Review by New York Times Review
This much we know to be true: On a cold winter weekend in early 1982, somebody murdered 76-year-old Dorothy Edwards. Apparently she knew the perpetrator, since she let him into her handsome home on a quiet side street in Greenwood, S.C. The crime itself was horrific. She was beaten with a blunt object, stabbed repeatedly - one ear was almost severed - probably sexually assaulted; her body was stuffed into a bedroom closet, where it was discovered on Monday afternoon, Jan. 18. The next day the police arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a 23-yearold handyman whom Edwards had recently hired to do a few odd jobs around the house. He was formally charged with first-degree murder on Jan. 21, tried in the second week of April, found guilty by a jury that "deliberated for two and a half hours, and sentenced to death. We know this as well: As of this writing, there have been 1,283 executions in the United States since 1976, when the Supreme Court ended its four-year moratorium on capital punishment. There have also been 134 death row exonerations, almost half of them since 1999. In his mesmerizing new book, "Anatomy of Injustice," Raymond. Bonner, a onetime prosecutor and a former investigative reporter and foreign correspondent at The New York Times, makes a persuasive case that Elmore ought to be added to the list of the innocent Instead, he spent nearly 30 years in the South Carolina state penitentiary, most of that time on death row, trapped by a complex of forces that too often warp the legal process, even when a man's life hangs in the balance. Like many capital cases, Elmore's was shaped by the fearsome combination of race and class. Edwards was a well-to-do white woman whose murder made frontpage headlines; little wonder that the Police Department wanted a quick arrest, the prosecutor the death penalty. And Elmore, a poor black man with a tangential connection to the victim, seemed so obvious a suspect, neither the police nor the prosecutor considered any alternatives, though there was one close at hand. Their case was incredibly weak, Bonner shows, resting on inference, some very dubious physical evidence and the testimony of a jailhouse snitch who claimed the defendant had confessed to him. But Elmore, who had an I.Q. of 61, was in no position to fight back; he couldn't tell time, much less follow the intricacies of the law. His court-appointed attorneys didn't help. At trial they barely interrogated the prosecution's witnesses and called only one of their own: Elmore, whom the prosecutor, with 30 years of experience behind him, savaged. Once Elmore was on death row, his case moved into a miasma of appeals. Twice his lawyers had his conviction overturned on procedural grounds. But on retrial he was convicted again - and again sentenced to death. Then, in the summer of 1993, his file ended up in the hands of Diana Holt, a law student working as an intern for the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center. And the case's trajectory suddenly changed. Like Elmore, Holt came from a hardscrabble background. Brutalized by her stepfather, she'd run away from her home in Waco, Tex., at 17; dabbled in drugs; raced through two marriages, one to a man who beat her; and spent two years in prison for armed robbery. Somehow she managed to pull herself back from the brink. With her grandmother's help, she returned to school, first at the local community college, then at Southwest Texas State. She graduated summa cum laude, applied to law school and to her great surprise was admitted to the University of Texas. There she found her passion for public service channeled into death penalty cases, some of the hardest work a lawyer can do. Elmore's case became her obsession. Holt understood the importance of procedural issues. But she was sure that Elmore was innocent, so she started to burrow into the evidence that had persuaded three separate juries to convict her client. Bonner follows along - in many ways "Anatomy of Injustice" is Holt's book more than Elmore's - watching as she peels back the prosecution's omissions, manipulations and deceits, and tries to uncover what really happened in Dorothy Edwards's home on that brutal weekend in 1982. It's a marvelous move: in Holt's relentless investigation, Bonner has found a way to turn this sad, sordid story into an utterly engrossing truecrime tale. He also uses Holt as a guide through the dark side of the American legal system. In principle, he says, "the duty of the prosecution is not to obtain a conviction but to do justice." In Greenwood, prosecutors fought to win - and to preserve their victory - justice be damned. They contested every challenge Holt raised, even those that clearly cast doubt on Elmore's guilt, and at one point tried to undercut Holt herself by making an issue of her prison record. When she pushed through those impediments, she ran into another barricade, this one of the Supreme Court's making. In 1993, the court ruled that as long as a death row inmate had received a fair trial, he was not entitled to a federal stay of execution simply because evidence of his innocence had been discovered. "The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder," Harry Blackmun wrote in his blistering dissent. But the standard had been set. Even if Holt could prove Elmore innocent, she Couldn't be sure of keeping him out of the electric chair. EVENTUALLY, she found a way to do just that. In 2009, 16 years after she picked up his file, Holt persuaded a state judge to change Elmore's sentence from death to life imprisonment. This past November, a federal appeals court granted her request that Elmore be given yet another new trial, a decision based not on the facts but on his original lawyers' mishandling of crucial forensic evidence. At first the prosecutor seemed determined to pursue the case again. Then, just a little more than two weeks ago - 10 days after the official publication date for "Anatomy of Injustice" - he announced that he and Holt had struck a deal. On March 2, Elmore walked into a Greenwood courtroom, pleaded guilty to the murder he still insists he didn't commit, and was set free. He had been in prison 11,000 days. The truth proved more elusive. In the end, Holt couldn't be sure that the Greenwood police had planted drops of the victim's blood on Elmore's pants; couldn't explain how pivotal evidence the prosecutor had long said was lost miraculously reappeared; couldn't say who committed the murder, though she seems to have come tantalizingly close to doing so. But she has proved, absolutely and unequivocally, that by the standards of American law Elmore should never have been convicted, certainly not sentenced to die. Therein lies that larger tragedy of this powerful book. No doubt most of the 1,283 convicts put to death in the United States in the past 36 years were guilty of the crimes that cost them their lives. It's possible there was only one Edward Lee Elmore among them: one person who because of the color of his skin or the poverty of his circumstances or the weakness of his defense counsel or the actions of an overzealous prosecutor was sentenced to die for a crime he didn't commit. But in a nation premised on the promise of justice, that's one too many. Edward Lee Elmore, who had an I.Q. of 61, was in no position to fight back - until he got his new lawyer. Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Ohio State University. He is the author of "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 18, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Bonner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his foreign correspondence for the New York Times, turns his considerable reportorial gifts to the issue of wrongful conviction as seen through the lens of a particular, outrageously mishandled case. The case, from 1982, centered on the conviction of a young black man for the murder of a white widow in South Carolina. Although the trial dates back decades, Bonner reanimates the wrongs of racism, inept defense, and prosecutorial misconduct seen in this case and also in cases across the U.S. The narrative, which moves through the initial trial and eventual freeing of the convicted prisoner, Edward Lee Elmore, is given a face and a voice through Bonner's focus on the young female lawyer who never gave up on trying to free her client. Far-ranging in its implications, thoughtful, and utterly absorbing, this book is a fine example of involving narrative nonfiction.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This is a lucid, page-turning account of the trials and death row appeals of Edward Lee Elmore, a quiet and mentally challenged African-American man accused of the brutal murder of an elderly white woman in South Carolina in 1982, and the remarkably dedicated legal team that fought for him to have fair representation in court after three separate, grossly mismanaged jury trials. Led by Diana Holt, a lawyer whose own turbulent youth contributed to a fierce commitment to her client, Elmore's defense winds through nearly three decades of legal maneuverings as suspenseful as the investigation of the mysterious crime itself. Painstakingly researched by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bonner (Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador), the case illustrates in fascinating and wrenching specificity the widely acknowledged inequality and moral failings of the death penalty, while illuminating the less understood details of a criminal justice system deeply compromised by race and class. Indeed, Bonner's ability to succinctly and vividly incorporate the relevant case history and explain the operative legal procedures and principles at work-including the bizarre way in which court-acknowledged innocence is not necessarily enough to spare a life on death row-makes this not only a gripping human story but a first-rate introduction to the more problematic aspects of American criminal law. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Bonner (At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife) explores a 1982 criminal case in South Carolina involving a murdered white woman and a black defendant, Edward Lee Elmore. Bonner goes to great lengths to navigate a horribly mismanaged case in which the evidence is tenuous at best and the justice system fails everyone involved. Elmore spent 23 years behind bars before being exonerated. As of October 2011, there have been 1,271 executions in the United States since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated. Currently 34 states have active death penalty statutes, and the issue of the execution of people innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted is a hot topic of debate in today's legal and human rights communities. VERDICT The Death Penalty Information Center reports that in 96 percent of the states where there was a review of race and the death penalty, there was a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination or both. Those interested in human rights, issues of race, and inner workings of the U.S. legal system-not to mention true crime fans-will want to read this book. [See Prepub Alert, 8/12/11.]-Krista Bush, Shelton Public Sch. Lib., CT (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife, 1993, etc.) weaves all this together with discussions of pertinent Supreme Court opinions, capsule tales of other, relevant capital cases and sharp mini-portraits of the case's lawyers and judges. A last-minute stay of execution and a 2005 writ of habeas corpus that successfully argued Elmore could not be killed under the Supreme Court's 2002 Atkins decision, prohibiting execution of the mentally retarded, spared him from the electric chair. He remains in prison. A powerfully intimate look at how the justice system works--or doesn't work--in capital cases.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
