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A review by roxanamalinachirila
The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins and His Struggle for Redemption by Patricia L. Bryan, Thomas Wolf
4.0
I don't usually read books about true crime, but this one caught my eye - it's not every day that an 11 year-old boy murders someone. I was half-expecting to learn Wesley Elkins hadn't killed his father and stepmother at all, only to discover he did in fact eventually plea guilty and never retracted that plea later on.
The story of the crime itself is pretty straightforward: in the late 19th century, 11 year-old Wesley Elkins was (probably) mistreated at home. One night he shot his father and hit his stepmother with a club until she also died. Initially, enough people in the town believed he was innocent, only for someone to extract a confession from him not too long afterwards, resulting in mostly everyone turning violently against him, including his own lawyer. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail.
As he grew older, he discovered that he could have gotten a lighter sentence had his age been invoked during the trial and, with the help of outside friends, he began asking for a pardon, even if it proved elusive to obtain.
The strength of the volume lies in the description of the world Wesley lived in: what the justice system looked like; who the people involved in his trial were and what their interests might have been; the lack of differentiation between children and adults, except by the discretion of the judge; the power of a community to damn someone; the prison system and the philosophy behind it; the prison he was actually in, what it was like, and what principles it was founded on.
It's an exploration of society even more than it is a story about a particular person; yet even so, we get to find out as much as we can about Wesley Elkins. Where court papers, newspaper articles and official letters end, Patricia L. Bryan looked into other sources (censuses, company records etc.) to reconstruct his life after regaining his freedom and becoming an upstanding citizen and a great help to his family.
Many thanks to NetGalley and University of Iowa Press for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.
The story of the crime itself is pretty straightforward: in the late 19th century, 11 year-old Wesley Elkins was (probably) mistreated at home. One night he shot his father and hit his stepmother with a club until she also died. Initially, enough people in the town believed he was innocent, only for someone to extract a confession from him not too long afterwards, resulting in mostly everyone turning violently against him, including his own lawyer. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail.
As he grew older, he discovered that he could have gotten a lighter sentence had his age been invoked during the trial and, with the help of outside friends, he began asking for a pardon, even if it proved elusive to obtain.
The strength of the volume lies in the description of the world Wesley lived in: what the justice system looked like; who the people involved in his trial were and what their interests might have been; the lack of differentiation between children and adults, except by the discretion of the judge; the power of a community to damn someone; the prison system and the philosophy behind it; the prison he was actually in, what it was like, and what principles it was founded on.
It's an exploration of society even more than it is a story about a particular person; yet even so, we get to find out as much as we can about Wesley Elkins. Where court papers, newspaper articles and official letters end, Patricia L. Bryan looked into other sources (censuses, company records etc.) to reconstruct his life after regaining his freedom and becoming an upstanding citizen and a great help to his family.
Many thanks to NetGalley and University of Iowa Press for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.