Michael Ponsor graduated from Harvard, received a Rhodes Scholarship, and studied for two years at Pembroke College, Oxford. After taking his law degree from Yale and clerking in federal court in Boston, he began his legal career, specializing in criminal defense. He moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1978, where he practiced as a trial attorney in his own firm until his appointment in 1984 as a US magistrate judge in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed him a life-tenured US district judge. From 2000 to 2001, he presided over a five-month death penalty trial, the first in Massachusetts in over 50 years. Judge Ponsor continues to serve as a senior US district judge in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Western Division, with responsibility for federal criminal and civil cases in the four counties of western Massachusetts. THE HANGING JUDGE is his first novel.

Books by Michael Ponsor

The Hanging Judge

by Michael Ponsor - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Based on the experience of the author, a federal judge who in 2000 presided over the first capital case in Massachusetts in more than 50 years, this extraordinary thriller offers an unprecedented inside view of a federal death penalty trial.