When Should Law Forgive?
by Martha Minow.
Norton, 252 pp., $27.95; $17.95 (paper)
One night in September 2018, in a gentrifying neighborhood just south of downtown Dallas, a twenty-six-year-old accountant named Botham Jean came home from work. Without locking his apartment door, he changed into shorts and a T-shirt, served himself two scoops of vanilla ice cream, and settled onto his couch to watch a football game. Before the ice cream began to melt, a stranger barged in, yelled, “Let me see your hands,” then shot him dead.
The stranger was an off-duty police officer, a white woman named Amber Guyger. Guyger lived in the apartment directly below Jean’s. She later said that she had accidentally entered the wrong apartment, mistaking Jean, who was Black, for an intruder in her…
