Innocent
Inside Wrongful Conviction Cases
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Innocent graphically documents forty-two recent criminal cases to find evidence of shocking miscarriages of justice, especially in murder cases. Based upon interviews with more than 200 people and reviews of hundreds internal case files, court records, smoking-gun memoranda, and other documents, Scott Christianson gets inside the legal cases, revealing the mistakes, abuses, and underlying factors that led to miscarriages of justice, while also describing how determined prisoners, post-conviction attorneys, advocates, and journalists struggle against tremendous odds to try to win their exonerations.
The result is a powerful work that recounts the human costs of a criminal justice system gone awry, and shows us how wrongful convictions can—and do—happen everywhere.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A chilling chronicle of what can happen when the criminal justice system goes awry, Christianson's volume documents 42 cases in which an innocent person was sentenced for a crime that she or he didn't commit. An investigative reporter who specializes in the American prisons, Christianson (With Liberty for Some; Condemned) finds the usual evils in our beleaguered, bureaucratic judicial system--prejudiced juries, mistaken identification, ineffective counsel. More frightening, however, are the cases that he reveals involve deliberate institutional corruption--false confessions, fabrication of evidence or misconduct by police or prosecutors. Despite the publicity surrounding the recent exoneration of some prisoners who were freed after the reconsideration of DNA evidence, many wrongfully convicted people still remain incarcerated. The powerful and compelling stories of such innocent victims carry this book, which is otherwise rather shoddily assembled--the anecdotes and photographs lack cohesion or orderly arrangement. Readers may be frustrated by the book's episodic structure and lack of narrative unity, but the subject is an undeniably important one.
