Monster and the Justice System

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading a book that has been sitting on my to-read list for over a year now.  Had I known it was only a 2 hour read, I probably would have gotten to it much sooner.  At any rate, I read Walter Dean Myers's Monster which is split between a first person prison journal and a screen play for the teenaged prisoner the story revolves around.

Steve Harmon was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was fingered by a neighborhood acquaintance as a look-out man for a stickup heist that ended with the death of a drugstore owner.  The screenplay is based on the trial that followed after one of the two people involved in the stickup implicated Steve in order to spread the blame around and lessen his own sentence. 

*SPOILER ALERT*

The books is transparent as to Steve's innocence.  Whether or not he will be acquitted is up in the air until the end of the novel.  The novel's suspense exists in this aspect; the judgment of the jury and the rhetoric of the prosecuting attorney left me as the reader anxious.  Would the DA be able to convince the jury that Steve was in fact innocent?  Would the Prosecutor's closing argument smear the lucidity of the defenses argument?  You'll have to read it yourself to find out.

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Coming up... Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion.