On February 8, 1994, the judges of the Louisiana 5th Circuit Court of Appeal decided, in secret, to stop reading petitions filed by prisoners who claimed they had been unjustly convicted. In the 13 years that followed, the court ignored more than 5,000 petitions from men and women in prisons across the state. They ranged from people convicted of murder to nonviolent offenders serving life for “purse snatching.” Many had a limited education and struggled to present their arguments in the language of the courts. None of the judges ever laid eyes on their claims. Instead, a court employee rejected all of them with cut-and-paste denials from a prepared list.
To put in blunt terms, in a state where racially charged policing and prosecutorial misconduct frequently make national headlines, and where a stream of exonerations has revealed a criminal justice system still functioning in the shadow of Jim Crow, a group of white judges determined that thousands of inmates, most of them Black, didn’t have anything to say that was worth taking the time to read.
By any measure, this was an appalling scandal, a criminal conspiracy hatched by those who are sworn to uphold the law. But the silence that followed may be the more damning indictment. In her gripping, exhaustively reported narrative, “The Scandal That Never Happened,” Anat Rubin unfurls this decades-long deception through the stories of three flawed people who tried — and failed — to expose it.
Part crime thriller, part character study, part revisionist history, “The Scandal That Never Happened” begins with a revelation inside a suicide note, then broadens its scope to reveal the indifference of a criminal justice system that believes — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary —that it is incapable of making a mistake. Rubin never falls back on hyperbole or overheated prose; rather, with understated authority and masterful control, she lets the facts pile up to paint a picture of a sprawling injustice, of the powerful forces that kept it buried, and of the prisoners who are still paying the price.
