By PAUL BASS | New Haven Independent
The individuals who murdered an innocent man, who framed an innocent teen, who copped a fake confession all made choices. So did Nicholas Dawidoff when he told their story — and he has now left New Haven with a choice of our own.
Dawidoff chose to name names in telling the story. But not all names.
He chose to leave himself out of the story.
He chose to remove an omnipresent racial slur from the story.
He chose to wait to tell the story so he could tell it in full, to go back generations and to the South to trace the factors that led up to the plague of gun violence and limited opportunity and repeated long-term imprisonment of people framed for crimes they didn’t commit.
Dawidoff did all that to produce a gripping new book called The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and The American City. Norton releases the book this coming Tuesday, Oct. 18. The author will discuss it at upcoming community events. (See details at the bottom of the story.)
The city in the book’s title is New Haven. The violence takes place in the Newhallville neighborhood. The injustice is the incarceration of a 16-year-old bullied by cops into confessing to a murder they could have easily proved he didn’t commit and almost as easily solved — instead of allowing the real murderer to continue killing people before he himself lost his life to a bullet.
The story is both a specific tale involving a specific heinous crime and a specific compelling main character — and an all-too common tale (a small sampling of examples can be found here, here, here, here, and here) about a confluence of crises to which we become all too inured when we hear about it day to day. Dawidoff, a Pulitzer Prize-finalist author and New Yorker contributor, spent eight years diving into the story in order to tell it in a deeper, more personal way that’s much harder to ignore.
In doing so, Dawidoff has presented New Haven with the choice: Will we do something about it?