Roger Keith Coleman: Must This Man Die?

"Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream." -- Judge Learned Hand, 1923

HERE IS A STORY AS TWISTED AS THE THIN bands of highway that corduroy the mountainous tip of southwestern Virginia, a remote pocket of mining country where the river runs black with coal dust in the spring. This much can be stated with certainty: on the night of March 10, 1981, in the town of Grundy, a young woman named Wanda Fay McCoy was raped, stabbed twice in the chest and slashed across the neck with such...