BOOK REVIEW--"THE CONFESSION" by JOHN GRISHAM

Reviewed by Bill Breakstone, November 30, 2010

Master storyteller John Grisham has done it again. There is a reason why this novelist brings out one bestseller after another—he finds a timely topic, then weaves a fast-paced narrative that grabs the reader’s attention immediately and won’t let go.

“The Confession” is about the death penalty, the inequities of the criminal justice system, and political corruption. It illustrates how minority defendants are discriminated against by investigators, prosecutors, judges and juries, and that such discrimination is systemic. No need here to describe the plot—let the readers enjoy the tale themselves without previews.

However, it is worth noting that this past Sunday, The New York Times ran an article by Adam Liptak about the death penalty, in particular Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ decision to reverse his position on it. Stevens has written an article that appears in the current issue of The New York Review of Books in which he came to the conclusion “that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‘regrettable judicial activism, had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.”

Liptak writes: “The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice. Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent among the abuses. Juries have systematically been shaped — rigged — to heighten the chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment. Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly white and male and their behavior has often — not always, but shockingly often — been unfair, bigoted and cruel. Innocents have undoubtedly been executed. Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants. And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is fired up far more often when the victims are white.”

Justice Stevens was not alone in his opinions about the death penalty. Liptak continues: “Justice Harry Blackmun was 85 years old and near the end of his tenure on the Supreme Court when he declared in 1994 that he could no longer support the imposition of the death penalty. ‘The problem,’ he said, ‘is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.’ Justice Blackmun vowed that he would no longer participate in a system ‘fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.’ In 1990, Justice Thurgood Marshall asserted: ‘When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery.’ Justices Blackmun and Marshall are gone, but the death penalty is still with us. It is still an abomination.”

With this background in mind, read Grisham’s book. You will not only find it thoroughly enjoyable, but highly informative on a public issue that truly needs attention.