Book Review: Seventy Times Seven by Alex Mar

When asked by Justice Scalia during the Roper v. Simmons oral argument whether our criminal justice system punishes people for who they were and not who they are, Attorney Seth Waxman responded that what they are and what they will become is relevant. In other words, people can change.

This is what Alex Mar’s newest book, Seventy Times Seven, is all about: how a child who committed a heinous act of murder changed. The book is about how those around her and involved in her story also changed.

Most true crime novels focus on every detail of the crime, the police investigation, and the trial. This book is different. The focus is not on the crime but on the themes that underlie our discussion of justice: retribution, forgiveness, rehabilitation, and redemption. Mar does this through following the lives of the people involved in the Paula Cooper case. Paula was a 15-year-old black girl from Gary, Indiana sentenced to die because she murdered a white, elderly Sunday school teacher named Ruth Pelke.

In the 1990s, when I attended college, I became involved in the abolitionist movement, protesting at the Governor’s Mansion before an execution and education others about the death penalty. I continued that work in law school.

Jack Crawford, Bill Pelke, Monica Foster, Rhonda Long-Sharp, Bob Hammerle, and Chief Justice Randall Shepard were familiar names to me, and I knew much about Paula’s case. But I certainly did not know everything.

Mar takes the outsider through the entire story, telling a side of it from each person’s perspective. She informs the reader at the outset that she is not religious, but you see God everywhere in the story.

For example, when Bill, Ruth Pelke’s grandson, decided to forgive Paula, Mar described the moment as follows: “Bill begins again to pray, the way a desperate person forms words, unable to prevent them slipping from his lips. He prays for God to make him love Paula Cooper, to flood him with it — and he waits. He waits. And inevitably, this comes to him: If that girl is worth forgiving — if even his grandmother can feel compassion for her, can wish for her protection — then he must be too. Though he has also, in his own way, fucked things up beyond repair, Bill himself must be worth preserving.”

Or this quote from Monica, one of Paula’s appellate lawyers and close friends: “I always want to save my people more than [the State wants] to kill them.”

There is so much more to be said about the book, but I do not want to spoil the reader’s experience of walking through the bittersweet journey of Paula Cooper: from hate to love, death to life, and indefensible to forgiven.