The Confession by John Grisham

An innocent man is about to be executed.

Only a guilty man can save him.

For every innocent man sent to prison, there is a guilty one left on the outside. He doesn’t understand how the police and prosecutors got the wrong man, and he certainly doesn’t care. He just can’t believe his good luck. Time passes and he realizes that the mistake will not be corrected: the authorities believe in their case and are determined to get a conviction. He may even watch the trial of the person wrongly accused of his crime. He is relieved when the verdict is guilty. He laughs when the police and prosecutors congratulate themselves. He is content to allow an innocent person to go to prison, to serve hard time, even to be executed.

Travis Boyette is such a man. In 1998, in the small East Texas city of Sloan, he abducted, raped, and strangled a popular high school cheerleader. He buried her body so that it would never be found, then watched in amazement as police and prosecutors arrested and convicted Donté Drumm, a local football star, and marched him off to death row.

Now nine years have passed. Travis has just been paroled in Kansas for a different crime; Donté is four days away from his execution. Travis suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. For the first time in his miserable life, he decides to do what’s right and confess.

But how can a guilty man convince lawyers, judges, and politicians that they’re about to execute an innocent man?GOODREADS
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Lawyers.........I've never liked 'em. Although Grisham sure knows how to make them look human and make them look like the damn blood sucking vampires that they are. The confession is a great book and argument about why the death penalty shouldn't be allowed. There are arguments pro and contra. I enjoyed reading this , the setting is great and the characters diverse:  moving and repulsive. You know that feeling you get when something unjust is happening, a feeling of anger mixed with confusion and shock that it's happening. There's probably a word for that. Well there's a lot of that going on, it's just ridiculous. Donte Drumm gets convicted for murder. There's no body. The confession itself is bogus. Even I can see that and I don't even know what the insurance certificate to my car looks like! Then there's the actual confession in the book, you have Donte "confessing" and while he does this the officer interrogating him keeps "correcting" him. He's leading the confession, how can he know the details better than the alleged killer! come on!!.  that's not even the half of the bullshit , during the trial it turns out the judge is having an affair with the prosecutor and they frigging cross examine a dog, they put an actual dog on the witness stand! yes, this happened  in Taxes, but somebody should have been smacked upside the head!

Then there's Boyette. The actual killer, he goes and confesses to the priest who then takes it on to bring Boyette to Texas to try and stop the execution. I should have known better! I freaking got my hopes up! I thought Donte would be saved. We read a lot about Donte's live , he had a promising future, comes from a good family.He always knew he was innocent, his family had faith in his innocence and so did his Lawyer Robby flak. Donte is portrayed as an innocent man and a good kid that got wronged by the system and spent the rest of his life  in prison for something he didn't do. And just hours ,minutes before the execution when Boyette reaches Texas , confesses and Flak tries to make an appeal for more time. Just a couple of more hours,that's all that was needed, to investigate and exonerate Donte Drumm. Bureaucracy got in the way and wouldn't allow that, Donte Drumm gets executed. A innocent man gets murdered by the state.

He's memory gets justice when Boyette takes them to the body. This brings a backlash to the judicial system and   questions the death penalty. The thing that people have always feared has happened. It still isn't enough to abolish the death penalty.

Although I have a slight dislike for lawyers doesn't mean I hate them. I have an uncle who's a lawyer and I've grown to like Robbie Flak, he's a compassionate lawyer who defends the small people against the corporate monkeys or bad guys trying to rip them off. Flak also has a good character , he defended Donte free of charge even puts his own money on the line, he believed in Donte's innocence and saw that the whole case against Donte was BS. Flak grew close to the Drumm family and to Donte and felt the loss just as hard as they did. Flak's a great character and amusing one, he holds a record for being held in contempt for calling prosecutors and judges (you know the monkeys) SOB's ,he even called the dog that was on trial on the Drumm case a SOB. Who wouldn't love his character.

There's also a racial tint to the story, I suppose Donte being black was also easier to accept, "ofcourse the black guy could kill the girl". Following the execution , this caused some tension in the town between the whites and the blacks. Nobody got shot tho. this didn't  escalate into violence either, the situation was taken down in a peaceful way. The Donte brothers go to the school and try to calm things down through the football teams, following Boyette's confession, Donte's mother asks the town people to stop. The victims mother, I don't know how I should feel about her. She loved her Daughter ,would hog any publicity to show how distraught she was and blatantly emphasized on the fact that only Donte and no other person was the killer. When the truth was out, it's hard to say if she took it well.

So we got a bogus trial based on a bogus confession. Innocent man gets executed. But wait, there's politics involved. Lawyers and politics a very bad dish indeed. You got the prosecutor who only cares about retiring with successfully winning a case from Flak and a governor who's worried about how much votes he's up in the polls. These people are so casual about the fact that a girl was murdered, that they might have sent an innocent man to jail, so worried about losing their positions that the fact that they lied and cheated mean nothing to them.

This is a great book that touches on a controversial topic, should any state or country be allowed to execute people? is this even a relevant question,seeing as it's already something  happening in many countries and is now normal. Or is it just stupid to argue it now because we have ethical problems with it? I don't pay taxes, but would you be comfortable knowing your money is going to inadvertently allow the state to kill another person, yes a criminal, are criminals not people anymore? I think it was also mentioned that it costs more to be able to execute people,whereby people have to pay more taxes. The priest in the book stayed in the background  all he did was bring Boyyette to Texas. He witnessed Donte get executed. He was just a priest, never preached about anything controversial. He was neutral but after this experience with Boyette. He found something to preach about. I found something to think about and two lawyers I might actually like (which is probably not saying much seeing as one's my uncle and the other one is fictional). This book has something to say, so why not pick it up

*the level of objectivity in this review (might be) is zero

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