One of the trademarks of Stephen King's writing is the moral earnestness with which he approaches a wide range of social issues. The Green Mile is, however, the most overtly didactic of his works. Its purpose is to kindle the reader's outrage at the inhumanity and capriciousness of the death penalty. Victims of the death penalty are, King suggests, overwhelmingly, the poor, social or racial minorities, or the mentally impaired. The three men executed during the course of the novel are a Native American, a lowlife French Canadian, and a man who is both black and retarded. In contrast, "the President," a well-connected white man who had killed his father, stays on E Block only briefly before his sentence is commuted to life in prison. The Green Mile's descriptions of "routine" executions are merely heartbreaking; Delacroix's slow death during an execution deliberately sabotaged by a sadistic...