Deliberate Indifference

Description

On Christmas Day, 1987, a black man named Loyal Garner, Jr., drove down the wrong road in East Texas and was pulled over by a white police chief. He was taken to jail, beaten unconscious, and hospitalized – after officers came up with a cover story. Although witnesses swore that he was murdered, the policemen were summarily acquitted by a hometown jury. Only after prosecutors in another county wrested control of the case was justice served. In Deliberate Indifference an award-winning investigative journalist tells a true story that resembles a cross between the plot of Mississippi Burning and a frontline report from Daryl Gates’s L.A. With a meticulous attention to detail, Howard Swindle extends his inquiry beyond Garner’s murder to probe the poisoned heart of American racial injustice. Deliberate Indifference is a profoundly disturbing investigation of sanctioned murder and a miscarriage of justice that brings home hard truths about America’s stubborn legacy of racism.Acknowledgments
Preface
Prologue
1. The Arrest
2. Coma
3. Pine Thickets and Good Ol’ Boys
4. Sabine Law
5. Outside Scrutiny
6. Under Color of Law
7. Fighting Over the Body
8. Legacy of Shame
9. Relying on Old Adversaries
10. Precedent
11. “Against the Peace and Dignity of the State”
12. Loyal
13. Death Threats and Freedom
14. “Agitators”
15. Lawyers from Alabama
16. Forging an Alliance
17. Official Silence
18. Murder
19. Fear and Anger
20. Patterns and Circles
21. The Race to the Courthouse
22. Precarious Positions
23. A Jury of Peers
24. Prosecution
25. “Wild Man”
26. “Psychotic Bully”
27. God, Flag, and Sabine County
28. All or Nothing
29. Double Jeopardy
30. Conviction

Epilogue
Cast of Characters

US