THE OTHER SIDE OF PROSPECT

A 2006 murder in New Haven, Connecticut, provides a framework for a wide-ranging study of the problems of life in cities divided by class and race and of the effects of an inept or corrupt police system.

Journalist Dawidoff, who was born in New York City but grew up in New Haven, examines in great detail the murder of Herbert “Pete” Fields Jr., a crime for which 16-year-old Bobby Johnson was falsely accused and convicted. He served nine years of a 38-year prison term before he was exonerated and released. The text—compassionate, thoughtful, and thorough to a fault—is caught somewhat uncomfortably between a sociological study of the causes and results of racial division and a more straightforward narrative of Bobby's conviction, imprisonment, and bumpy reentry into society. The author spent hundreds of hours interviewing hundreds of people, including Bobby, his family members, the lawyer who dedicated years of his life to getting Bobby released from prison, Fields' family members, and other residents of the economically depressed Newhallville neighborhood, which Dawidoff describes as “a fully formed working-class neighborhood without any work.” The author’s research and dedication to the project are clear, but the book would have benefitted from a stronger editorial hand. Readers anxious to get on with the story may get bogged down in the long account, drawing on Fields' sister's memoir, of his childhood in South Carolina. Certain chapters—e.g., an indictment of Yale for its lack of action in the city—are not thoroughly integrated into the narrative structure. Overall, though, Dawidoff presents a compelling examination of a situation in which police officers eager to put another case in the “solved” column ignored obvious evidence and coerced a teenager into a confession of a crime he didn't commit. Anyone with grand illusions about the American justice system will have lost them by the end.

An uneven but rigorously reported, urgent book.