A Time to Live: The Last Ordeal of a Condemned Man (forthcoming, Columbia University Press, April 2027)
Doyle Lee Hamm’s Decades-Long Struggle on Death Row: The night of February 22, 2018, all was almost lost. After a decades-long struggle on death row, the state of Alabama strapped Doyle Lee Hamm, a terminally ill, cancer-ridden, 61-year-old man, to its lethal injection gurney and tried to execute him. But he stumbled out of the execution chamber alive and survived the attempt. Years of drug addiction and cancer-riddled glands made his veins unviable. This was a reality the justice system had been walked through in detail by his lawyer yet was ignored all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, as the state persevered with what can only be considered as modern-day torture. His lawyer successfully got the state to promise never to execute him again. This is the non-fiction account of Doyle Hamm’s ordeal told by his lawyer, Bernard E. Harcourt.
The book also traces the other travesties of justice in Mr. Hamm’s case, including the prosecutor writing the judge’s 89-page judicial opinion denying Mr. Hamm relief, and Doyle Hamm’s harrowing upbringing in a long line of impoverished Irish sharecroppers, along with his seven brothers, all of whom would end up in prison at the infamous plantation prison, Parchman Farm, in Mississippi.
In a startling account of injustice, A Time to Live weaves the travesties in Doyle Hamm’s case together with several decades of Harcourt’s career defending other prisoners on death row. It reveals a broken system set up to further disadvantage those marked by poverty, while hiding behind a murky line of innocence and guilt. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Today it is impossible to say for certain why people are really punished.” A Time to Live is a story of human sacrifice and reflection on what punishment has come to mean.
