Book - Deadly Force: A Police Shooting and My Family's Search for the Truth

by Lawrence O'Donnell (TV anchor at MSNBC). Paperback, 472 pages, published 2018. Excellent used condition. Minor cosmetic wear, this copy is gently read. No writing, no highlighting. The binding is tight and all pages are intact. "On a rainy winter night in 1975 James Bowden, Jr. left Roxbury after visiting his mother. He guided his Buick to the street when an unmarked police car suddenly blocked his path. Two undercover officers sprang out and ran toward his car. Shots were fired and Bowden slumped over the wheel. He was pronounced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. "The police argued that they had fired in self-defense, claiming Bowden was an armed robbery suspect, and that after they'd ordered him to stop he had shot at them. Multiple internal investigations by the Boston PD exonerated the officers involved. But Patricia Bowden, James’s widow, knew better. “The truth will come out,” she said at her husband’s funeral. "She sought a lawyer willing to take on the police department and finally found one in Lawrence F. O’Donnell (the author’s father)--a man whose past, unbeknownst to Patricia Bowden, made him the only man in town who could not refuse her case. A highly contentious three-year battle with the Boston Police Department began, in order to win justice for James Bowden. More timely now than ever, this story is a powerful indictment of police misconduct, and a reminder of the long, tortured history of police brutality and of how far we still have to go."