From Amazon.com
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.
This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
"I wanted to show just how difficult it can be in a death penalty case to discover the truth," declares Earley (The Hot House), and he proves his point with an engrossing, challenging trip into the labyrinth. Monroeville, Ala., was the fictionalized setting of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird; on Nov. 1, 1986, it was the site of the shooting of an 18-year-old white female store clerk; four months later, another white teenager was murdered in Brewton, 36 miles away. A black man, Walter "Johnny D." McMillian, the boyfriend of a white ne'er-do-well associated with the second teenager's family, was implicated in the murders more than three months later, despite a strong alibi and numerous inconsistencies in witnesses' statements. After McMillian was convicted and sentenced to death, the courageous efforts of Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer devoted to death penalty appeals, reopened the investigation, pried clear some obvious lies in the prosecution's case and, with the help of a 60 Minutes broadcast that laid out the appeal, got McMillian freed. The case remains open, but Earley lays out some alternate theories, as well as hints at possible suspects. A memorable tale of the many points where investigations are fallible.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient de la
Hardcover
édition.
