Jodi’s brush with death row

By Hannah Stephenson

Published:

SHE is Britain’s biggest-selling female adult fiction author, her novels always reaching the top of the bestseller list – and Jodi Picoult never shies away from uncomfortable, controversial subjects.

Over the years, she has written about stem-cell research, teenage suicide, sexual abuse, domestic violence and school shootings – all meticulously researched.

But she took on her biggest challenge as she came face to face with several murderers on death row in Arizona for her 15th novel, Change Of Heart, in which the killer of a little girl, and her stepfather, wants to donate his heart to the victim’s sister.

Picoult, 41, a jovial mother-of-three from New Hampshire, goes into a different, darker world from her happily married, affluent “school mom” life when she writes in her office overlooking Moose Mountain at the large colonial-style family home set in 11 acres.

Indeed, she’s been corresponding with an Arizona death-row inmate for two years, one Robert Towery – an armed robber who injected his victim with battery acid.

“We have had many conversations over the years. He asks after my family and has read my books. He’s very kind and, in my mind, he’s very redeemable. But I can imagine the family who lost a loved one may not have the same opinion.”

However, she’s not going soft on murderers, she insists. She also spoke to the families of victims during her research.

“As a mother, I can imagine that if one of my children were, God forbid, killed, revenge begins to look an awful lot like justice.”

Picoult’s books may be mass-market page-turners, but they are also incredibly informative. In Change Of Heart, we discover that death by lethal injection is unsuitable for heart donors because the drugs actually stop the heart, and that hanging is a more viable prospect for those on death row who wish to leave organs to others.

She goes into the nitty-gritty of why lethal injection is not as humane as has been claimed. Picoult discovered during the course of her research that the anaesthetic prisoners receive doesn’t have time to work before the drugs which kill them kick in.

While the death penalty is still carried out in her home state of New Hampshire, it hasn’t been enforced since 1939, so after much persistence she was permitted to visit a death-row block in a prison in Arizona.

Interestingly, none of the prison officials on death row that she spoke to believes in capital punishment.

“They said they will keep doing it because it’s their job, but they have seen far too many old and feeble men being executed who’ve been in prison for 20 years. That’s how long it takes for the death sentence to get through with all the appeals.”

Picoult was born on Long Island, New York. After studying English and creative writing at Princeton University, she had a succession of jobs – in finance, editing textbooks, teaching and writing advertising copy – while writing in her spare time.

She admits that sometimes she finds it hard to switch off, walk out of the office and be a normal, happy-go-lucky mum again when her children come home from school.

“I try not to let the subjects affect me. It’s easy for me when I’m not writing to step outside my office and realise how different my life is from whatever I’m writing about.

“Usually I’m so busy as a mother I don’t have time to think about what I’m writing about. I can choose dark subjects because I don’t live them.”

Change Of Heart, by Jodi Picoult, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £16.99.