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Title: Dreams of ADA
Penguin Publishing Group
Item Number: 9780451821829
Number: 1
Product Description: Dreams of ADA
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780451821829
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780451821829
Rating: 5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/18/29/9780451821829.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Luke Scioscio
reviewed Dreams of ADA on January 05, 2009“Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.â€
- Franz Kafka, The Trial
“Ada is…pecan country; on the outskirts are commercial pecan orchards; in the grassy yards of many houses are one or more pecan trees. In the fall, when the pecans are ripe, the adults knock them off the trees with long poles. The children gather the fallen ones from the ground. The nuts not intended for commercial use are taken to the pecan cracker. There, in the small white building, the pecans are dumped into the funnel-like tops of machines…One by one the hard pecans fall into moving gears. The top set of gears cracks open the largest pecans. Smaller pecans fall through, untouched, to another set of gears. These mesh closer and crack apart the smaller pecans. Still some escape and fall again: to another set of gears. These gears mesh tighter still; like steel claws they crack apart even the smallest pecans. Few pecans are too small, few shells too hard, to be cracked and broken…â€
- Robert Mayer, The Dreams of Ada
“They say I killed a girl…They told me I killed her and that I’ll get the death penalty. But I didn't do it…I didn't confess…I told them a dream I had. It was only a dream. But they say it’s true…â€
- Tommy Ward, convicted murderer of Donna Denise Haraway
I practiced criminal law as a public defender for almost nine years. It is the kind of job that requires constant explanation to family, friends, and people you meet at parties. Whenever I told someone what I did, I received a variation of the same response: How can you defend guilty people? My answer, depending on how much I’d been drinking, coalesced around this reply: How do you know they’re guilty?
Doing a job like that (and I won’t claim I was great at it), requires a lot of skepticism, a certainty that there is no certainty, and a willingness to accept that yes, a lot of the people you meet are, in fact, guilty.
Also, though, a lot of people are not.
Of course, if a crime isn’t serious, you will find that a lot of defendants would rather take a plea bargain for a shorter sentence than validate their constitutional rights in a slow-moving and uncertain process. Thus, a lot of the day-to-day work of criminal justice is comprised of folks holding their noses and pretending the system works just fine.
Often, it takes a hard case – a tough murder – to show you the systemic flaws.
The murder of Donna Denise Haraway was just such a case.
Robert Mayer’s The Dreams of Ada covers it with meticulous research, expansive scope, and a keen sense of place.
In April 1984, Haraway disappeared from her job at a convenience store in Ada, Oklahoma. Two young men, Karl Fontenot and Tommy Ward, were eventually accused of her rape and murder, despite a lack of hard evidence (including her body, which had not been found). Unfortunately, Karl and Tommy were not the freshest sandwiches in the picnic basket. They were brought into the police station and interrogated for hours and hours and hours. During that time, they never said the magic word (hint: it starts with "L" and ends with LAWYER), and so were at the mercy of law enforcement’s coercive techniques.
At the end of the ceaseless badgering, both men copped to the crime, despite the fact that their stories were contradictory, implausible, and unsupported by physical evidence. The twist in this tale is that the “confession†of Ward was extracted after he mentioned a dream he’d had. That dream became reality for the police, and an unending nightmare for Ward. With so little to go on, the putative admissions of the defendants were the linchpin of the cases against them.
(It is worth noting, for those who believe they’d never falsely confess: twenty-five percent of convictions overturned as a result of DNA testing were based on false confessions. It does happen. It does happen a lot).
As crazy as the "dream confession" sounds, it was also the basis of another conviction in Ada, that of Ron Williams, accused of raping and killing a woman named Debbie Carter two years before Haraway’s death. Eventually, Williams had his conviction and death sentence, a story told by John Grisham in his estimable The Innocent Man.
The lesson, I suppose, is stay clear of Ada if you have an active nocturnal subconscious.
The Dreams of Ada is a sad, tragic book. There are no winners, just a string of losers: a young, missing woman; two men with stunted futures convicted by an overzealous prosecutor, with incompetent defense counsel; the multiple families mourning the losses of their sons and daughter; and justice itself, masquerading as infallible. You see, in The Dreams of Ada, how hard people will try, how far they will go, to protect the system, and their place within it. The men and women in the machinery do not matter. They are the pecans, poured into the cracker. It is the illusion that matters. The illusion that our scheme of justice is not riddled with fault lines that typically swallow the most vulnerable: the poor; minorities; the developmentally challenged; the young.
Mayer does a fantastic job with this material. There's a real feel for the town and its small-time dreamers. It's like Friday Night Lights filtered through Dateline and mixed with CSI, if every cast-member of CSI used the constitution to wipe their noses. More than that, he makes a huge effort at explaining all the steps along the way, without dumbing anything down. For instance, at one point, he takes us all the way back to 1909, to tell the story of the first no-body murder case in Oklahoma.
The best way to explain The Dreams of Ada is to say it is absorbing. When I read it, it enveloped me. It also infuriated me.
Nothing about the case against Tommy and Karl feels right. The story they told was ridiculous, and it kept changing. The cops kept searching the area where they said they buried the body and found nothing. They said they burned her. They said they stabbed her. Years later, after the trial, Haraway’s body was found by hunters. She had died from a single gunshot. No bone-scarring from a knife. No signs of burning. The confession was a dream, not just of Tommy and Kirk, but of a law enforcement organization bent on attaining a conviction.
Innocent people are jailed. Innocent people have been executed. Those exonerees who manage the Sisyphean task of overturning their convictions typically have a lot of help, help that often comes in the form of outside interest. The West Memphis Three, for example, needed the Dixie Chicks and Peter Jackson. The case of Tommy Ward and Kirk Fontenot never really became a cause célèbre. That may change now that Netflix has turned Grisham’s The Innocent Man into its latest installment of prestige true crime.
Even with the publicity, it is unlikely that Ward and Fontenot will be sprung, barring a miracle. They have rotted in prison for decades, despite all the flaws and errors that put them there in the first place. Too much is stacked against them. Not just the careers and reputations of those who prosecuted them, but the fantasy that a guilty verdict is really as meaningful as we pretend.
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