This much we know to be true: On the cold winter weekend in early 1982, somebody murdered 76-year-old Dorothy Edwards. Apparently she knew the perpetrator, given she let him in to her handsome home upon the still side street in Greenwood, S.C. The crime itself was horrific. She was beaten with the brief object, stabbed regularly the single ear was roughly severed substantially sexually assaulted; her body was stuffed in to the bedroom closet, where it was detected upon Monday afternoon, Jan. 18. The next day the military arrested Edward Lee Elmore, the 23-year-old handyman whom Edwards had recently hired to do the few odd jobs around the house. He was rigourously charged with first-degree attempted murder upon Jan. 21, tried in the second week of April, found guilty by the jury which deliberated for dual as well as the half hours, as well as sentenced to death.
Courtesy the Elmore Family
Edward Lee Elmore
ANATOMY OF INJUSTICE
A Murder Case Gone Wrong
By Raymond Bonner
Illustrated. 298 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $ 26.95.
We know this as well: As of this writing, there have been 1,283 executions in the United States given 1976, when the Supreme Court finished the four-year moratorium upon collateral punishment. There have additionally been 134 genocide quarrel exonerations, roughly half of them given 1999. In his hypnotizing brand new book, "Anatomy of Injustice," Raymond Bonner, the onetime prosecutor as well as the former investigative reporter as well as foreign correspondent during The New York Times, makes the impressive box which Elmore ought to be added to the list of the innocent. Instead, he outlayed nearly thirty years in the South Carolina state penitentiary, most of which time upon genocide ro! w, trapp ed by the formidable of forces which as well often warp the legal process, even when the man's hold up hangs in the balance.
Like most collateral cases, Elmore's was made by the fearsome combination of competition as well as class. Edwards was the well-to-do white lady whose attempted murder made front-page headlines; small wonder which the Police Department wanted the discerning arrest, the prosecutor the genocide penalty. And Elmore, the poor black man with the tangential tie to the victim, seemed so obvious the suspect, conjunction the military nor the prosecutor considered any alternatives, yet there was the single tighten during hand. Their box was incredibly weak, Bonner shows, resting upon inference, the little very indeterminate earthy justification as well as the sworn statement of the jailhouse inform upon who claimed the defendant had confessed to him. But Elmore, who had an I.Q. of 61, was in no in front of to fight back; he couldn't discuss it time, much less follow the intricacies of the law. His court-appointed attorneys didn't help. At trial they hardly interrogated the prosecution's witnesses as well as called only the single of their own: Elmore, whom the prosecutor, with thirty years of experience during the behind of him, savaged.
Once Elmore was upon genocide row, his box moved in to the miasma of appeals. Twice his lawyers had his self-assurance overturned upon procedural grounds. But upon retrial he was convicted again as well as again sentenced to death. Then, in the summer of 1993, his file finished up in the hands of Diana Holt, the law tyro operative as an intern for the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center. And the case's trajectory suddenly changed.
Like Elmore, Holt came from the hardscrabble background. Brutalized by her stepfather, she'd run away from her home in Waco, Tex., during 17; dabbled in drugs; raced by dual marriages, the single to the man who beat her; as well as outlayed dual years in prison for armed robbery. Somehow she managed ! to pull herself behind from the brink. With her grandmother's help, she returned to school, initial during the internal community college, afterwards during Southwest Texas State. She graduated summa cum laude, practical to law propagandize as well as to her great surprise was admitted to the University of Texas. There she found her passion for public use channeled in to genocide chastisement cases, the little of the hardest work the counsel can do.
Elmore's box became her obsession. Holt understood the importance of procedural issues. But she was certain which Elmore was innocent, so she proposed to burrow in to the justification which had persuaded 3 apart juries to convict her client. Bonner follows along in most ways "Anatomy of Injustice" is Holt's book more than Elmore's examination as she peels behind the prosecution's omissions, manipulations as well as deceits, as well as tries to uncover what unequivocally happened in Dorothy Edwards's home upon which brutal weekend in 1982. It's the miraculous move: in Holt's relentless investigation, Bonner has found the way to spin this sad, sordid story in to an utterly engrossing true-crime tale.
Kevin Boyle teaches American history during Ohio State University. He is the writer of "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights as well as Murder in the Jazz Age."
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