Summary of Mara Leveritt's Dark Spell

Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 When Jason was born in 1977, Arkansas’s death penalty was already constitutional. In August 1988, when Jason was in the sixth grade, his childhood path crossed that of the up-and-coming young prosecutor John N. Fogleman. #2 The Sultana disaster, which took place in 1865, remains the greatest maritime disaster in American history. It was caused by the explosion of a steamboat overloaded with recently freed Union prisoners of war. eighteen hundred people died in the disaster. #3 Jason’s family was almost rootless compared to the Foglemans. His mother, Gail, had earned a high-school equivalency degree, and his father, Charles Baldwin, was illiterate. They had moved him and his brother across the Mississippi River to Marion when he was five. Every Sunday and Wednesday, Gail took them to a Southern Baptist church. #4 When Jason was in fifth grade, his family moved to Marion, and his life was never the same. His stepdad would take him and his brother Matt out in the middle of the night to bars to look for their father, who was often drunk. One night, the police came and took them all to jail.