The Confession

“He tried to appear upbeat, hopeful, confident that a miracle was on the way. The miracle was slowly coming together, some four hundred miles due north, in Topeka, Kansas.”

The indefatigable defense attorney Robbie Flak, here filing appeals he knows will go nowhere, struggles to maintain the confidence and optimism he knows his overworked and underpaid staff (as well as Donté himself) needs. The miraculous confession of the real killer is incredible luck—though the novel will show that even this unlikely chance is not enough to save Donté.

“What’s more important here, Joey? Your reputation or Donté’s life?”

The novel makes the case that those who have worked to put an innocent man on death row did so for petty and self-serving reasons: political opportunity, fear of scandal, or hunger for the media spotlight. Here, Joey Gamble has to answer a private investigator’s question about his priorities, but even being put on the spot like this is not enough to get Joey to recant and thus expose himself to shame for the sake of another’s life.

“My whole life I’ve wanted to stop hurting people, to somehow straighten up, stay out of prison, get a job, and all that. I didn’t choose to be like this.”

In pointing out that he never wanted to be a sleazy career criminal, Boyette raises an age-old ethical question: Is criminality innate? Or do criminals choose violence? If they are genetic victims, then medical care seems more appropriate than harsh punishment.

“But the truth was not important.”

In his lengthy brief presenting the evidence of how Donté’s confession had been obtained—15 grueling hours of psychological manipulation by a rogue cop that ensured a teen’s false admission of guilt—defense attorney Flak summarizes the novel’s argument against capital punishment. Because trials cannot protect defendants against the realities of discrimination and racism, capital punishment cannot exist—it offers no chance of undoing a mistake.

“He’s a coward. Any human being who could do what he did to my precious little girl, I doubt he’ll be man enough to look at me…I expect he’ll deny it when they strap him down and he says goodbye.”

In a poignant moment, Nicole’s mother Reeva begins to question whether the man she has spent nine years vilifying in the media might in fact be innocent. However, before she can have that redemptive arc, she is shown at her worst: Here she is playing to the cameras in the days leading up to Donté’s execution—her assuredness will come to haunt her.

“Before long, he’d forgotten the old football scores and could only recall a few of the more famous scripture verses. He would stare at the ceiling for hours, mumbling over and over, ‘Jesus, I’m losing my mind.’”

The novel captures the torturous nothing that defines life on death row. Despite his heroic efforts early on to maintain a grip on his sanity by reliving football games or repeating Bible verses word for word, Donté eventually realizes that his mind is starting to collapse into a numbing sort of indifference. Later, Flak will argue that death row itself drives criminals crazy in one of his last appeals.

“The Drumm execution, though, would be his high-water mark, his vindication, a shining moment that the people of Slone, or at least the white ones, would appreciate. Tomorrow would be his finest day.”

Three years before Donté’s execution, the reputation of Slone DA Paul Koffee suffered when his long affair with the judge at the Drumm trial became public knowledge. Although reelected by a razor-thin margin and sure that his liaison with the judge did not impact the justness of the verdict, Koffee needs the execution to vindicate his reputation—that he managed to get a death penalty sentence for a man without evidence, witnesses, or body.

“And so it had all come down to this: a drunk Joey Gamble confessing his sins and baring his soul in a strip club to a man with a concealed mike that produced a scratchy audio that no court in the civilized world would take heed of.”

The novel reveals how condemning an innocent person comes down to tiny accidents of chance. The anonymous tip responsible for leading the Slone police to Donté was placed by Joey Gamble, a rival jealous of Donté’s high school successes. Now, Gamble is a failure who works a dead-end retail job and nightly numbs himself with alcohol. Still, he refuses to recant publicly fearing his mother might be embarrassed.

“Why couldn’t I stop myself? Because of what I am. I wasn’t born this way. I became a man with a lot of problems, not because of my DNA but because of what society demanded. Lock ’em up. Punish the hell out of them. And if you make a few monsters along the way, too bad.”

The sweeping indictment of the justice system in America includes the reality that young offenders fed into the prison system often come out worse than they went in. Boyette tells Schroeder that most to blame for the kind of monster he has turned into is being treated as a thing and not a person in prison.

“Hurry up.”

John Grisham uses the anxiety of a ticking clock to propel his plot forward. Here, as time is running out for Donté, Flak urges Schroeder to see speed as the priority: The only slim hope is to get Boyette’s notarized confession to the court of appeals and the governor. Donté’s life hangs in the balance of a 400-mile nearly non-stop drive.

“Well, the first thing I want to know I if there’s any reward money on the table…I have needs and I don’t have a dime and no prospects for finding one.”

With this, Boyette destroys any illusion that he is acting to save a man who is sentenced to die for a crime he committed. Instead, Boyette coldly demands money for his taped confession. He has no real need for this money—he is dying and has no family. He wants the reward only because it is associated with his victim Nicole: Her family offered it nine years earlier for information leading to finding her.

“He’s obviously lying. I’m not bothering the governor with this, and I want to keep the video to yourself. I’ don’t have time to look at it either. Neither does the governor.”

Texas Governor Newton’s staff decides not to show him Boyette’s confession, which means that these unelected aides—not a jury or judge —seal Donté’s fate. Moreover, staffers do not even watch Boyette’s tape. This blasé lack of interest—they are tired of the publicity from the case and want to move on—dooms Donté. Instead, the governor can describe Donté as a monster awaiting justice—rhetoric that plays to his constituents, and ignores the state’s Black voters.

“They arrived at the court at 5:07, the doors were locked, the offices closed. She called the clerk’s cell phone. The clerk said he was not there, he was in his car driving home. Donté’s final petition would not be filed.”

The novel features many moments of unconcern. Here, while Donté’s life hangs in the balance, a judge who wants to play tennis makes a fatal and selfish decision to leave the office early on an afternoon when then entire branch of the county courthouse is on alert because of the impending execution.

“Koffee was barbecuing chicken on the grill, breast and thighs coated with a thick sauce. But the treat of the night, he announced, would be ‘Drumm sticks.’ A chorus of laughter echoes across the lake.”

The barbecue that DA Koffee throws for friends, including the rogue cop who extracted Donté’s bogus confession is an unapologetically jovial celebration that reflects indifference to the approaching execution. The crude jokes, innuendos, and tasteless puns like “Drumm sticks” show the insensitivity and moral blinkeredness of the white power structure of Slone.

“I was a faithful servant, Keith, and look what I got…I could’ve prayed ten times a day, and I would still be sitting right here, with you.”

Schroeder wants to reconcile Donté to the Christian God of his upbringing. While Donté has seen many convicted criminals return to Jesus just hours before their execution, he tells Schroeder without bitterness that a life of following God had led him only to this miscarriage of justice. God, Donté has decided, is simply irrelevant.

“He paused, closed his eyes, then yelled. ‘I am an innocent man! I have been prosecuted by the State of Texas for a crime I didn’t do.’”

As Donté promised his mother and Schroeder, he does not die quietly or in surrender. He dies outraged. His last words are an impassioned diatribe in which he names those responsible for this injustice. He dooms them to future judgment and prophesies that when the real killer is arrested, Donté will haunt those who falsely condemned him.

“He was naked, leaving the world the same way he had entered it […] She dipped a cloth and began bathing her son. She rubbed his legs […] washed his genitals and wondered how many grandchildren he would have fathered.”

The scene in which Donté’s grieving mother prepares her son for burial by stripping off his prison clothes, bathing him, and the dressing him in a new suit is one of the most emotionally charged in the novel. The image recalls the Pieta of classical religious art—the traditional pose of Mary cradling the body of the crucified Jesus. A mother grieves her son, not as a victim of an unjust criminal justice system or as a political cause, but as an individual person with deep connections to his family.

“I saw something in the death chamber that should be seen by everyone. Why hide what we are doing?”

Schroeder’s question reflects his position in the novel as a stand-in for readers whose journey into the nightmare world of capital punishment changes him forever. His provocative question reveals his faith in the basic goodness of people who would be repulsed by the reality of state executions.

“It wasn’t enough.”

Schroeder’s assessment of the effort to save Donté is telling. Flak and Schroeder’s heroics and willingness to work for justice are in vain because the legal system is set up to imprison and punish, but not to admit mistakes or fix them. The eventual exoneration of Donté does nothing to save the young man and give him the life he was denied.

 “The truth must be told. It’s been buried for nine years by the police and the prosecutor, so, yes, it’s time to the truth.”

Flak’s decision in the immediate aftermath of Boyette’s confession and the DNA evidence from Nicole’s body to make public the role of those involved in Donté’s execution provides the novel’s closing affirmation that public servants—cops, lawyers, judges, governors—must be held accountable.

“The day we long feared has happened, when we would wake up to the horrible fact that we have executed an innocent man and that it can be proven by clear and convincing evidence.”

In his speech to the press announcing his intention to seek indictments against all those involved in the Donté Drumm case, Flak argues that after the Drumm case, the US must put a moratorium on executions. If this horror doesn’t make the country reexamine the underpinnings of capital punishment, what will?

“Would Jesus witness an execution without trying to stop it?”

Schroeder echoes Grisham’s own oft-recounted epiphany about the immorality of capital punishment, describing to his congregation how watching Donté Drumm die, wrongfully, at the hands of Texas has transformed his perspective. Before meeting Boyette, Schroeder, like most Americans, was unaware of the realities of state executions and had never considered their morality from a Christian perspective.

“I gotta tell you, Dana, other than our honeymoon, this past week has been the greatest week of my life.”

It might appear to be an insensitive thing to say given that the past week involved the execution of an innocent man, but Schroeder’s declaration to his wife reveals the exhilaration he has felt an activist deploying his social conscience, righteous anger, and his civic awareness—something the novel hopes to impart to its readers.