A new book by Pulitzer Prize-win­ning jour­nal­ist Raymond Bonner, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, inves­ti­gates the short­com­ings of the jus­tice sys­tem in the case of Edward Lee Elmore, a black man sen­tenced to death in South Carolina in 1982. Elmore, who was semi-lit­er­ate with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties, was sent to death row for the mur­der and sex­u­al assault of a white woman, even though there was lit­tle con­nec­tion between him and the vic­tim. He was tried, con­vict­ed, and sen­tenced to death bare­ly nine­ty days after the vic­tim’s body was found. Bonner describes a com­pre­hen­sive sto­ry of racism, pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, and inef­fec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Elmore’s case and con­cludes that the same injus­tices occur in oth­er mur­der cas­es across the coun­try. DPIC Note: Elmore was even­tu­al­ly spared from exe­cu­tion when a South Carolina court ruled in 2010 that he suf­fered from men­tal retar­da­tion. At one time, he was the longest serv­ing death row inmate in the state.

Raymond Bonner earned his J.D. from Stanford and sub­se­quent­ly worked for Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen Litigation Group and the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. In the course of his career as a jour­nal­ist, he has been a for­eign cor­re­spon­dent for the New York Times, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize, and a staff writer at the New Yorker. He is also the recip­i­ent of the Overseas Press Club Award and the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.

(R. Bonner, ​“Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong,” Knopf Publications, forth­com­ing in February 2012). See Intellectual Disability. Read more Books on the death penal­ty. Read pre­vi­ous DPIC cov­er­age of his case.

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