Crime Fictions
How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From award-winning sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve comes the first account of mass wrongful conviction in America, indicting a system purposefully designed to ensnare Black youth in order to close cases
“A must-read reckoning with past and present alike.”—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Fear and Fury and Blood in the Water
Wrongful convictions have long been dismissed as rare exceptions to an otherwise well-oiled criminal justice machine. But, after years spent investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the nation, Chicago’s Cook County, Dr. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve began to uncover a far more chilling truth. Wrongful convictions are not accidental, nor anomalous: There are at least hundreds of cases indicting innocent Black youth of crimes they didn’t commit. Arresting and incarcerating kids is the point—the “evidence” is tailored to fit.
In a suspenseful narrative account based on years of interviews, archival research, and the excavation of hidden documents, Gonzalez Van Cleve presents an ironclad “howdunit,” illustrating the steps that our supposed system of justice takes to “find” criminals, coerce confessions, and bury evidence.
A clear pattern emerges as Lee Hester, a disabled fourteen-year-old boy, is branded a “super predator” and convicted of killing his teacher. At just seven years old, Romarr Gipson is charged with a murder that is physically impossible for him to commit. Groups of boys like the Roscetti Four and Dixmoor Five are characterized as “wolf packs” in a pattern that connects them to the Central Park Five. These “crime fictions” are actively produced, perfected by police, enshrined in our legal records by the courts, and reinforced by the media.
Placing the exonerated boys at the center of their own story, Crime Fictions is a devastating, systemic account that leaves us to wonder just how many innocent souls have been claimed by the racist lies police tell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This shocking exposé uncovers how Chicago police have used false confessions and cherry-picked evidence to systematically produce wrongful convictions of African American boys. Sociologist Gonzalez Van Cleve (Crook County) spotlights harrowing examples of children being falsely accused of extreme violence; they include the 1961 case of Lee Hester, a disabled 14-year-old convicted of murdering his teacher, a charge considered laughable by those who knew him, and of seven-year-old Romarr Gipson and eight-year-old Elijah Henderson, accused in 1998 of the brutal sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old despite being physically unable to commit the crime. The author shows how, in each case, police dismissed exonerating evidence, from "a grown man's shoe print" to airtight alibis like already being in police custody at the time. Along the way she unveils a clear "set of patterns and practices that allowed police to bury evidence," such as 12-hour-long interrogations of impressionable children and selective reframing of evidence. Gonzalez Van Cleve's most alarming discoveries involve the continued use of long-banned practices, such as "street files," separate files of evidence hidden from defense attorneys, as well as law enforcement protecting itself from scrutiny through intimidation of both exonerees (one of whom was "stopped nearly twenty-five times for traffic violations") and whistleblowers, including a detective whose squad car's brakes were cut after he advocated for a child's innocence. It's a bone-chilling revelation of a "shadow system of justice" responsible for devastating untold numbers of lives.
