The Whistler

The motif of the flawed legal system plays into the theme of corruption. As humans are imperfect, no system they create can be perfect. The author, a lawyer himself, uses the example of Junior Mace to show how a human system is vulnerable to error even without malicious intent. In addition to obvious corruption, like Dubose using paid informants to lie on the stand, are more subtle failures: For example, Judge McDover, having already decided the defendant’s guilt, favors the prosecution in her decisions, thus tilting the trial against Junior. As a result, an innocent man is on death row for 15 years, while the actual killer and the man who hired him are free to kill again.

Some people, like Gunther, avoid dealing with the discomfort of this reality by refusing to believe that false convictions can happen. Many people argue that anyone who is in prison is guilty of something, even if it is not the crime of which they’ve been accused. This is the reason that the author introduces the Innocence Project, which has exposed hundreds of false convictions, demonstrating that the system fails far more often than most people know.

The characters in the story say nothing directly about the morality of the death penalty, but if the system is so flawed that it convicts innocent people, then the death penalty is a significant risk. For the state to kill a single innocent person undermines the foundation of the American justice system.