An impassioned, well-researched report on one of the most burning issues facing us today: the death penalty.

Billy Wayne Sinclair was only 21 when he heard the Louisiana judge pronounce these words: “I hereby sentence you to death in the electric chair.” It was the culmination of a botched holdup committed the year before in which Billy had accidentally shot and killed a man. Billy spent the next 40 years in Angola Prison, one of the country’s worst, six of those years on death row. When in 1972 the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as arbitrary and capricious, Billy was re-sentenced to life without parole. Finally released in 2006, he now examines the death penalty in great detail, from ancient history—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—to the present. Informed by his own experience and his decades-long studies, this book offers important information about, and insights into, a subject that is as heated and controversial today as it ever was.

•Seven years on death row •Thirty-five years in the Louisiana prison system–the nation’s worst •Denied parole six times •Largely responsible for integrating the once fiercely segregated Angola State Penitentiary •Respected, self-trained jailhouse lawyer who has helped hundreds of fellow inmates get a fairer deal •Award-winning journalist, editor of the higly respected prison journal The Angolite •Whistle-blower extraordinaire, the man who blew wide open the pardons-for-sale scandal that rocked the Louisiana government and helped send key officials to jail •Married by proxy, behind the backs of prison officials, to a pretty, feisty television anchorwoman, who has been his staunch supporter and helpmate for twenty years and is now his coauthor

Such is the abbreviated curriculum vitae of one of American’s most famous prisoners, Billy Wayne Sinclair, a man known to many as a latter-day Robin Hood. Sentenced to death in 1965 at age twenty for an unpremeditated murder during the bungled holdup of a convenience store, Billy Wayne spent his first seven prison years on death row. When the death penalty was abolished, his sentence was commuted to life. Three-and-a-half decades later, Billy Wayne is still behind bars–feared by many politicians and prison officials for his well-known incorruptibility and unrelenting crusade for prison reform.

This is his memoir. It begins with an almost unbearable account of his early years, when he was so abused by his father one wonders how he survived, and his “escape” into a crowd of hooligans, which led him to the fateful day in 1965 when he held up the convienence story. His unvarnished story takes you behind the metal doors of the Angola State Penitentiary–and other Louisiana prisons–to reveal the brutal truth of life inside. Here you will meet Billy Ray, Billy Wayne’s blood brother; old Emmitt Henderson, who died of prison neglect; Jamie Parks, a seventeen-year-old kid whose fate was sealed the day he arrived in Angola; Big Mick, who ran drugs in the prison to earn money to put his handicapped sister through college; Wilbert Rideau, Billy Wayne’s coeditor on The Agngolite; the Dixie Mafia; and Richard Clark Hand, the young lawyer who took on Billy Wayne’s case and has been fighting for his release for thirty years.

Written in collaboration with his wife, Jodie, A Life in the Balance will leave you shaken and upset. And as Assistant Sheriff of the city and county of San Francisco, Michael Marcum, noted after reading the manuscript, it will doubtless also leave you “outraged . . . and ashamed of the criminal justice system.”