REVIEWS

OUT OF EVIL, RIGHTEOUSNESS

The 1997 film Amistad chronicles an historic episode in which an American court tried kidnapped Africans for hijacking the ship hauling them to bondage. In it, an actor playing white antislavery activist Lewis Tappan suggests a wrongful conviction would suit the abolitionist cause more than an acquittal. A colleague decries Tappan’s eagerness to martyr innocents, but the fact is that instances of grave injustice often serve as catalysts for reform.

Thus, one of Thurgood Marshall’s few courtroom failures helped dismantle American racism. In trying Marshall’s client William Lyons, convicted in 1941 of a heinous triple murder, Oklahoma authorities so abused justice that a community drenched in racial bias came to support an African American man wrongly accused. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court accomplished nothing. The justices distinguished between confessions made as a suspect was being beaten and those made hours after the beating had ceased, ruling that while the former were coerced the latter were