Administration of Criminal Justice, Courts & Trial Practice - General & Miscellaneous, Thrillers
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Overview
You're glancing through your morning paper when you see a story about a terrible assault in your neighborhood. Included in the story is a physical description of the suspect, and that description sounds a lot like you. Suddenly the police knock at your door and ask you about your whereabouts the night before. You were home alone. You spoke to no one. You own a red jacket like the perpetrator. You're dragged down to the police station, questioned for hours, hauled in front of a line-up. The victim swears you're the man who assaulted her. And so, after a two-day trial, you're sentenced to twenty years in jail. You're innocent. But with the whole criminal justice system arrayed against you, how can you prove it?Far-fetched? It happened to Tony Snyder, in Alexandria, Virginia. Unfortunately, such scenarios occur every day in this country. Lazy police officers, crusading and hostile district attorneys, shaken and unreliable witnesses, coerced false confessions, corrupt crime labs, lying jailhouse snitches, biased juries - all of these obstacles confront the wrongfully accused in a criminal justice system geared more to get a conviction than get at the truth.
This powerful book tells the story of innocent people put in prison because one or another aspect of the system failed. In each case, the lawyers of the Innocence Project worked pro-bono to free these individuals, a struggle that can take years, even after DNA evidence has definitively cleared the suspects.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
[Starred review] A report on the many ways justice can go astray and an innocent person be convicted. Perhaps one of the more shocking of their revelations is the unreliability of eyewitness testimony; they present a case in which three eyewitnesses separately identified the defendant as a rapist/robber. [The authors] offer a litany of such errors, along with detailed case histories. [They] offer concrete advice on how these dangers can minimized. This is an alarming wake-up call to those who administer our justice system that serious flaws must be addressed to protect the innocent.Library Journal
Scheck and Peter Neufeld, founders of the Innocence Project, along with journalist Jim Dwyer, give details of persons wrongfully convicted and imprisoned and, in doing so, point out problems with the American criminal justice system. Many of the people were victims of incompetent public defenders or overzealous prosecutors; some were identified by mistaken eyewitnesses, others by jailhouse snitches only too eager to make deals for themselves. Many of the imprisoned were released through DNA evidence that proved that they could not have committed the crimes; yet, as the authors show, the system sometimes moves much more slowly in redressing a wrong than in creating one. Throughout, though, the major emphasis is on the stories of the convicted themselves, gripping and anguished tales of injustice. Intelligently read by Michael Boatman, who lets the dramatics of the tales speak for themselves, this will make all listeners rethink their notions of justice and sentencing. Very highly recommended for all collections.--Sally G. Waters, Stetson Law Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.Allen Boyer
This timely, troubling book deals with . . . men wrongly convicted of rape and murder . . . who were able to prove that they were innocent . . . What this book does compellingly argue . . . is the need to presume a suspect innocent . . .—The New York Times Book Review
Book Details
Published
February 15, 2000
Publisher
Random House Audio Publishing Group
Format
Audiobook
ISBN
9780553526943