Circumstantial Evidence - Hardcover

Earley, Pete

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553095013 ISBN 13: 9780553095012

Publisher: Bantam, 1995

Synopsis

On a busy Saturday morning in November 1986, in the small southern town of Monroeville, Alabama, a beautiful white teenager named Ronda Morrison was found brutally murdered in the back room of the dry cleaning store where she worked. Several months later, Walter McMillian, a black man with no criminal record, was arrested and then convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair in a trial that lasted less than three days. His guilt was seen as unquestionable until a young, black, Harvard-educated Yankee lawyer launched his own investigation into the murder. Thanks to Bryan Stevenson's unremitting efforts, six years after Walter McMillian was consigned to a cell on Alabama's death row, he walked out a free man. The state had been forced to acknowledge that investigators had used perjured testimony and withheld evidence from the defense that would have proved him innocent.

About this title

Review:

This classic tale of murder and injustice in a small Alabama town has a great cast of characters: a sweet-faced and popular teenaged girl, some bumbling but well-meaning homicide detectives, another teenaged girl who's considered "trailer trash," her identical twin aunts who have bulldog tenacity, a ditzy white woman who likes her weed and her black boyfriends, a racist good-ol'-boy sheriff, a wily raconteur of a con man, three black lawyers with impeccable credentials in civil rights activism, and the stars of the story, a wronged black man and his long-suffering wife. Circumstantial Evidence is an entertaining mystery as well: If you pay close attention, you may guess the solution. As the New York Times writes, "Without preaching, Mr. Earley shows how subtle and overt racism conspired to condemn a man while giving lip service to the legal system's supposed objectivity." Circumstantial Evidence won the 1996 Edgar Award for best fact crime.

From the Publisher:

Earley's reporting has the bracing flavor of fiction, as if he were a masterly novelist displaying his imagination in a crime thriller."
--The Washington Post

"Mr. Earley tells the story skillfully, weaving together interview material, investigators' reports and courtroom testimony to show how the system slowly, inexorably tightened a noose around Mr. McMillian's neck. Circumstantial Evidence leaves readers outraged."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A wonderful story. The new To Kill a Mockingbird."
--Gerry Spence, author of How to Argue and Win Every Time

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0553095013
• ISBN 13: 9780553095012
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416