Don't Mess With Texas

 “The Confession” by John Grisham, 2010

This is a book about a young black kid railroaded into a murder conviction by the state of Texas. And an attempt by the actual killer to confess to the murder of a white cheerleader and save the young man from execution. The tension is high as the days, hours and minutes tick away. We live with Donte as he awaits a fatal injection in the prison at Huntsville, Texas. Grisham is not escapist entertainment like most Steven King stories, so this is unpleasant in a real sense.

I say 'the state of Texas' because it's legal elite, in this book and also in reality, from the governor on down, loves the death penalty … especially for black men. In this case it doesn't matter if the judge and prosecutor had an illicit affair during the trial; if there is no body; if a jail-house snitch provided evidence and later recants; if a fellow student testified, then admits he lied; if a confession was coerced out of the young man, who then retracted it; if the jury was all white. The chief justices don't care, nor do the appellate courts, nor does the governor. In Texas, like so many other places, justice takes a back seat to politics. And those politics are Baptist 'eye for an eye' no matter what. The hell with careful fact-finding.

In a sense the real criminals are sometimes in the black robes, especially in the South – all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Grisham stories a courageous white lawyer spear-heads the cases, though in actual fact black lawyers like Bryan Stevenson also do that. They are all current versions of Atticus Finch, but without his hidden racist ideas. The 'Innocence Project' helps through a disguised name. The family is distraught for years. The black community gets involved in protests and riot. In this story they play a bigger role than usual, attempting to stop the execution. Perhaps Grisham is realizing that what happens outside a courtroom is starting to become more important than what happens inside it.

The young man, Donte, waits on Death Row for 9 years, 23 hours a day in solitary, where he almost loses his mind and motivation. Solitary is torture, but the prison system uses it constantly. So is the death penalty. Recently the State of Louisiana decided to send 22 juvenile offenders, some as young as 12, to formerly adult Angola prison, to be put in solitary in old Death Row cells. Then there is the notorious, overcrowded Rikers Island, where the accused wait for months or years for their cases to be heard, some dying in the process. “Cruel and unusual punishment” are just words in the U.S., applied haphazardly as the political winds prevail.

Huntsville, TX Walls Prison

Here an out-of-his depth Lutheran preacher tries to save the young man by dragging the real – and dying - murderer to meet the defense attorneys, even though all have done stupid things and made stupid mistakes that delay 'the confession.' The preacher is the real hero of this story, as he's a somewhat ordinary man who stuck out his neck. Will they stop the execution? Will the real murderer pay? Will the State of Texas be revealed as another criminal? You might suspect what is coming.

We have sensationalist media, talk TV show hosts, mother histrionics, pathetic commentators, a number of arsons, a failed blockade, white v. black, drunks, fuck-ups, sly political operators, good 'ol boys and their fuckin' bourbon, political stunts, dueling preachers, a football strike, the National Guard and a thinly-disguised Al Sharpton – its all here - the whole political circus that passes for human society in the neo-Confederate state of Texas. After all this, Donte questions religion, as the jury, judges, governor and prosecutor were all 'good' Christians.

If you are interested in 'the law' – which you sure as hell better be – then this story will sit right. Grisham is ultimately a political writer for mass audiences. He's not an aesthete, a post-modernist, a memoirist, a historian, a rote recounter of murder mysteries or a writer of self-centered fiction. Whether his books make any difference is undecided, but certainly readers know his work and it might influence their thinking. At this point in history, non-political culture is an abdication from reality. It is more a narcotic than anything else.

Grisham is not that. This is a riveting story that is hard to put down except when the description becomes too much. The Blog has reviewed 4 other Grisham books, all political, and all right as far as they go. But they do celebrate the occasional rightness of a legal system that can rectify its mistakes, that some lawyers (mostly white) are heroes and that we can sleep deeply because they are on the job. Not so.

In fact I was astonished to recently hear an NPR interview in which two liberal Constitutional law professors said there is something seriously wrong with the whole U.S. Constitution, from the Supreme Court on down to the states.  Our archaic Constitutional system is fast falling in esteem even among legalistic non-socialists.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive covering many types of culture, using these terms: “Grey Mountain,” “Sycamore Row,” “A Time to Kill,” “The Appeal” (all 4 by Grisham); “The Time Before the Trial,” “Kenosha Trial Was Rigged,” “The Divide” (Taibbi); “With Liberty and Justice for Some” (Greenwald); “Missoula – Rape and the Justice System in a Small Town” (Krakauer); “Spotless Minds.”

The Kultur Kommissar

October 1, 2022