Sympathy is probably the wrong word, as I don't know that Truman Capote actually felt sorry for Perry Smith, but he did empathize with him. That is, both personally and in his writing, he could understand and tried to express what it was like for a person to be facing the death penalty.
The greater achievement of the book is getting the true story of what happened, but he also, for perhaps the first time in literature, put a human face on the condemned. He at least provoked some thought about the realities of capital punishment in a country that overwhelmingly supported the death penalty at the time.
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