Race, power-lust and capital sin

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Donté Drumm has been on death row for nine years. The state of Texas has sentenced the 27-year-old to die by lethal injection for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Nicole Yarber, a popular high school cheerleader, in the town of Slone. Drumm, a rising football star when he was arrested in 1998 at age 18, is days away from his end. Another crucial cog: he’s innocent, and he’s black.

This is the “has-already-happened” scenario of John Grisham’s latest novel when the book opens with Travis Boyette, who claims to be the real murderer and supposedly nearing his end due to a malignant brain tumour, turning up at the church of Lutheran minister Keith Schroeder in Topeka, Kansas. He’s had a conscience call and wants to save an innocent man from being wrongly executed. The minister is at first disbelieving, then wary and suspicious, and, once he realises that Boyette’s story could actually hold some water, sets out to save Drumm from wrongful death. But he just has four days.
And so the race against time begins. But who will listen to his protestations? Drumm’s defence counsel, Robbie Flak, and his team has been toothcombing every little detail and filing every possible appeal to stop the execution. But the bull-headed state authorities seem to have made up their minds on Drumm’s guilt and refuse to acknowledge even glaring discrepancies and inaccuracies in the conviction, leave alone the fact that the girl’s body was never found.
What follows is a narration of Schroeder’s mad dash, with “terminally-ill, suffering from migraines and seizures” Boyette in tow, to Texas to get the execution stopped. Admittedly, the book seems to be the extra-padded version of a short story, but what grips your attention and sustains it is the urgency of the situation. You become part of the action, willing the characters, at times mulish and downright stupid, to see sense and avert the massive wrong that’s about to be committed. You share the agony of the innocent man’s family, feel frustrated when one door after the other which could set him free seems to close, and fervently hope that he can somehow be saved.
The volatile race situation in the town forms the backdrop against which the action takes place. One may draw a parallel with the film Hurricane, about boxing star Rubin Carter and starring Denzel Washington, who is deliberately framed and convicted for a bar shooting and sentenced to life in prison. But whereas in that there was malicious intent to send an innocent man to prison because his skin wasn’t white enough to sustain his success, Grisham here attributes the maliciousness to the greed of the ones in authority to retain their elected positions, including the district attorney and the governor.
Grisham has dealt with racial tensions and crimes revolving around them in his previous works too, but here the racial facet, though strong, is a sideshow. The impending execution leads to a flammable situation with the tension rising as the day of death draws near. A conflagration seems waiting to happen with blacks marching through the roads, chanting slogans to the rhythm of rap music. Molotov cocktails are thrown on cars, and then a white church is burnt down. A black church is similarly attacked in retaliation. The school football team’s black players refuse to play to show their unity with Drumm and his family, and the superficial homogeneity which was hiding the underlying self-imposed segregation is ripped. Only some show of support by the white players of a rival football team and a forceful appeal by Drumm’s family calm things down.
This is where Grisham falls into a precast mould. His characters are not new. They’re caricatures who can be slotted into distinct categories. There is no novelty there. You would meet them elsewhere, albeit with different names. There are more than a dozen or so sport-related, or otherwise, Hollywood films where there is racial injustice and a handful of characters rise to the occasion and set an example for the others.
So there’s a determined minister, significantly of a different race than the man he is trying to save as otherwise he won’t be able to sway the readers’ collective conscience, who will stop at nothing to set things right and the ever-persevering defence lawyer, also white, fighting against the pig-headedness of the state authorities — the investigating detective, district attorney, presiding judge, state governor (all white) — in their single-minded determination to kill the wrong man.
Throw into that the ever-grieving mother of the victim, Reeva Pike, who makes an annual pilgrimage, with a suitable entourage, to a certain spot on the bank of the river into which her daughter’s body was thrown and who never lets an opportunity to show how troubled she is go by. And to add some colour, Grisham brings in Sean Fordyce, the flamboyant and ruthless host of a death row-based TV show, who interviews the victims’ families before and after the sentence is carried out. His sole target is higher rating for his show and he’ll try any trick up his sleeve to achieve it. He doesn’t even spare the hapless Reeva and stumps her on live TV when he plays the confession by Boyette.
The novel is in three parts — the crime, the punishment and the exoneration — and some readers may feel disappointed that the climax of the story has been arrived at two-thirds into the book, rather than at the end, as it should be. It is not so, but only because Grisham doesn’t intend for it to be so. The race to stop the execution, and whether it’s a success or not, is not what the crux of the story is. What he wants us to focus on is the stubborn attitude of the state in denying justice to a man because they’re too comfortable in their skin with what they have done and have no qualms that an innocent man could lose his life because of their brazen refusal to admit that they could be wrong. Even towards the end, when more and more evidence of Boyette’s guilt and Drumm’s innocence is thrown up, what strikes the reader is that their unease stems not from their complicity in the wrongful conviction but from the fear that they could lose their power and position.
The argument that this is only fiction is belied by a recent case in which doubts have been cast on the guilt of a Texas man who was executed 10 years ago for a liquor store robbery-murder during former US President George W. Bush’s final months as governor. The DNA test of a strand of hair, which was the only piece of physical evidence linking the executed man to the crime scene, showed that it was possible that it came from the victim. Mr Bush’s office seemed to have failed to inform him that the convicted man was seeking a DNA test on the strand of hair and so a reprieve was denied. That Mr Bush was in the middle of a turbulent recount dispute in Florida during the time, which ended with him being elected President, only makes Grisham’s story more hard-hitting and close to reality.