Unequal Justice

"Welcome to Forrest City... named for the Confederate hero and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest... Forrest City was what the Chamber of Commerce claimed was a 'big little city in the U.S.A.', as business leaders desperately tried to counteract the horrifying publicity generated by the events recounted in these pages. Before Bill Clinton, the biggest national news for Forrest City came from its election of a gambler sheriff...
"Get off the 1-40 exit that takes you into Forrest City and you might notice the Planter's Bank, the bank that lent the sheriff more than half a million dollars. Near the dirty downtown... is a stodgy funeral home with a neat lawn. That was where men looked at another man's cut-out body parts.
"Down the street is the courthouse, where the sheriff and his deputies shot high-stakes craps. Out on the highway was a crop-dusting business, owned by the sheriff, which burned down mysteriously in the middle of the night...
"There is a lane with fashionable homes and well-trimmed lawns. It was there that a local girl said she was kidnapped by a man and taken out to the woods, where he forced her to perform oral sex...
"Had a traveler peeked into one of several houses in Forrest City in early 1985, he might have seen... a policeman selling dope, or - on Barrow Hill Road along Crowley's Ridge - men tying up another man and mutilating him into unconsciousness...
"Sound like Peyton Place on the farm? Maybe it was - except every word you are about to read is true."
These words from the prologue of Unequal Justice set the stage for Guy Reel's dramatic account of the appalling corruption in Arkansas' St. Francis County. Here County Sheriff Coolidge Conlee manipulated the entire political system for his own gain, while crowing, "I run this county." Reel vividly reconstructs the terrifying sequence of events that brought together two very different men in a struggle for justice: handyman Wayne Dumond - falsely convicted of rape and horribly disfigured by vigilante hit men - and investigative reporter Jack Hill, who exposed the evil perpetrated by the sheriff at great personal risk and sacrifice. Conlee was finally brought to trial and imprisoned for multiple felonies. But Wayne Dumond is still waiting for the justice that is his due. Despite DNA evidence proving that Dumond could not have been the rapist, then Governor Bill Clinton - a distant cousin of the rape victim - refused to grant Dumond clemency. Unequal Justice is a frightening tale of victimization and the failure of the constitutional protections that all Americans take for granted.