eat to survive. And people wake up with bad breath and smeared make-up.

I hope that my characters, and the things they do, feel real to readers. I have no doubt that I’m guilty of breaking a rule here and there. We all have that trigger, the one thing that makes us shake our heads and say, “Only in fiction.” Apparently, mine is morning breath.

This is geared toward the YA market but can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. Our heroine is a teenager, struggling through all the things we all deal with in high school, while also trying to understand her powerful psychic powers. There is much to love about this book and Stacy’s writing.

At some point in our life, we all wonder what it would happen if we could go back in time and change one detail, one decision, one thing about our past. Maria Savva explores this and more in this fun and insightful story.

A perfect mix of historical fiction with a paranormal twist, this is a beautiful story of love and hope.

This is a thriller with substance. Not only did this book keep me on edge (I couldn’t turn pages fast enough!), but it also has an incredibly thought-provoking issues throughout.

This novella is part horror, part paranormal. James knows how to weave a tale and he sucked me right into this one.

Do you like short stories? How about edgy, dark fiction that holds nothing back when showing the not-so-pretty side of life? If you said yes to these questions, you’ll love Joe Schwartz.

This is the third and most gripping book in RJ’s Rock & Roll Mystery Series. You don’t have to read the first two in order to enjoy this one, though you might want to read them just because they’re good.

A powerful story told from the viewpoint of a young woman who’d been sold into the sex slave. This is fiction that reads like nonfiction – and, sadly, stories just like this one are truly taking place all over the world, right this minute. Sibel tells this important tale with talent and grace.

An Urban Fantasy, this vampire tale has a different spin than the typical story. Vampires and werewolves are at war. Can love cross boundaries, conquer prejudices? Gareth explores this and more, while keeping readers on edge.

Charlie Courtland’s mind is twisted and it shows in this book! This one has some graphic scenes, though they belong in the story and aren’t there for shock value. Mixed in with the creepiness is a great amount of humor. If you want to laugh and gasp, this one’s for you.

I am a sucker for characters that make me forget they aren’t real and Marty Beaudet creates them with flare. This is a psychological thriller, a mystery, and a suspense story, with a multi-layered plot and aspects that will leave you thinking about things long after you’ve read the last page.

One old man, a park bench, and revenge. The end made me cringe – but I live for that twisted stuff.

Reading anything by Joel is an unforgettable experience. In this book, we’re taken back to 18th century Italy, where we meet a young woman who teaches us what it means to truly follow your passion.

Meet Trevor Wolff, rock star with a bad boy image and a spirit struggling to soar. Susan knows about the rock world and that knowledge shows in her writing.

I could not stop reading. This is a thriller with nonstop action and characters that make you want to jump into the book to save them. Blake Crouch is phenomenal talent.

And if you still have room, you can always check out my books. You’ll find them all in the carousel to the left.

To discover more indie authors and their books, check out the ‘BsB Kindle Store‘ The link is always to the right, under the ‘Blogroll’ heading. And we add to it continually, so check back often!

Whatever your reading preferences, I hope lots of books fill your new year.

Thanks for reading.

Is it fair to factor cover art into a book’s star rating? Is it better to mention your thoughts on the cover art, without it effecting your rating one way or the other? Or should the cover art be left out of the opinion piece altogether?

Many readers do not realize the extent of which the author is involved – or is not involved – in cover art. In the mainstream world, the author typically has absolutely no input. Within the indie world, an author’s input varies widely. Some small presses allow authors to create their own covers, others allow authors to make suggestions and, ultimately, approve or reject a design. The self-published author is entirely responsible for the cover art, whether that means he/she hires a graphic artist, uses a template, or designs his/her own from scratch.

I am guilty of being swayed by cover art. A great cover will draw my interest, leading me to read the description and deciding whether to purchase the book. A cover design that I find unappealing will have me moving right past that book without a second glance. This is not the ideal shopping method, since a great cover doesn’t mean a great book and an unappealing cover can be equally misleading.

While I am swayed by design in my reading choices, covers play no role in my rating of a book. For me, the reading experience is entirely separate from the aesthetics of the book.

One of my favorite covers is this one, for Caraliza by Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick:

The stark beauty of the woman in the tattered dress, set against the black background, drew me right in. This is a simple, yet profound, cover design. I knew I had to read Caraliza the moment I saw the cover. The description further enticed me. With this book, the cover spoke volumes about the writing. Caraliza remains one of my all-time favorite books.

A book I would have turned away from based solely on the cover is Stolen Dreams by Stacey Kennedy:

If I’d seen this book while shopping, I would have passed it by because the cover appears a little cartoonish and, to me, childish. (Sorry, Stacey!) But I was involved in a blog hop and won this book in a giveaway. The description intrigued me, with the main character being able to see and converse with spirits. After reading the book, I was further confused by the innocence of the cover, since much of the book’s content borders on erotica. While I enjoyed the book and Stacey’s writing style, I would have had to give it a lower star rating had I included my opinion on the incongruity of the cover.

Mania by Craig Larsen is one of those books where the cover caught my attention:

The bright red of the title set against the bleak background told me this was a suspense or thriller novel. I bought and read the book. I hated it. (And there aren’t too many books I truly hate.) In this case, if I included my opinion of the cover, I would have been forced to give this book a better rating. Indeed, the cover was the only thing I liked about the entire book.

In the end, this is where I stand on allowing opinions of the cover art to raise or lower a book’s star rating: I’m totally against it. While awesome cover art is great to have, it has no effect on the reading experience. A book’s rating should be a statement on the quality of the writing and the story, not its packaging. Including your opinion on the cover within the text of the review is fine, but the star rating should reflect the words the author wrote, not the art he/she or someone else entirely chose as representation.

What do you think?

Here are a few of my favorite covers, that also happen to represent my favorite reads:

Whether you worship God, Allah, Mother Earth or nothing at all, the holiday season has the same basic meaning – love and be kind to one another, and give what you can to those who are less fortunate. We shouldn’t need a holiday to remind us. We should behave this way all year.

Enough said. I shall not step up on my soapbox today. It’s the holidays!

I am excited to be helping Santa out this year. I don’t have a lot to give. (In fact, my bank would probably argue that I have nothing. ) But even the little stuff counts, right? In my role as Santa’s Helper, I need your help. What I have to give is books. And I’m looking for someone who loves to read and is in need of a boost this holiday season. Here’s the deal…

Are you having a difficult year and can’t afford to give gifts to all the people you love? Do you know someone who doesn’t have much, who probably won’t get much, and you’d like to make that person smile? Do any of these people love to read? If so, tell me about them! Choose one person and tell me why you think he/she deserves a gift. You don’t have to give me a lot of personal details. Maybe you lost your job and can’t afford to buy your best friend something. Or you’re buried beneath a heap of medical bills (I can relate to that!) and you need a gift for your child’s teacher. It could be someone you know who lost a job, a house, is going through a divorce, and that person is special to you. Tell me why!

I’ll pick two ‘winners’ from the comments. If your nomination is picked, I’ll send you an email requesting the person’s name and mailing address, as well as your choice of one of my eight titles for that person. I’ll wrap the book, include a card letting the person know the gift is from you, and ship it – all free!

Sound good? I hope so! Here are the guidelines in simplified form:

1. Submit your nomination of one person who deserves a surprise gift this holiday season. You do not need to give this person’s name.
2. You cannot nominate yourself. (But you can get someone else to!)
3. Include your name and a valid email address.
4. Nominations are open between 8:00 a.m. EST on Saturday, December 3 and midnight EST on Wednesday December 7.
5. Due to shipping time, I have to restrict this to people living within the U.S.
6. The person you nominate needs to be at least 16 years of age.

That’s it. Please help me be a Santa’s Helper this year by nominating someone you care about.

Here are some words and phrases that were and/or are popular slang:

In the 1920s, anything considered the height of excellence was referred to as the cat’s pajamas.

In the thirties, we got the word gig as slang for a job. That slang is still around, though it is now mainly used by musicians. This decade also gave us I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, as a way of expressing disbelief.

The 1940s brought cool and smooch, which are still used to varying degrees today.

With the fifties came hipster, a word defining a trendy person or someone in the ‘in crowd’. This decade also gave us the phrase Big brother is watching you, referring to the government.

In the sixties, we had a kind of Cultural Revolution that brought a whole new way of speaking for some people. The word hippie, derived from the earlier decade’s hipster, came to define a type of person as well as an entire movement. A male hippie was often referred to as Daddy-O and life was groovy.

The 1970s, the decade in which I became a teen, gave us an inriguing array of slang. We have the phrase catch you on the flip side, and the title of workaholic. A high-energy person was a spaz and running away, particularly from the police, became booking it.

With the 1980s came a whole new collection of words and phrases. Gag me with a spoon was said when a person found something disgusting. A nerd became a dweeb, and gnarly was reserved for things one step up from cool.

The nineties gave us still more choices. We have diss for showing disrespect, and homey for a close friend. We expressed agreement by saying word, and we lost the ‘L’ and ‘R’ in alright, instead saying a’iight.

Despite the relative ease in which slang can define a generation, with the 2000s we can’t even agree upon a shortened title for the decade. Unlike past decades that we refer to as the seventies, eighties, etc., this one doesn’t offer us a simple title. Names for this decade that have been tried and failed include: ohs, oh-ohs, double ohs, twenty ohs, and the noughties. While we might never settle on a unified name for this decade, we had no such problem getting slang to take off. This decade brought us rents as a reference to parents, peeps for our groups of friends, and newbie for the person new to a group and/or situation.

Our current decade – are we calling it the tens? – is still new. The younger generation is working furiously to find new slang to define their decade. One word taking hold is ill, which is replacing sick, which replaced cool, to define something great. We have salty to describe a bad attitude. Flying your freak flag is a good thing, and someone calling you fly is a huge compliment.

I don’t always understand where slang words and phrases originate or why they take off the way they do. The reasons why some words take hold and linger for decades, while others are here and gone in a few months, also escape me. Though I might not use much slang or understand the origins, I am fascinated by the phenomenon. In this age of the Internet, I think it’s easier to get slang to take off. Pop a word or phrase on Facebook, get enough of your friends to repeat it, and before long we could be creating our own slang. That could be a fun experiment.

Do you keep up with the trends and speak in slang? What is your favorite slang word or phrase?

But my point today is not to discuss the merits for and against the death penalty. I want to talk about the people whose job it is to carry out this government-sanctioned murder – the executioners.

An October issue of Newsweek had an article on professional executioners. These are people that the majority of us never think about. The trial is over, the killer sentenced. The media moves on and so do we. Years, often decades, later, the sentence is carried out by a nameless, faceless person. We get a blip on the news. We might remember who that killer is, though chances are high that many of us will not. That person is put to death, as if by the wave of a government magic wand.

You might be surprised to learn that many whose job it is to execute a death row inmate do not believe in the death penalty.

What would it feel like to be forced to kill another person as part of your job? In essence, you are a paid assassin. As you read this, your first instinct might be to say that you’re doing the country a service, that the inmate deserves to die. And, if that’s your stance, perhaps you are the right person for the job. But before you move on, sure of your position, really think about it. You’re killing another human being; one that might have committed one rash act two decades ago. One whose guilt you might not be convinced of. Are you positive that would not negatively affect you?

Newsweek introduced a few executioners, whose perspective I think is important to consider. We need to think about what we are asking these people to do; what we are asking them to live with.

Jerry Givens is a 59-year-old man, whose job for 17 years was to execute death row inmates in Virginia. During that time, Givens put 62 men to death. In all 62 of those cases, the official death certificate reads ‘HOMICIDE’.

Givens states that, “I had to transform myself into a person who would take a life.” That’s a profound position to find yourself in. He also states, “The person that carries out the execution itself is stuck with it the rest of his life. He has to wear that burden. Who would want that on them?”

Indeed.

Another person interviewed by Newsweek was Jeanne Woodford, who spent much of her career as warden of San Quentin prison in California. In 2004, shortly after her appointment as director of all California prisons, she resigned. Her reason? “I knew I couldn’t carry out another execution,” she said. “I knew I just couldn’t do it.”

From the start of her career, Woodford opposed the death penalty. Her words struck me deep: “…it never made sense to me that we would believe killing a human being would make up for killing a human being.”

Her position against the death penalty was not only personal. As a prison warden, Woodford concluded that capital punishment made no fiscal sense. She calculated that her state spent $4 billion to execute 13 inmates between 1992 and 2006. That is roughly $308 million per execution.

Studies – and numbers – prove that keeping a prisoner on death row, and eventually executing that prisoner, is far more expensive than keeping that same person in prison for life. As of 2009, the cost of prosecuting death penalty cases cost an average of $184 million more each year than it would cost to give these same prisoners life without parole. Woodford believes that extra money would be better spent on hiring more cops. In California alone, half of all murders go unsolved. We simply do not have enough manpower to do the job.

Jeanne Woodford, a career employee within our prison system, a warden, and, at times an executioner, believes that, “The death penalty shouldn’t exist at all.”

Allen Ault was the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections from 1992 until 1995. During those short years, Ault oversaw five executions.

Ault states that he left his job in part because he did not want to supervise more executions. Two quotes of his, included in that Newsweek article, require no further comment from me:

“Having witnessed executions firsthand, I have no doubts; capital punishment is a very scripted and rehearsed murder. It’s the most premeditated murder possible.”

“The United States should be like every other civilized country in the Western world and abolish the death penalty.”

The death penalty remains legal in 36 U.S. states. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, between 1973 and 2010, 138 death row inmates were exonerated. That is 138 innocent people who, without intervention from an independent organization, would have been put to death. As I said, my point is not to argue the merits of the death penalty itself. We have to remember that we have no robots that ultimately kill these inmates. The sentences are carried out by men and women, not much different from you and me. Are we asking too much from them?