Cold Punishment Capital Punishment: In

¶ … Cold Punishment Capital Punishment: In Cold Blood The very fact that Truman Capote wrote in Cold Blood, and that the book has persisted in popularity and controversy over the decades since it was published, is an argument against capital punishment. In Cold Blood is not really the story is a murder, or of the punishment of that murder, but rather a story of several lives.

The immediacy and urgency of these lives is heightened by the knowledge of how each life in the book ends, and this makes in Cold Blood compelling where it otherwise would have been a well-written yet fairly mundane biography, but this intensity and the public attention to the book stem from somewhere else as well. At one point, Capote quotes the lawyer, Mr. Fleming, as saying, "Remember, all we can hope is to save your lives" (Capote 266).

This is not really true, however, and in Cold Blood is evidence of that: Capote managed to preserve life through the writing of this book even if efforts to save lives were in vain. The desperation evident in the tone of the book makes it clear that this preservation is a last ditch effort, and would be unnecessary if taking a life was truly disallowed.

Towards the end of the book, when Capote is both narrating Smith's writing of his account of his own life and presenting large chunks of this narrative in what purports to be Smith's own hand, Capote comments that "Smith's pencil sped almost indecipherably as he hurried," signaling the extreme desperation on the part of this author, as.