The Sing Sing Files
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4.8 • 17 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Bristling with urgency, empathy, and determination…this is investigative journalism at its best and most necessary.”—AudioFile
The author's podcast, Letters from Sing Sing, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
This program is read by the author and features sound design and original archival sound recordings from Sing Sing maximum-security prison, including letters written to the author. It also includes commentary from formerly incarcerated men.
An NBC Dateline producer's cinematic account of his two-decade journey navigating the broken criminal justice system to help free six innocent men
In 2002, Dan Slepian, a veteran producer for NBC’s Dateline, received a tip from a Bronx homicide detective that two men were serving twenty-five years to life in prison for a 1990 murder they did not commit.
Haunted by what the detective had told him, Slepian began an investigation of the case that eventually resulted in freedom for the two men and launched Slepian on a two-decade personal and professional journey into a deeply flawed justice system fiercely resistant to rectifying—or even acknowledging—its mistakes and their consequences.
The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice is Slepian’s account of challenging that system. The story follows Slepian on years of prison visits, court hearings, and street reporting that led to a series of powerful Dateline episodes and eventually to freedom for four other men and to an especially deep and lasting friendship with one of them, Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez. From his cell in Sing Sing, JJ aided Slepian in his investigations until his own release in 2021 after decades in prison.
Like Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, The Sing Sing Files is a deeply personal account of wrongful imprisonment and the flaws in our justice system, and a powerful argument for reckoning and accountability. Slepian’s extraordinary book, at once painful and full of hope, shines a light on an injustice whose impact the nation has only begun to confront.
A Macmillan Audio production from Celadon Books.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The plight of the wrongfully imprisoned comes into frustratingly clear focus in Dan Slepian’s exposé. As a producer for the television news program Dateline, he was tipped off to the likely innocence of two men serving time in New York’s notorious Sing Sing penitentiary. That led to a prison meeting, which led to meetings with more inmates and finally to his quest to unearth an epidemic of unjust convictions. As a journalist, Slepian knows how to build his case, speaking not only with those convicted but with prosecutors, defenders, law enforcement, and even jurors to show how miscarriages of justice happen. He organically blends journalistic gravitas, empathy, and frustration into his narration. The author’s work on behalf of JJ Velazquez, accused of murdering a retired police officer, offers a heartbreaking example of just how hard overcoming institutional racism and circumstantial evidence is. What The Sing Sing Files shows more than anything is that what’s broken with the U.S. justice system is everything.
Customer Reviews
❤️
Amazingly heartbreaking.
Incredibly moving
Dan’s experiences with these wrongly convicted inmates (compounded by their own stories) was equal parts uplifting and heartbreaking. I was moved to tears so many times.