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

This shocking exposé uncovers how Chicago police have used false confessions and cherry-picked evidence to systematically produce wrongful convictions of African American boys. Sociologist Gonzalez Van Cleve (Crook County) spotlights harrowing examples of children being falsely accused of extreme violence; they include the 1961 case of Lee Hester, a disabled 14-year-old convicted of murdering his teacher, a charge considered laughable by those who knew him, and of seven-year-old Romarr Gipson and eight-year-old Elijah Henderson, accused in 1998 of the brutal sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old despite being physically unable to commit the crime. The author shows how, in each case, police dismissed exonerating evidence, from “a grown man’s shoe print” to airtight alibis like already being in police custody at the time. Along the way she unveils a clear “set of patterns and practices that allowed police to bury evidence,” such as 12-hour-long interrogations of impressionable children and selective reframing of evidence. Gonzalez Van Cleve’s most alarming discoveries involve the continued use of long-banned practices, such as “street files,” separate files of evidence hidden from defense attorneys, as well as law enforcement protecting itself from scrutiny through intimidation of both exonerees (one of whom was “stopped nearly twenty-five times for traffic violations”) and whistleblowers, including a detective whose squad car’s brakes were cut after he advocated for a child’s innocence. It’s a bone-chilling revelation of a “shadow system of justice” responsible for devastating untold numbers of lives. (May)