It took less than two days after the body of Lottie Mae Brandon, a pregnant white newlywed, was found in her Annapolis flat in 1917 for the editor of the local newspaper – based on no evidence at all – to conclude that her murder must have been the work of a Black man. It took only 22 minutes for an all-white jury to convict John Snowden, an African-American iceman, for the crime and sentence him to death, based entirely on circumstantial evidence. But it took more than eight decades after his death for him to be pardoned for the murder that many believe to this day he did not commit.

Snowden’s was the last hanging Anne Arundel County, Maryland would ever see. But it was the one Annapolis would remember for a century.

Set in Jim Crow Maryland, the book recounts the story of a case many Black and white Annapolitans saw as a “legal lynching.” It takes the reader through the discovery of the murder, the police investigation that followed, the arrest of Snowden, his brutal interrogation, his trial and his unsuccessful appeal, the stubborn refusal of the then-governor to commute his sentence and his death on the scaffold.

It then picks the story up in the 1990s, chronicling the efforts of an activist Annapolis alderman who, working with Snowden’s family members and others, pressed for a posthumous pardon for Snowden against the backdrop of a national debate over the future of the death penalty and a growing body of evidence of the corrupting role race plays in its imposition. The Snowden case was a way station on the road to total abolition of the death penalty in the state.

But it was more than that. It was also a stand-in for countless other cases in which justice may not have been done. The book brings posthumous pardons into the national conversation on amends for past racial injustices. It argues that the repeal of blatantly racist laws and changes in federal, state and local government policies are insufficient and must be augmented with a reckoning with our judicial past, especially those instances in which prejudice may have tainted procedures or perverted verdicts. It illustrates the profound effects of such acts of clemency on people very much alive today, and issues a siren call for a re-examination of such cases on the national level, especially by the U. S. Department of Justice, which to this day officially refuses even to consider them.