Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town - Softcover

Earley, Pete

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553763563 ISBN 13: 9780553763560

Publisher: Bantam, 1995

Synopsis

Pete Earley's The Hot House gave America a riveting, uncompromising look at the nation's most notorious prison--the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas--a book that Kirkus Reviews called a "fascinating white-knuckle tour of hell,  brilliantly reported." Now Earley shows us a different, even more intimate view of justice--and injustice--American-style.

In Monroeville, Alabama, in the fall of 1986, a pretty junior  college student was found murdered in the back of the dry  cleaning shop where she worked. Several months later, Walter "Johnny D." McMillian, a black man with no criminal record, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the crime. As McMillian sat in his cell on Alabama's death row, a young black lawyer named Bryan Stevenson took up his own investigation into the murder of Ronda Morrison. Finding a trial tainted by procedural mistakes, conflicting eyewitness accounts, and outright perjury, he was determined to see McMillian go free--even if it took the most unconventional means...

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: 0553763563
• ISBN 13: 9780553763560
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528