The Perfect Shot

Many of the events and themes in The Perfect Shot revolve around the American justice system and how corruption, bureaucracy, and human error often cause it to fall short of the ideals in the Constitution. Todd and his brother, Warren, who is a lawyer, understand how patterns of abusing power affect vulnerable people, and they educate Brian and his friends so that they are more aware of them, too.

When Todd and Brian begin reading about the case of Leo Frank, Brian is shocked by how unfairly he is treated by the court. The southern community in Georgia was already prejudiced against him as a Jewish man, and instead of investigating real evidence, the judge and jury listened to and believed untrue stories about him. The prosecution paid witnesses to maintain the narrative of Leo’s guilt, and the corrupt system led to his being lynched when his sentence was commuted. This storyline draws on the history of lynchings in the United States, which emerged as a problem after the end of the Civil War and endured into the 20th century. After slavery was abolished, the legal system was used to perpetuate anti-Black violence and discrimination—Black Americans were often linked to crimes without evidence or accused of crimes that never happened at all. Reporter and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells wrote frequently about the sham trials conducted by lynch mobs, which often resulted in public torture and extrajudicial executions; her 1895 book The Red Record found that over 10,000 Black Americans were lynched without receiving due process in the Reconstruction era. Motivated by white supremacist ideals, lynch mobs also targeted other marginalized groups like Jewish people.

The Perfect Shot’s examination of the American justice system links this history of lynchings with present-day police violence and anti-Black attitudes in policing and law. In the novel, this is shown through Julius, who is illegally detained because the police suspect he might have done something wrong, even though they have no actual crime to link him to. Racial profiling is a pervasive practice in policing that results in a disproportionate number of young Black men being arrested and incarcerated. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander traces the lineage of pre–Civil War slave patrols to post–Civil War “racialized social control” that included both lynch mobs and unjust policing practices that targeted Black Americans. Mass incarceration is a problem that plagues the United States as a whole—as of 2024, 1.9 million Americans are incarcerated, one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Black Americans are targeted in particular; in 2022, 42% of the prison population was Black, though Black people only comprised 14% of the population as a whole (“United States Profile” Prison Policy Initiative). Another pressing problem with bias is that people who have run-ins with the police—whether they have committed a crime or not—are stigmatized and often targeted repeatedly. This is discussed in the novel—“But that’s all too often the way the police do things. They get a feeling about someone, and then make up their minds to find the evidence to prove it” (164)—as well as in nonfiction books like The New Jim Crow.

Officer Recks’s culpability highlights several enduring issues with the American justice system. His involvement with a drug ring and murders of the Daine family show how someone can abuse police power to commit crimes. Additionally, he is shown concealing evidence by failing to report Brian’s initial testimony. This reflects the difficulty in attaining justice if the people who are meant to uphold it act in their own self-interest instead. Later in the book, Brian reflects on all of the ways the justice system can fail someone:

Nobody seems to care about the truth—not the prosecutors, not the police, not the judges. They just care about statistics. Do we have a murder? Yes. Now let’s get a conviction. So what if he didn’t do it? If we call it a conviction, if the court rubber-stamps it, then someone goes to jail for the crime and we rack up another success (250).

These professional motivations contribute to false convictions. A 2022 Reuters report found that over 3,200 people were exonerated for false convictions since 1989. More than half of those exonerated were Black, indicating that mistrials of justice disproportionately affect Black Americans (Kemu, Hassan “Rising Number of False Convictions Shows Stark Racial Patterns.” Reuters, 27 Sep. 2022).