The Fresh Persepctive

^{4 out of 5 stars}

This is one of those books where I watched the movie long before I read the book. I remember enjoying the movie and the book was also enjoyable. Sadly I feel like this is a good book but there is very little to say about it. Well I guess very little to say about the book itself but the themes that are still relevant in 2024 are important to mention.

This book is about Paul Edgecombe, the head guard at Cold Mountain Penitentiary death row, affectionately called the Green Mile because of the quaint lime green tile down the middle of the hall leading to ‘old sparky’, the electric chair. Paul recounts 3 prisoners that come to the prison in the fall of 1932, Del Delacroix, John Coffey, and William “Wild Bill” Wharton. While telling the story of these three inmates he is also telling the story of a new guard on The Mile named Percy Wetmore, a nephew of the governor who has kept his job through his connections.

Del, is a simple man who made some stupid choices that got him onto death row. He is savagely killed in the electric chair because Percy had chosen not to soak the sponge in brine. Wharton lives up to his nickname of Wild Bill from the very beginning. He attacks some of the guards as they are bringing him into the prison, Percy freezes and fails to assist, and he pees trough the bars and winds up getting stuck in the isolation room on more then one occasion. Percy shoots him 6 times while he is sleeping in his cell, sorry spoilers. John Coffey is a messenger from God.

You might be asking yourself how a messenger from God is stuck on death row well it all comes down to him being a big black man. This is 1932, before civil rights and it is in the south, Georgie to be specific. John Coffey is caught holding twin white girls who had just been savagely raped and murdered. He cries almost the entire time he is on The Mile and asks if they leave a light on at night because he is afraid of the dark. He also has healing hands. he heals Paul’s urinary infection, he saves Mr. Jingles (Del’s circus mouse), and the warden’s wife. He is also innocent but is the reason Percy shoots William Wharton. You see Wharton is the real rapist and murderer of those twin nine-year-old girls. John Coffey figures this out when Wharton touches him as they leave to save the warden’s wife.

I liked this book, it is a good book. I did not like that I had to read about an innocent black man being murdered by the state of Georgia. Paul and the other guards figure out the connection between Wharton and Coffey after Wharton is killed but are unable to do anything about it because it is 1932 in Georgia and everyone is fine seeing a black man fry for the crime. After all they found him holding the dead girls, the dead little white girls with cute curls in their hair. I have kids and if they were murdered I would want the murderer brought to some sort of justice. I would also want to make damn sure the right person was being brought to justice. I would also not condone killing them as retaliation.

That brings me to my next point, the electric chair. I have never understood the death penalty. That is a lie I do think that there was a time in my life I thought it was okay but probably because I didn’t understand what it actually meant. Can people be rehabilitated? Yes they can it happens in other countries across the globe. Yet in America we have decided that once a criminal always a criminal. This is not always the case and half the laws on the books were written to oppress people of color. So we have this system where someone kills someone so we decide as a state or country that this person needs to be killed. How does that make us any better than the person we are executing? Because we are doing it for justice? Killing in the name of justice is still killing.

In The Green Mile while John Coffey is being escorted to Old Sparky the mother of the little girls is yelling things about murdering him twice. Paul and the other guards that know he is innocent are trying not to cry. When Coffey asks to not have the mask over his face, because he is afraid of the dark, Paul allows it. He decides that if these people are going to insist that John Coffey be killed that they will have to look him in the eyes.

John Coffey was an innocent man and while he was fictional there are many that are not. America still has state sanctioned murder on the books in 27 states, 17 of those have not had an execution in 10 years or have formally suspended executions for the time being. America also has a tendency to over prosecute black individuals over white individuals. In a nation with a black population of only 13.6% America is seven times more likely to convict and innocent black man for a crime. Black exonerations from murder convictions are 50% more likely to involve police misconduct than those of white exonerations. As well as intentionally suggestive witness identifications occurring twice as frequently in the cases of black and latinx exonerees. The American criminal justice system is not the same for everyone and that fact is easy to see when you look at our prisons.

If you want more information about how many innocent people are convicted every year (black, white, and all the colors in between) you can visit The Innocence Project. You can also go the The American Civil Liberties Union on other ways to help reshape the criminal justice system. I hate to make a book review about my liberal ideals but America is living in a garbage heap of despair and has been for the last 24 years. Granted I could say we have since 1776 but I will leave the fore fathers out of this as they have had enough of my ire recently so we only focus on what we can change now and not what I can do nothing about from the past.