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A Second Reckoning: Race, Injustice and the Last Hanging in Annapolis
2021 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year, Gold Medal Winner 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Silver Medal Winner Reader Views 2021-22 Literary Awards, Silver Medal Winner American Bookfest 18th Annual Best Book Awards, Finalist
Book Launch Video
Watch the video of the launch of A Second Reckoning at Washington's Politics and Prose Bookstore on October 26, 2021:
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A Second Reckoning recounts the story of John Snowden, a Black
man accused of the brutal murder of a pregnant white woman in Annapolis,
Maryland, in 1917. He refused to confess despite undergoing torture,
was tried—through legal shenanigans—by an all-white jury, and was
found guilty on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death.
Despite hair-raising, last-minute appeals to spare his life, Snowden
was denied clemency and hanged for the crime, even though many Annapolitans - Black and white - believed him innocent. More than eight decades after his death,
however, thanks to
tireless efforts by interested citizens and family members who
considered him a victim of a “legal lynching,” Snowden was pardoned
posthumously by the governor of Maryland in 2001.
The
book uses Snowden’s case to bring posthumous pardons into the
national conversation about amends for past racial injustices. It
argues that the repeal of racist laws and policies must be augmented
by reckoning with America’s judicial past, especially in cases in
which prejudice may have tainted procedures or perverted verdicts,
evidence of bias survives, and a constituency exists for a second
look. It illustrates the profound effects such acts of clemency have
on the living and ends with a call for a reexamination of such
cases on the national level by the Department of Justice, which
officially refuses to consider them.