The Problem with the Chair

AT a dinner party in Georgetown during the Reagan years, I was seated next to a liberal journalist I didn’t know too well—Sidney Blumenthal, then with The New Republic. No matter what has happened since, he was erudite and charming that night as we discussed the Washington scene. But my mind was largely elsewhere, for that week I had begun work on a story about a man convicted of murder who was possibly innocent. 1 was preoccupied, not with anything the administration might have been doing, but with the issue of capital punishment.

At some point, I asked my dinner companion his view of the death penalty.