By C.W. Gortner
Heart-breaking, and at
times infuriating, in its depiction of the ruthless machinery of our courts,
“A Mother’s Torment” by Shirley Dicks is both a mother’s impassioned
plea for a fallen son and a scathing commentary on the terrifying
vulnerability that so many people without means in this country suffer while
enmeshed in the criminal justice system.
Jeff Dicks, the twenty-two
year old son of an impoverished Tennessee mother, was convicted of murder and
sentenced to die, despite an overwhelming lack of evidence to support the
claim that he did not participate in a store robbery that resulted in the
death of the storeowner. His mother Shirley’s desperate fight to exonerate
him and her unrelenting crusade against the men, and the system, that she
believes unjustly condemned her son, is the basis of “A Mother’s
Torment”. The book takes the reader on a journey from Ms. Dick’s
poverty-stricken youth and struggles to raise her children to the fateful day
that Jeff Dicks was arrested for murder; but it could be, in truth, any
mother’s story – and it is this fact that makes Ms. Dick’s account so
powerful.
Though the often grinding
pace of her narrative might lead an impartial reader to wish for less, Ms.
Dick’s drive to save her son can, in the end, only humble even the most
rational. Having experienced a lifetime of penury and hardship, Ms. Dicks did
not spare her own self from confronting, and breaking, the law in order to
keep Jeff alive. Her daily invectives and demands for justice are, at moments,
difficult to read—until one remembers that every day, somewhere, someone in
the nation rails with equal rage for a loved one to no avail. Ms. Dick’s
most gripping legacy in the book indeed arises from the contemplation that
while Jeff sat in prison and his trial turned into an unbelievable travesty
with only one possible outcome, it is a scenario that has no doubt played
countless times throughout the United States, exacting as its toll the anguish
of countless mothers and sons like Ms. Dicks and Jeff.
The loss of Mr. Dicks and
her family is unimaginable. Yet from the devastation, she has had the courage
and strength to pen this tremendously candid and passionate account, in the
hope of saving others. Her book is one every parent, and every person working
in the criminal justice system, should read—a testament to the unbreakable
bonds between a mother and a son, and to the indomitable will of the human
spirit.
C.W. Gortner is the author of The
Secret Lion, an historical novel set in the Tudor Court. He can be visited
at: www.leonibus.com
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Dicks's son Jeff has been on death row in the Tennessee state
penitentiary since 1982, when he was sentenced for participating in a 1978
holdup-murder. That he sat in the getaway car while an acquaintance committed
the slaying is verified, but according to the law, he is guilty nonetheless.
As portrayed here by his mother, Jeff was a naive, overprotected youth who was
deeply compassionate toward the dispossessed; in her view, that helps to
explain his association with the killer and with the orphan he married, who
turned out to be a troubled wife and mother. Dicks ( Death Row ) chides
herself for bungling every effort she made to help her son's defense, and his
lawyer is presented as having been more interested in his fee than in his
client. Although she diminishes the book's emotional impact by writing in the
third person, Dicks makes her case convincingly, and readers are likely to
agree that Jeff's death sentence is not just.