The Confession

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-17

Chapters 18-24

Chapters 25-29

Chapters 30-35

Chapter 36-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 30-35Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “The Exoneration”

Chapter 30 Summary

Exhausted and angry, Flak meets with his staff, Schroeder, and Boyette 12 hours after the execution. They need to get Boyette to Joplin, Missouri. Boyette assures Flak he can lead them directly to the remote spot where he buried Nicole’s body in a large metal toolbox from his construction job. They head to Missouri.

There, they recover the buried box. Boyette smugly unlocks it—finding it vindicates everything he has been saying. What they find is gruesome—the body is now little more than bones and pieces of fabric. They record the proceedings on camera. There is no doubt this is Nicole—her driver’s license and MasterCard are with her.

Chapter 31 Summary

Donté’s family gathers for his funeral service.

Boyette has another seizure and is rushed to a Joplin hospital, with Schroeder accompanying. Meanwhile Flak waits for the sheriff. At the ER, doctors recommend keeping Boyette overnight for observation. When Schroeder and the doctors head to the third-floor room to check on Boyette, they find his room empty. Boyette is gone.

Chapter 32 Summary

Flak phones his office and confirms finding the body. Because Texas will never admit a judicial error, Boyette will most likely be charged in Missouri. Flak acknowledges bitterly that “Koffee, Kerber, Judge Vivian Grale, the jurors, the appellate judges, the governor” (403) will never face charges.

Schroeder arrives home in Topeka. His wife calls him courageous, but Schroeder worries what mayhem Boyette might still cause.

Chapter 33 Summary

Back in Slone, Flak meets with Kerber and Koffee. He informs them that he will make public the case against Boyette and will file two lawsuits: a criminal action against Kerber and Koffee, and a civil rights action on behalf of the Drumm family. He will also file a complaint to the state bar association to disbar Koffee. Finally, he strongly suggests Kerber retire early. “I’m suing everybody” (415).

Flak heads to the Drumm home to deliver the news personally. Donté’s mother faints.

Chapter 34 Summary

As she watches live coverage of Flak’s press conference the following morning, Nicole’s mother realizes “the unthinkable” (420): Donté was innocent.

Flak lays out exactly what the police and the DA’s office did to ensure the guilty verdict: Kerber is a “rogue cop” with a history of “obtaining false confessions” (423), while Koffee played to the jury’s racism and used his affair with Judge Grale to his advantage. Flak also reveals that Joey Gamble, the state’s star witness, recanted his testimony hours before the execution and that the petition to delay the execution was never read by the appeals court because the paperwork was delivered seven minutes after the office closed. Flak next implicates the governor—materials were sent for his review the afternoon before the execution. Flak ends by saying the worst nightmare of the death penalty has finally happened: The state legally executed an innocent man.

After Flak finishes, Donté’s mother speaks briefly, begging the residents of Slone to stop the violence.

Chapter 35 Summary

Over breakfast, Schroeder asks his friend at the DA’s office about his legal liability. The friend advises Schroeder to lay low until Boyette is found, but Schroeder refuses: “I made a choice” (432), he says, ready to accept the consequences.

DNA tests confirm Boyette as Nicole’s killer. In Slone, both high school football teams agree to boycott Friday’s game in protest.

Chapters 30-35 Analysis

One of things that most challenges The Need for Activism is the feeling of hopelessness or pessimism. To create an example that counters this tendency, the novel portrays the aftermath of Donté’s execution as the beginning of a larger campaign for justice. This allows the novel not to end with Donté’s death, and also gives Grisham space to deal with the horrific murder of Nicole—a crime that has been mostly overshadowed by the miscarriage of justice arc. Flak and his team swing into action, their efforts now having little to do with their client—they are instead directed at bringing Nicole’s actual killer to account and at reforming the demonstrably fallible capital punishment system. Flak hopes that the revelations following Donté’s execution can expose those responsible, but knows that for this to be the case, he cannot stop working. This is why he files unprecedented law suits against “those responsible for this travesty” (403). Flak’s approach is a touch “vigilante-style” (428), as is made evident in the quixotic overreach of including the governor in a massive $50 million lawsuit. Although Flak ultimately does not succeed in his grandest ambition—a two-year moratorium on executions in Texas—he does raise awareness about the system’s many points of failure.

Grisham’s work with the Innocents Project provides the contextual background for Flak’s key point during his press conference: “[T]he first time that we know by DNA evidence that the wrong man has been executed” (402). DNA testing of Nicole Yarber’s body confirms Boyette as her killer. This detail is meant to remind readers of similar real-life cases, in which newly tested DNA evidence (often, the original trials predated DNA science) confirms the innocence of someone wrongfully convicted. The Innocents Project specifically focuses on DNA evidence because this is the only type of forensics that actually has scientific validity (fingerprints, hair analyses, bullet casing studies, and polygraph tests are notoriously subjective and prone to error).