Overview

In 2003 Governor George Ryan cleared Illinois' death row, pardoning four death penalty inmates who said their confessions had been tortured out of them. He then commuted the death sentences of the remaining 156 death-row inmates to life in prison - a move unprecedented since capital punishment was reinstated in America. But Ryan's move was only the most dramatic at a time when it seems that everyday we read of a new prisoner released because of new evidence, police misconduct, or a host of other miscarriages of justice. While the American legal system is based on the tenet that accused persons are considered innocent until proven guilty, a close look at many cases reveal that this is often far from the truth. The 42 cases collected and graphically documented in ""Innocent"" tell the story of just such wrongful conviction cases. Based upon interviews with more than 200 people and reviews of hundreds of internal case files, court records, smoking-gun memoranda and other documents, Scott Christianson gets inside the legal cases and displays them through documents and images of the people and evidence involved. He reveals the mistakes, abuses and underlying factors that led to miscarriages of justice, including the presumption of guilt, mistaken identification, eyewitness perjury, ineffective assistance of counsel, police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, and forensics, while also describing how determined prisoners, post-conviction attorneys, advocates and journalists struggled against tremendous odds to win their exonerations. Some of the defendants in ""Innocent"" are still in prison, trying to prove their innocence to the courts. Others have had their convictions reversed and the charges against them dismissed, and still others have been awarded civil damages after the state conceded their innocence. The result is a brief and powerful work that recounts the human costs of a criminal justice system gone awry, and reminds us that wrongful convictions can - and do - happen.

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9780814716342

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Innocent is an excellent recommendation to make the next time someone questions the need for further criminal justice reform. -New York Law Journal A chilling chronicle of what can happen when the criminal justice system goes awry. -Publishers Weekly Christianson succeeds in raising reasonable doubts and questions about the integrity of our criminal justice system. Written with perceptiveness and sympathy for the plight of the wrongly convicted, [Innocent] is an excellent addition to the literature on miscarriages of justice. -Justicia This should be required reading for everyone who gives a damn about justice in this country. -Mickey Sherman,CBS News legal analyst

A chilling chronicle of what can happen when the criminal justice system goes awry. -Publishers Weekly Christianson succeeds in raising reasonable doubts and questions about the integrity of our criminal justice system. Written with perceptiveness and sympathy for the plight of the wrongly convicted, [Innocent] is an excellent addition to the literature on miscarriages of justice. -Justicia Innocent is an excellent recommendation to make the next time someone questions the need for further criminal justice reform. -New York Law Journal This should be required reading for everyone who gives a damn about justice in this country. -Mickey Sherman,CBS News legal analyst

A chilling chronicle of what can happen when the criminal justice system goes awry. - Publishers Weekly Innocent is an excellent recommendation to make the next time someone questions the need for further criminal justice reform. - New York Law Journal This should be required reading for everyone who gives a damn about justice in this country. - Mickey Sherman, CBS News legal analyst Christianson succeeds in raising reasonable doubts and questions about the integrity of our criminal justice system. - Justicia

Author Information

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.

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