BOOKS: ​“A Murder Case Gone Wrong”

Raymond Bonner’s new book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, is about to be pub­lished and was not­ed ear­li­er by DPIC. An excerpt from the book appeared recent­ly in The Atlantic. Andrew Cohen, also writ­ing in The Atlantic, called it ​“the book of the cen­tu­ry about the death penal­ty.” Cohen com­ment­ed that ​“Bonner’s book comes at a cru­cial time in the mod­ern his­to­ry of the death penal­ty. It comes at a time when views are slow­ly hard­en­ing against the cur­rent unre­li­able and expen­sive sys­tem. It comes at a time when sev­er­al states are look­ing to elim­i­nate their cap­i­tal regimes. It comes at a time when even the con­ser­v­a­tive Supreme Court has sent a sig­nal that cap­i­tal cas­es must be han­dled bet­ter. It’s a book that sure­ly comes too late for some death row inmates but per­haps just in time for oth­ers.” In Anatomy for Injustice, Bonner recounts the case of Edward Lee Elmore, a man with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties, who has been tried, con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death three times for a mur­der, and was recent­ly grant­ed a fourth tri­al when the review­ing court acknowl­edged ​“grave ques­tions about whether it real­ly was Elmore who mur­dered [the vic­tim].” Read the excerpt from Anatomy for Injustice.

In the excerpt from his book, Bonner wrote, ​“In our crim­i­nal-jus­tice sys­tem, once a per­son has been con­vict­ed, no mat­ter how shaky the con­vic­tion, the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence dis­ap­pears. The defen­dant is assumed to have had a fair tri­al. New evi­dence, even enough to sow a field of doubt, does not nec­es­sar­i­ly enti­tle a defen­dant, not even one on death row, to a new trial.”

(A. Cohen, ​“The Book of the Century About the Death Penalty,” The Atlantic, February 9, 2012; R. Bonner, ​“Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong,” Alfred A. Knopf, February 2012)). See Innocence and Intellectual Disability. Read more Books on the death penalty.