Innocent: Inside Wrongful Conviction Cases

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.