The Chamber (novel) - Plot

Plot

In Greenville, Mississippi, the office of Jewish lawyer, Marvin Kramer, who is active in Civil Rights work, is bombed. He is badly injured but survives. His two young sons are killed. Sam Cayhall is identified, arrested and tried for their murder. His trial is engineered by his Klan-connected lawyer and is declared a mistrial. The second trial finds him not guilty and Sam is a free man. Several years pass and the FBI pressures a suspected associate, Dogan, to testify against him. He does so, and is later killed, almost certainly by the Klan.

Sam, an unrepentant racist and Klansman, is convicted of murder and sentenced to death by exposure to lethal gas, 20 years after the bombing. He is sent to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, and placed on Death Row.

Now without a lawyer, he becomes a pro bono case for several anti-death penalty lawyers; ironically from Krawitz and Bane, a largely Jewish law firm in Chicago.

Sam's son, Eddie, has fled to California, where his son Alan grew up under the name of Adam Hall. After his father's suicide, Adam starts to learn something of the violent Cayall history. Now working as a lawyer at Krawitz and Bane, he persuades them (with difficulty) to allow him to represent Sam, even though Sam has managed to terminate the representation. He journeys south from Chicago to the Memphis office to represent Sam in the final month before the date of execution.

Despite his lack of death-penalty experience, Adam is determined to argue a stay for his grandfather. Despite Sam's violent past, he is one of the few living links to Adam's history. Sam's daughter, Lee Cayhall Booth (Adam's aunt), an alcoholic who has worked hard to conceal her past, slowly reveals the sad, brutal history of their family.

Initially uncooperative, Sam eventually opens up to Adam and reveals a remarkable depth of hard-won legal knowledge, regularly preparing his own briefs and court motions. Adam interviews the FBI agent who worked the original case, and it becomes apparent that Sam almost certainly did not commit the actual crime for which he has been found guilty, although he was present. Nevertheless, he has a long and largely secret history of Klan-related crime and has killed several times. One of his associates (Dogan) is now dead, and Sam will not reveal if another associate exists, thus not violating his Klan oath of loyalty.

Adam desperately files motion after motion and argues some of them before judges. He seeks to persuade the state Governor to grant a reprive, knowing full well that such a move is politically impossible. And Sam has forbidden such a move, as he suspects the Governor of using him for politcal gain.

All appeals are finally exhausted. Sam is now repentant, but does not want Adam as a witness to the execution. The sentence is carried out.

With Sam and Dogan dead, no-one knows that Roland, the third man, who prepared and set off the bomb, is still free and living nearby, under a false identity and observing the progress of the case. Adam, sickened but fascinated by the experience, quits the law firm to accept a poorer-paid position with an group of anti-death penalty lawyers.