Deliberate Indifference: A Story of Racial Injustice and Murder

On Christmas Day, 1987, a black man named Loyal Garner, Jr., drove down the wrong road in East Texas and was pulled over by a white police chief. He was taken to jail, beaten unconscious, and hospitalized - after officers came up with a cover story. Although witnesses swore that he was murdered, the policemen were summarily acquitted by a hometown jury. Only after prosecutors in another county wrested control of the case was justice served. In Deliberate Indifference an award-winning investigative journalist tells a true story that resembles a cross between the plot of Mississippi Burning and a frontline report from Daryl Gates's L.A. With a meticulous attention to detail, Howard Swindle extends his inquiry beyond Garner's murder to probe the poisoned heart of American racial injustice. Deliberate Indifference is a profoundly disturbing investigation of sanctioned murder and a miscarriage of justice that brings home hard truths about America's stubborn legacy of racism.

On Christmas Day, 1987, a law-abiding black man with a wife and six children went on what should have been a brief errand. He was stopped by a white police chief in a small Texas town near the Louisiana border, taken to jail, and beaten to death with a lead-filled blackjack. Award-winning journalist Howard Swindle, himself a Texan, draws on his personal knowledge to tell a spellbinding tale about the local law-enforcement and criminal-justice systems, both before and during this landmark case. "As if the 70-foot-tall pines were an impenetrable social barrier," Swindle writes, "Deep East Texas lies stagnant in a civil rights time warp, more forties and fifties than eighties and nineties." The New York Times praised "the author's compelling storytelling [that] enriches every page of this nonfiction thriller."

Also recommended: Swindle's Edgar-Award-nominated Trespasses: Portrait of a Serial Rapist.