The Inferno

This is a remarkable book. It chronicles the 25 year journey of Philip Workman through what US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun termed ‘the machinery of death’. It is the most detailed, intimate and complete look at a death row prisoner that I have encountered. The story is told through Ingle’s eyes as Workman’s pastor; the perspective of another condemned prisoner; and courtesy of the Tennessee Public Records Act, the viewpoint of the state officials who colluded to see that Workman was executed despite MORE THAN AMPLE EVIDENCE that he did not murder the police officer who he was convicted of killing. A memoir such as this is wrenching for it raises fundamental questions about our moral fabric as a nation. What does it mean to kill people, in our names, who do not kill people and are not eligible for the death penalty? These and other questions are addressed in the book as the reader descends with Philip Workman into the Inferno. It is a journey, like Dante’s in the original Inferno, that will leave your soul transformed. –Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking