March Book club

We read The Confession by John Grisham and we all felt the power of the book. If you haven't read it, and you want to, I'll just say: spoiler alert. In the story, a young black man is about to be executed for a murder he did not commit. All kinds of travesties were committed prior to and during his trial, but since he lived in Texas (substitute any number of states here), and he was young, black, relatively poor and powerless, none of these were ever considered and he was was convicted and spent 9 years on death row, finally coming to his execution date. In spite of a last minute confession by a serial rapist, the execution went forward and the rest of the story was the fall out of murdering an innocent man in the name of justice. Grisham makes an excellent point against the death penalty and it is hard to imagine that this is the act of a civilized society. While the story is obviously told along racial lines, black innocent man convicted of a crime against a white girl; white rapist/murderer who got away with it for almost 10 years, etc., we discussed the justice issues without talking too much about the obvious racist bias inherent within the death penalty in our country. Maybe we just had too much of that from last month's session. But, next month, we'll read and discuss, The Other Wes Moore, another non-fiction book set in Baltimore. What a great place to live!