A Letter From The Publisher: Jan. 24, 1983

How well, or badly, the wheels of justice grind has long intrigued Staff Writer Kurt Andersen, who wrote this week's cover story on capital punishment. The son and grandson of lawyers, Andersen inherited an interest that he cultivated at Harvard by studying the history of rebellion. "Somehow," he says, "I am drawn to issues of crime and punishment. I seem to have a propensity for writing on death, disaster and dementia."

Indeed, within a month of joining TIME in 1981, Andersen found himself writing about the execution of Steven Judy, who had killed a woman and her three children. Subsequent assignments included stories on John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of President Reagan, and last month's first execution by injection.

Andersen's most recent cover story was on prisons (TIME, Sept. 13). In preparation, he visited five jails around the country and absorbed "a palpable sense of the daily interminable monotony of living in prison, with the constant risk of being killed by fellow inmates." His assumptions about those he met were frequently challenged by the hard facts: "I would talk to some very sweet, kind-looking woman," he recalls, "and afterward would learn from the warden that she had killed every member of her family." He still exchanges letters with some prisoners. For this week's cover, Andersen probed the profound issues surrounding the ultimate punishment for a prisoner: execution. "The death penalty," Andersen concludes, "dramatizes the classic conflict between high-minded reason and visceral emotions."

New York Correspondent James Wilde also visited a prison for TIME's death-penalty coverage, the Green Haven maximum-security institution in Stormville, N.Y. His goal: to sit in the nation's most famous electric chair, brought there in 1975 from Sing Sing. For half an hour, Wilde occupied the chair, imagining what a prisoner thinks and feels during the final minutes of his life.

What was his strongest impression? "It is such a simple instrument of death," Wilde recalls. "It was more comfortable than I had expected, but very eerie and very chilling nonetheless " Wilde's memorable account of what it is like to be strapped into an electric chair appears on the cover and serves as an introduction to Andersen's story.