Innocent: Inside Wrongful Conviction Cases / Edition 1

by Scott Christianson

Overview

Innocent graphically documents forty-two recent criminal cases to find evidence of shocking miscarriages of justice, especially in murder cases. Based upon interviews with more than 200 people and reviews of hundreds internal case files, court records, smoking-gun memoranda, and other documents, Scott Christianson gets inside the legal cases, revealing the mistakes, abuses, and underlying factors that led to miscarriages of justice, while also describing how determined prisoners, post-conviction attorneys, advocates, and journalists struggle against tremendous odds to try to win their exonerations.
The result is a powerful work that recounts the human costs of a criminal justice system gone awry, and shows us how wrongful convictions can—and do—happen everywhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814716755
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2006
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Presumed Guilty
2 Mistaken Identification
3 Eyewitness Perjury
4 Ineffective Counsel
5 False Confessions
6 Police Misconduct
7 Fabrication of Evidence
8 Prosecutorial Misconduct
9 Forensics
10 Selected Wrongful Conviction Cases
Appendix
Selected References
Resources
About the Author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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. 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

Editorial Reviews

"Innocent is an excellent recommendation to make the next time someone questions the need for further criminal justice reform."

New York Law Journal

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

From the Publisher

"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