It is a sordid tale where the lines are forever blurred between fact and fiction, truth and lies, right and wrong, and, more importantly, black and white.

To Kill a Mockingbird meets White Fragility in this fast-paced legal thriller set in a small East Texas town.

Follow attorney R. E. Jackson’s intensely personal warfare against the powers that mete out their own personal rigged brand of justice in East Texas.

Review by Caleb Pirtle III

Biased Justice, the new legal thriller written by Stephen Woodfin, is a magnifying glass that allows us or perhaps dares us to look into the troubling and confusing times in which we live. Stephen is an attorney who knows his way around the courtroom and around the law, and that gives the story the touch of authenticity it needs to cut to the heart of every conscience that reads it.

Most of us are so involved with our own personal ordeals that we seldom if ever look deep behind the façade of our daily existence.

We see it on the evening news.

We read the daily headlines.

We know lives are being wrecked by the injustices designed by generations before us.

But if the problems of society don’t touch us personally, it’s easy to ignore them as if they never existed.

The first words of Biased Justice sets the tone and the theme of a novel that, in some ways, condemns us all. R.E. Jackson, an iconoclastic, maverick old East Texas attorney admits: “I was seventy years old before I realized I was racist.” He is asked to defend a school shop teacher, Cecil Johnson, who has been accused of inappropriately touching one of his female students.

Cecil is black.

His accuser is white.

He swears he’s innocent.

She says nothing.

The powers within a prejudiced town in a prejudiced county are quite willing to do her talking for her.

For R.E. Jackson, nothing about the case makes any sense.

But he plows stubbornly ahead, slowly peeling back layer after layer of racism that thrives within the inner circles of men and women who place their politics, their greed, their personal ambitions ahead of justice and equality in a town that hasn’t really considered its racial roots for decades.

He finds himself caught up in a whirlwind of white privilege, white fragility, even white supremacy as he fights to clear a good man’s name.

The evil tentacles of the case are intertwined within the political ramifications of churches whose members see no reason for change, and they ensnare the souls of prosecutors and judges and the legislative power brokers who all worship at the altar of the almighty dollar.

Biased Justice is disturbing in its truths, the kind we know about but never stop to think about.

It is a sordid tale where the lines are forever blurred between fact and fiction, truth and lies, right and wrong, and, more importantly, black and white.

And the cause we fight for or fight against is never what we think it is, never what it seems to be.