The Confession

Schroeder is a mild-mannered Lutheran pastor whose quiet routine in Topeka, Kansas, is suddenly upended when murderer Travis Boyette confesses to a killing for which the innocent Donté Drumm is about to executed.

Schroeder acts as a surrogate for readers, whom John Grisham imagines as well-intentioned and moral people who are unfamiliar with the injustices of the death penalty. Before learning about the flawed reality of the capital punishment system, Schroeder does little to apply the abstract ideals of his Christian faith to the world outside his church. However, during the course of the novel, learning about the shocking unfairness of the legal system makes Schroeder a staunch opponent of capital punishment. He ends the novel a committed social justice activist; his vague sermons now pointed directives, as he asks his congregation in Topeka the question that stirred Grisham, also a Christian, to become an anti-capital punishment advocate: “Would Jesus witness an execution without trying to stop it?” (445).

Witnessing the execution of Donté Drumm, Schroeder is convinced that the death penalty is barbaric—the culmination of an emotionally trying series of events that has made Schroeder into “a different person or at least a different preacher, suddenly confronting social injustice” (445). Having never “felt so alive” (422), he ends the novel as Grisham hopes readers do: awakened, outraged, and ready to continue the fight.

Executed at the age of 27 for a heinous murder he did not commit, Donté Drumm is the novel’s tragic hero. An accomplished student and a promising running back with scholarship potential, Donté, at the age of 17, loses everything because Joey Gamble, a white kid in his class, is jealous of Donté’s romantic interest in cheerleader Nicole. After she goes missing, the young Donté is bullied by police into signing away his right to an attorney and then tortured into signing a bogus confession to the murder as the only way to extricate himself from a nearly 15-hour interrogation. 

Prison destroys Donté’s spirit. As one appeal after another fails, his determination to organize the long sunless days into activities that would protect his mind slowly fade into irrelevancy. By the time of his execution, he looks more like an old man, stooped, wobbly legged, shuffling, sustained primarily by his deep love for his mother. A psychiatrist hired by Donté’s defense attorney confirms that he is now showing signs of mental illness: “Death row is a nightmare for serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it’s a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive” (129).

Donté loses his faith and rejects the idea that he needs to make amends with God. Instead, in his final moments, Donté summons the courage and the spiritual fortitude to proclaim once again his innocence and to defiantly name those in the white power structure of Slone and the state responsible for his fate. Donté promises them that “judgment is coming” (335)—a prediction that comes true.