The Worst Thing We've Ever Done: One Juror's Reckoning with Racial Injustice

In May of 1976, twenty-four-year-old Carol Menaker was impaneled with eleven others on a jury in the trial of Freddy Burton, a young Black prison inmate charged with the grisly murders of two white wardens inside Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison. After being sequestered for twenty-one days, the jury voted to convict Mr. Burton, who was then sentenced to life in prison without parole.

For more than forty years, Menaker did what she could to put the intensely emotional experience of the sequ...