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U.S. Justice Called into Question: A Study of the Elmore and Williamson Cases

Raymond Bonner in Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong (2012) and John Grisham in The Innocent Man (2006) deal with two murder cases occurred in 1982 where the prosecutors indicted wrong men. Black man Edward Lee Elmore was arrested for the murder of a 76 year-old white lady in South Carolina, whom he helped a few times with house chores, and the mentally unstable Ron Williamson along with his "drinking" buddy Dennis Fritz for raping and killing a 21 year-old girl in Oklahoma. They went through several trials. By circumstantial evidence that was devised by police and prosecutors, Elmore and Williamson were repeatedly sentenced to death and Fritz to life in prison. However in reality they had never committed the crimes, and yet they still had to be imprisoned from twelve to thirty years before their remission. Those cases raise a couple of questions on U.S. justice system: Why were they indicted and later sentenced to death even though there was little tangible evidence? How were the race of Elmore and "utilitarian" prejudice on Williamson's dissolute lifestyle played by police and prosecutors in trials? What are the "original sins" of those wrongly accused men? Investigating the procedure of the trials, based on Bonner's and Grisham' s reports, and reexamining the fairness of U.S. justice, this paper attempts to answer those questions and contemplates the meaning and future of justice in the United States.