Awards

• Short-listed for American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award 2013

Overview

From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

Full Product Details

9780307948540

Table of Contents

Reviews

<p> Masterful. . . . Eloquent, important, and accessible. . . . The book of the century about the death penalty. --Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic <br> <br> Mesmerizing. . . . Powerful. . . . An utterly engrossing true-crime tale. --Kevin Boyle, The New York Times Book Review <br> <br> A genuine whodunit, a page-turner, and a tale of redemption. And it's all true. For all that, however, Anatomy of Injustice is also a blistering indictment of the death penalty. . . . Bonner delivers a crackerjack feat of storytelling that steadily administers the truth about capital punishment like a slow, toxic IV drip. . . . In his expert hands, the twists and turns of Elmore's appeals, and the gradual discovery of the travesties in the original investigation and trial by Holt's team, make for excruciatingly suspenseful reading. --Laura Miller, Salon.com <br> Gripping and enraging. . . . Bonner's book is not a treatise against the death penalty. Rather, it is a look at what happens in America's justice system when justice is absent. --The Economist <br> Accomplished and meticulously researched. . . . Convincing . . . As a piece of reporting, the book is masterful. Bonner builds the story, and his argument, carefully, rarely editorializing, mixing in a precis of capital punishment in the United States. . . . Bonner's book is an important addition to the body of evidence against the death penalty. --Ethan Gilsdorf, The Boston Globe <br> A revealing look at how police and courts grapple with death penalty cases. . . . If you are a staunch advocate of the death penalty . . . you're precisely the person who should read Anatomy of Injustice. -- Nicholas Varchaver, Fortune <br> The investigation . . . makes for a gripping read, and exposes some outrageous failures of American justice. -- The Must List, Entertainment Weekly <br> Compelling. . . . Bonner makes us feel the frustration and inhumanity of a justice system gone awry. --Wilbert Rideau,

<p> Masterful. . . . Eloquent, important, and accessible. . . . The book of the century about the death penalty. --Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic <br> <br> Mesmerizing. . . . Powerful. . . . An utterly engrossing true-crime tale. --Kevin Boyle, The New York Times Book Review <br> <br> A genuine whodunit, a page-turner, and a tale of redemption. And it's all true. For all that, however, Anatomy of Injustice is also a blistering indictment of the death penalty. . . . Bonner delivers a crackerjack feat of storytelling that steadily administers the truth about capital punishment like a slow, toxic IV drip. . . . In his expert hands, the twists and turns of Elmore's appeals, and the gradual discovery of the travesties in the original investigation and trial by Holt's team, make for excruciatingly suspenseful reading. --Laura Miller, Salon.com <br> Gripping and enraging. . . . Bonner's book is not a treatise against the death penalty. Rather, it is a look at what happens in America's justice system when justice is absent. --The Economist <br> Accomplished and meticulously researched. . . . Convincing . . . As a piece of reporting, the book is masterful. Bonner builds the story, and his argument, carefully, rarely editorializing, mixing in a precis of capital punishment in the United States. . . . Bonner's book is an important addition to the body of evidence against the death penalty. --Ethan Gilsdorf, The Boston Globe <br> A revealing look at how police and courts grapple with death penalty cases. . . . If you are a staunch advocate of the death penalty . . . you're precisely the person who should read Anatomy of Injustice. -- Nicholas Varchaver, Fortune <br> The investigation . . . makes for a gripping read, and exposes some outrageous failures of American justice. -- The Must List, Entertainment Weekly <br> Compelling. . . . Bonner makes us feel the frustration and inhumanity of a justice system gone awry. --Wilbert Rideau, e

Author Information

Raymond Bonner practiced law for a decade and taught at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. He later became an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, where he was a member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team in 1999, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has also written for The Economist and The New York Review of Books, and blogs at the Daily Beast and theatlantic.com. He is the author of Weakness and Deceit- U.S. Policy and El Salvador, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; Waltzing with a Dictator- The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy, which received the Cornelius Ryan Award from the Overseas Press Club and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism; and At the Hand of Man- Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife. He lives in London.

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