Volume 52, Number 8 · May 12, 2005
The Right to Life
By Hilary Mantel
The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions
by Sister Helen Prejean
Random House, 310 pp., $25.95
The trial of Dobie Williams lasted one week, from selection of jury to guilty verdict to death sentence. Dobie was a Louisiana man, poor and black and with an IQ of sixty-five. He was convicted of the murder of a forty-three- year-old white woman who was stabbed to death in her bathroom. According to the prosecution, this lady called out helpfully, while being attacked, 'A black man has killed me,' and when her husband rushed into the bathroom, she indicated, while dying, that the black man had gone out through a window so small and high up that the family had never bothered to put a lock on it. Betty Williams, the mother of the accused, commented, 'That sounds like somebody in a murder mystery book.'
Review, 5164 words
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