Chris Joyner is an investigative reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with more than two decades of experience in journalism, ranging from community newspapers to national and international news and wire services. He reported from the scene of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. As an investigative reporter, he focuses on uncovering hidden communities and has written about street gangs and life inside a supermax prison, the hidden world of government lobbying, and a white-collar criminal network built around a drug testing lab. He lives in Atlanta.
A compelling account of 'justice' in the Jim Crow South. Recommended for readers interested in true crime and race. -- Library Journal Drawing on his two-plus decades of experience in journalism, Joyner plumbs newspaper archives, court records and personal interviews to tell the story not just of Henderson--a Black sharecropper in rural Georgia who in the late 1940s and early '50s was convicted and sentenced to death three times for a murder he didn't commit--but of race in the US after World War II. -- CNN Three times Henderson went to trial for Stevens' murder, three times he was convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair, and three times his convictions were overturned. Meanwhile, many believe that Buddy Stevens' real murderer remained free. It's an intriguing cold case story that might have remained under the radar if not for Joyner's deeply researched book. -- Atlanta Journal Constitution Using a range of archival sources, Joyner illustrates Henderson's vulnerable position as a Black defendant, and shows how external factors--such as the introduction of lie-detection and ballistics analysis and the rivalry between the N.A.A.C.P. and the Communist Party, which were both determined to come to his defense--shaped the legal proceedings in unexpected ways. -- The New Yorker Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigative reporter Joyner debuts with a searing look at an unsolved murder case . . . Joyner provides just the right level of detail in this stranger-than-fiction narrative, in which endemic racism almost resulted in the execution of an innocent man. -- Publishers Weekly, *starred* review