One of my favorite pieces in our September issue is Erin McReynolds’s essay “And These Too Are Defensive Wounds,” which details the author’s interactions with the courts following her mother’s murder. McReynolds not only testifies in the original trial, but is requested to do so each time the murderer is up for parole—a difficult revisiting of a traumatic experience. It reminded me that, over the years, many pieces in The Sun have described interactions with our flawed criminal-justice system and the dramas that take place inside and outside of the courtroom. Below are some of my favorites.
Take care and read well,
Derek Askey, Associate Editor
In this essay, Sun founder and editor emeritus Sy Safransky takes something as mundane and bureaucratic as jury duty and turns it into a thoughtful reflection on civic responsibility, politics, racism, and our—as individuals and as a nation—imperfect sense of justice.
Incarcerated people’s stories have long been essential to The Sun, and this one, cowritten by Gregory Bright and Lara Naughton, has stuck with me since I first read it. Bright spent nearly thirty years in prison before being exonerated for a murder he didn’t commit. I admire the plainspoken way he describes his arrest, trial, and conviction, but I especially love how he endeavors to see his long years in a Louisiana prison as a means of transformation.
Jackie Shannon Hollis’s essay, written in the second-person point-of-view, describes the moments after her sexual assault, when “you were a crime scene.” It’s a challenging account of a difficult time, shot through with the author’s sharp sense of description and her admirable candor.
Joseph Rodríguez’s photos have been gracing our pages since 2004, beginning with this striking collection of photos of incarcerated youths in California’s juvenile-justice system.
In the Readers Write on “Crimes and Misdemeanors” we meet delinquents, trespassers, shoplifters, scofflaws, and liars. You know—the kind of people with the best stories.
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