Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction

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.

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University and an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, Illinois. She is the award-winning author of Crook County and has contributed articles to The New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC News, Crain’s Chicago Business, and CNN.  Her legal commentary has been featured on NPR, NBC News, CNN, and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.