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Imagine being convicted of a crime you didn't commit and spending years behind bars. Since 1989 more than 1,400 Americans who experienced this injustice have been exonerated. Some of the people who have won their freedom include Ronald Cotton, who was falsely convicted of raping a college student; Nicole Harris, who was unjustly imprisoned for the death of her son; and intellectually disabled Earl Washington Jr., who was unfairly sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young mother. Wrongful convictions shatter lives and harm society by allowing real perpetrators to potentially commit additional crimes. How can such injustices happen? Overturning Wrongful Convictions recounts stories of individuals who served someone else's prison time due to mistaken eyewitness identification, police misconduct, faulty forensic science, poor legal representation, courtroom mistakes, and other factors. You'll learn about the legal processes that can lead to unjust convictions and about the Innocence Project and other organizations dedicated to righting these wrongs. The sciences—including psychology, criminology, police science, and forensic science—work hand in hand with the legal system to prosecute and punish those people whose actions break laws. Those same sciences can also be used to free people who have been wrongfully convicted. As a society, can we learn from past mistakes to avoid more unjust convictions?
TIME looks at those wrongfully convicted, and the fight to set them free.
Wrongful Convictions: Cases and Materials is the first legal textbook to explore the complex and fascinating legal and scientific issues involved in wrongful convictions and the exoneration of the innocent. This exciting area of the law is developing at a rapid pace as we learn more about the causes of wrongful conviction with each exoneration. The book is designed to teach about procedure related to the cases, as well as give a broad overview of the causes of wrongful convictions including false eyewitness testimony, false confessions, ineffective assistance of counsel, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and false forensic evidence. In this third edition, there have been significant updates to the cases and statutes from the previous edition, including expanded notes at the end of the chapters, as well as additional chapters on infant deaths, sex crimes against children, and arson.
The New York Times best selling true story of an unlikely friendship forged between a woman and the man she incorrectly identified as her rapist and sent to prison for 11 years. Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives. With Picking Cotton, Jennifer and Ronald tell in their own words the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.
"The only firsthand account of a wrongful conviction overturned by DNA evidence"--Cover.
"A report from National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence"--Cover.
“A riveting and infuriating examination of criminal prosecutions, revealing how easy it is to convict the wrong person and how nearly impossible it is to undo the error.” —Washington Post "No one has illuminated this problem more thoughtfully and persistently." —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy Jim McCloskey was at a midlife crossroads when he met the man who would change his life. A former management consultant, McCloskey had grown disenchanted with the business world; he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary at the age of 37. His first assignment, in 1980, was as a chaplain at Trenton State Prison. Among the inmates was Jorge de los Santos, a heroin addict who'd been convicted of murder years earlier. He swore to McCloskey that he was innocent—and, over time, McCloskey came to believe him. With no legal or investigative training to speak of, McCloskey threw himself into the case. Two years later, thanks to those efforts, Jorge de los Santos walked free, fully exonerated. McCloskey had found his calling. He established Centurion Ministries, the first group in America devoted to overturning wrongful convictions. Together with his staff and a team of forensic experts, lawyers, and volunteers—through tireless investigation and an unflagging dedication to justice—Centurion has freed 65 innocent prisoners who had been sentenced to life or death. When Truth Is All You Have is McCloskey's inspirational story, as well as those of the unjustly imprisoned for whom he has fought. Spanning the nation, it is a chronicle of faith and doubt; of triumphant success and shattering failure. It candidly exposes a life of searching and struggle, uplifted by McCloskey's certainty that he had found what he was put on earth to do. Filled with generosity, humor, and compassion, it is the soul-bearing account of a man who has redeemed innumerable lives—and incited a movement—with nothing more than his unshakeable belief in the truth.
A gripping account of one man's long road to freedom that will forever change how we understand our criminal justice system. During the last three decades, more than two thousand American citizens have been wrongfully convicted. Ghost of the Innocent Man brings us one of the most dramatic of those cases and provides the clearest picture yet of the national scourge of wrongful conviction and of the opportunity for meaningful reform. When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his innocence and the identity of the true perpetrator. These were spearheaded by his relentless champion, Christine Mumma, a cofounder of North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission. That commission -- unprecedented at its inception in 2006 -- remains a model organization unlike any other in the country, and one now responsible for a growing number of exonerations. With meticulous, prismatic research and pulse-quickening prose, Benjamin Rachlin presents one man's tragedy and triumph. The jarring and unsettling truth is that the story of Willie J. Grimes, for all its outrage, dignity, and grace, is not a unique travesty. But through the harrowing and suspenseful account of one life, told from the inside, we experience the full horror of wrongful conviction on a national scale. Ghost of the Innocent Man is both rare and essential, a masterwork of empathy. The book offers a profound reckoning not only with the shortcomings of our criminal justice system but also with its possibilities for redemption. "Remarkable . . . Captivating . . . Rachlin is a skilled storyteller."-New York Times Book Review "A gripping legal-thriller mystery . . . Profoundly elevates good-cause advocacy to greater heights -- to where innocent lives are saved."-USA Today "A crisply written page turner."-NPR
On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.
A powerful argument for adopting a model of restorative justice as part of the Innocence Movement—so exonerees, crime victims, and their communities can come together to heal In Rectify, a former Innocence Project director and journalist Lara Bazelon puts a face to the growing number of men and women exonerated from crimes that kept them behind bars for years—sometimes decades—and that devastate not only the exonerees but also their families, the crime victims who mistakenly identified them as perpetrators, the jurors who convicted them, and the prosecutors who realized too late that they helped convict an innocent person. Bazelon focuses on Thomas Haynesworth, a teenager arrested for multiple rapes in Virginia, and Janet Burke, a rape victim who mistakenly IDed him. It took over two decades before he was exonerated. Conventional wisdom points to an exoneration as a happy ending to tragic tales of injustice, such as Haynesworth’s. However, even when the physical shackles are left behind, invisible ones can be profoundly more difficult to unlock. In the midst of Bazelon’s frustration over the blatant limitations of courts and advocates, her hope is renewed by the fledgling but growing movement to apply the centuries-old practice of restorative justice to wrongful conviction cases. Using the stories of Thomas Haynesworth, Janet Burke, and other crime victims and exonerees, she demonstrates how the transformative experience of connecting isolated individuals around mutual trauma and a shared purpose of repairing harm unite unlikely allies. Movingly written and vigorously researched, Rectify takes to task the far-reaching failures of our criminal justice system and offers a window into a future where the power it yields can be used in pursuit of healing and unity rather than punishment and blame.