The Confession; by John Grisham.

Grisham used to give satisfactory if fantastic but not unrealistic endings to his tales of horrors and travails suffered by innocent and good people due to life and law in US, and then he went on to give some realism by doing away with the satisfactory endings in a couple of comparatively recent books; in this one he sort of finds a midway by describing how the legal and political (which is far too entangled in US at almost every level) system works like a beast of prey intent on finding a satisfactory victim to sacrifice for a crime and keeps the sacrifice on when the doubts about the identity of the criminal are overpowering, especially when the victim is the "right" race and the person caught in the legal net and browbeaten into signing a false confession is of the "other" race. That is the major gist of the background machinery crushing justice and people alike in the story, but it is all the more horror as well as satisfactory solution combined with a clever adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo with the identity of the criminal brought forth via a confession to a pastor by the said criminal, and the posthumous honour bestowed on the executed young boy (since he was taken in at eighteen and executed at twenty seven with no relief in the interim, he never really experienced being a young man or an adult) by the total exoneration is as tragic as the satisfactory prosecution of the secondary criminals in the story - the police officer who manipulated the innocent boy into confessing to something he did not do and repeatedly said so, the prosecuting attorney who knew the case was weak and got through on the basis of the affair he had with the judge, the subsequent judges who refused to consider the appeal on merits of the case and the new evidence submitted by the defence, the governor of Texas who refused to reprieve a mere day or week or month to consider the new evidence and his henchmen who lied, and so forth.

One does wish Grisham would show a downfall of the governor as well, but we know how Texas is. It is miraculous enough in this story that the exoneration was so clear and so quick, although the politico-legal machinery executed the innocent man nevertheless. The execution set in motion a huge storm against the whole process nationwide but was used in the wrong way by the guilty governor and his men for political survival (give reprieves to all the next guys for whatever flimsy excuse their attorneys bring up, never mind the total lack of doubt about the crimes).