Conviction: the murder trial that powered Thurgood Marshall's fight for civil rights

John Nicks, an attorney, and his son Denver Nicks, a journalist, recount the case of W. D. Lyons, a young African American man who was knowingly wrongly accused of murdering a white married couple and one of their children in 1939 in Oklahoma. He was defended, from Choctaw County all the way to the Supreme Court, by a young Thurgood Marshall, newly employed by the NAACP. Court testimonies take center stage here, especially that of Lyons as he describes the vicious beatings he suffered at the hands of white state and county officers and officials, including the prosecutor questioning him, which led him to falsely confess. The book's final chapters consist mainly of letters exchanged by Marshall, Lyons, and others at the NAACP during the appeals process. Lyons' widow provides information about his later years, after his parole and pardon. The authors only anecdotally connect the Lyons case to Marshall's later legal achievements as a civil rights champion, and they don't take the opportunity to link the case to obvious contemporary echoes, including Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge's decades of physically beating and torturing mostly African American men into similar false confessions of crimes.--Valerie Hawkins Copyright 2019 Booklist

John Nicks, an attorney, and his son Denver Nicks, a journalist, recount the case of W. D. Lyons, a young African American man who was knowingly wrongly accused of murdering a white married couple and one of their children in 1939 in Oklahoma. He was defended, from Choctaw County all the way to the Supreme Court, by a young Thurgood Marshall, newly employed by the NAACP. Court testimonies take center stage here, especially that of Lyons as he describes the vicious beatings he suffered at the hands of white state and county officers and officials, including the prosecutor questioning him, which led him to falsely confess. The book's final chapters consist mainly of letters exchanged by Marshall, Lyons, and others at the NAACP during the appeals process. Lyons' widow provides information about his later years, after his parole and pardon. The authors only anecdotally connect the Lyons case to Marshall's later legal achievements as a civil rights champion, and they don't take the opportunity to link the case to obvious contemporary echoes, including Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge's decades of physically beating and torturing mostly African American men into similar false confessions of crimes. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.