Deliberate Indifference

On Christmas Day, 1987, a black man named Loyal Garner, Jr., drove down the wrong road in East Texas and was pulled over by a white police chief. He was taken to jail, beaten unconscious, and hospitalized - after officers came up with a cover story. Although witnesses swore that he was murdered, the policemen were summarily acquitted by a hometown jury. Only after prosecutors in another county wrested control of the case was justice served. In Deliberate Indifference an award-winning investigative journalist tells a true story that resembles a cross between the plot of Mississippi Burning and a frontline report from Daryl Gates's L.A. With a meticulous attention to detail, Howard Swindle extends his inquiry beyond Garner's murder to probe the poisoned heart of American racial injustice. Deliberate Indifference is a profoundly disturbing investigation of sanctioned murder and a miscarriage of justice that brings home hard truths about America's stubborn legacy of racism.