Book review: Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom

Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for
Freedom
by Rick Tulsky
402 pages
Pegasus Books, 2026

By David Newsom

Over the years, Kansas City has built upon its foundational beginnings as a hub in the western expansion of this country and as a gathering-point for railroads, cattle, and the meat-processing industries of the 19th century. Today, of course, Kansas City has grown into the flourishing Midwest city that it is.

However, like every good story, drama is found in conflict, in turmoil, and in tragedy.
Consequently, then, it is from Kansas City’s darker, more sordid history that Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist and author Rick Tulsky finds the story of his latest book,
Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom.

It begins on a spring day in 1994, in the northern reaches of the city, in the beleaguered
streets of Kansas City, Kansas, in Wyandotte County. A blue Cadillac parked alongside
a residential street. Two young black men—Donald Ewing and Doniel Quinn—sitting
inside, smoking crack cocaine, unaware that their lives were about to be violently taken.
Suddenly out of a nearby wooded lot walked another young black man, a dark hood
pulled up over his head, and carrying a shotgun. Approaching the Cadillac, the hooded
figure raised his weapon and fired, point-blank-range, into the car, killing both Ewing
and Quinn. And then he calmly turned and walked off, just as mysteriously as he had
first arrived.

Stunned eyewitnesses and family members of the two victims were immediately called
into the local KCKPD station and questioned by law enforcement about what it was they
had seen. A stack of photographs—profiles, mugshots—of young black men were
presented. “Do any of these faces look familiar? Could any of these be the shooter?”
One of the eyewitnesses pointed hesitantly to one of the photographs—a young, black,
thin-faced, short-haired teenage boy: Lamonte McIntyre. And his life was about to be
ruined.

It did not matter, of course, that McIntyre had no idea who the victims were—he did not
know them and had no relationship with them. It did not matter that McIntyre had
countless family members of his own to provide an honest alibi for his whereabouts that
afternoon: He was spending the day with family and friends. It did not matter that
McIntyre did not have a gun, had never had a gun, and had never even fired a gun in
his young life. Although everyone at the murder site had to admit how difficult, if not
impossible, it had been to get a clear look at the killer’s face, Lamonte McIntyre was
quickly arrested, arraigned, and eventually charged with two counts of first-degree
murder.

He was only seventeen years old.

What then unfolded for Lamonte McIntyre was an unfortunate and unprecedented
“perfect storm” of criminal corruption, ineptitude, laziness, unprofessionalism, racism,
and abject incompetence from Kansas law enforcement, and attorneys, and judges, and
prison systems that all fell in line to simply find a scapegoat, a young, impoverished,
powerless black man to point to as the killer—regardless of mounting evidence to the
contrary—simply to be shut of the case and to be done with it.

But it was Lamonte McIntyre’s life. And he would spend decades of his life behind bars,
serving time for a crime he did not commit. He would spend decades of his life
incarcerated in Kansas prisons, fighting to stay alive, battling depression, despair,
loneliness, hopelessness, ceaselessly arguing his innocence, ceaselessly arguing that
he had been wrongfully identified, wrongfully arrested, wrongfully accused, and wrongfully victimized by a system that did not care one way or the other about him or his predicament.

Until he finally met somebody who did care, and who cared enough to help him.

Enter Jim McCloskey and Cheryl Pilate, whose organization, Centurion Ministries, which
fought to take on cases of prisoners wrongly accused of serious crimes, embraced
Lamonte McIntyre’s case and began, in 2009, the difficult uphill battle of finding him
justice. Finally.

What unfolds, then, in the latter half of Tulsky’s fascinating book is an incredible tale of
bravery, and heroics, and redemption. Redemption for Lamonte McIntyre, certainly, but
redemption also for a flawed, failed legal system in 21st -century America. As Tulsky
trenchantly observes in his short Author’s Note in the beginning pages of Injustice
Town: “Americans are fascinated with true crime. If they were a fascinated with true justice, we would be a better nation.”

David Newsom is a former English literature teacher from Chicago who currently resides in the south KC area.