Innocent: Inside Wrongful Conviction Cases - Softcover

Christianson, Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081471675X ISBN 13: 9780814716755

Publisher: NYU Press, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Scott Christianson is the author of Notorious Prison: Inside the World's Most Feared Institutions and Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House (NYU Press, 1999). A longtime investigative reporter, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, the The Washington Post, The Nation, the Criminal Law Bulletin and many other publications. Since the author began this project, six of the convictions discussed in Innocent have been overturned.

From 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.
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About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 081471675X
• ISBN 13: 9780814716755
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 196