Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong
Summary (from the publisher): In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. After attending the University of Texas School of Law, Holt was eager to help the disenfranchised and voiceless; she herself had been a childhood victim of abuse. It required little scrutiny for Holt to discern that Elmore’s case—plagued by incompetent court-appointed defense attorneys, a virulent prosecution, and both misplaced and contaminated evidence—reeked of injustice. It was the cause of a lifetime for the spirited, hardworking lawyer. Holt would spend more than a decade fighting on Elmore’s behalf.
With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt’s battle to save Elmore’s life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. He reviews police work, evidence gathering, jury selection, work of court-appointed lawyers, latitude of judges, iniquities in the law, prison informants, and the appeals process. Throughout, the actions and motivations of both unlikely heroes and shameful villains in our justice system are vividly revealed.
Moving, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation’s ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.
Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. After attending the University of Texas School of Law, Holt was eager to help the disenfranchised and voiceless; she herself had been a childhood victim of abuse. It required little scrutiny for Holt to discern that Elmore’s case—plagued by incompetent court-appointed defense attorneys, a virulent prosecution, and both misplaced and contaminated evidence—reeked of injustice. It was the cause of a lifetime for the spirited, hardworking lawyer. Holt would spend more than a decade fighting on Elmore’s behalf.
With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt’s battle to save Elmore’s life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. He reviews police work, evidence gathering, jury selection, work of court-appointed lawyers, latitude of judges, iniquities in the law, prison informants, and the appeals process. Throughout, the actions and motivations of both unlikely heroes and shameful villains in our justice system are vividly revealed.
Moving, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation’s ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.
Review: This work of non-fiction uncovers a case of the judicial system gone horrifically wrong. In 1982, an elderly white widow was found murdered in her home in Greenwood, South Carolina. Edward Lee Elmore, a black man with intellectual disabilities was quickly arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death within ninety days. His only connection to the killer was cleaning her gutters and windows some days before her death. Eleven years after Elmore was sent to death row, a young lawyer, Diana Holt, began to investigate his case and the blatant miscarriage of injustice - Elmore was represented by incompetent attorneys and was convicted on the basis of misplaced and contaminated evidence as well as a grossly misleading prosecution.
This was a really painful book to read, because of the blatant discrimination and injustice committed against Elmore. His original lawyers "did virtually nothing" to help his case. "They consulted no independent experts, no pathologists, no fingerprint specialists. They didn't search for witnesses; didn't talk to any of Mrs. Edwards's neighbors; didn't interview Mr. Holloway, who had found the body. They didn't even read the police interviews with the witnesses, which the prosecution had turned over to them as required by law" (49). Police failed Elmore as well; shockingly, despite the fact that he was the one to 'discover' her body, the police never investigated the murder victim's neighbor Mr. Holloway, a man who some suspected was having an affair with the woman and who later made incriminating comments to Diana Holt, including, "I am the only one who could kill her and get away with it" (137). Experts called in to the case also failed Elmore. The forensic pathologist was later found to have misrepresented the time of death; the actual time of death was likely a time frame for which Elmore had an alibi.
Even after appeals revealed these many inconstancies that revealed that Elmore did not have access to a fair trial, he was repeatedly denied a new trial. Indeed, it was only after his lawyers requested that he not be executed because he was mentally retarded that Elmore was finally removed from death row. This book is a pervasive indictment of the death penalty and of the judicial system as a whole. Elmore suffered not due to human error, but human manipulation. "If the death penalty could be imposed in a case like this, without a fair trial, 'then we don't have the right as a civilized society to pass this judgment'"(108).
This book was published in 2012, which is also when Edward Lee Elmore was finally released for prison after serving over 11,000 days imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. It is unfortunate that the book was published before the advent of this happy ending. Nonetheless, this book serves as a painful reminder that not all cases or supposed criminals are what they seem. After reading this, I felt immense respect for Holt and her fellow lawyers for working tirelessly to see that justice is properly carried out.
Stars: 4
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