5. Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer A book that launched a movement: Scheck and Neufeld are co-founders of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organisation that has helped free hundreds of wrongfully convicted men and women.
9. Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Accused, edited by Laura Caldwell and Leslie S Klinger It’s a brilliant idea: spotlight the experiences of men and women who’ve been falsely accused by asking today’s most talented thriller writers to tell their stories.
Barry Scheck (left), co-founder of the Innocence Project, with (l-r) Damon Thibodeaux, Derrick James and Rickie Johnson, all of whom were exonerated after being wrongfully convicted. Photograph: Michael Democker/AP.
Using the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s as a springboard, Flynn’s chilling story of a woman who helped convict her brother of the grisly murder of their family when she was a child established Flynn as one of the best contemporary crime writers years before Gone Girl made her famous. 7. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
An innocent make-out session led to Adams being accused of rape. An important statement from an eyewitness was withheld from the trial, and subsequently led to Adams being sentenced to 28 years in jail.
rapeAt 17 years old, Jarrett Adams, a Black boy from the south side of Chicago, was convicted of raping a white college freshman at the University of Wisconsin. Adams would spend 10 years of his young life in prison for a rape he always maintained he did not commit.
Grisham, whose latest novel, The Whistler, hit bookstores in October, is a longtime member of the Innocence Project's Board of Directors. Read the full interview online at The Marshall Project.
Author John GrishamAuthor John Grisham tackles criminal justice reform, wrongful conviction in new interview. There is nothing worse than wrongfully convicting an innocent person for a crime they didn't commit while the true perpetrator remains free, says Grisham.
With The Guardians, John Grisham is back in top form with his latest legal thriller. Based on the true story of James McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, The Guardians is thinly disguised as fiction.
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is a 2006 true crime book by John Grisham, his only nonfiction title as of 2020.
John Grisham Books in Order – The Legal StoriesThe Firm (1991)The Pelican Brief (1992)The Client (1993)The Chamber (1994)The Rainmaker (1995)The Runaway Jury (1996)The Partner (1997)The Street Lawyer (1998)More items...•
165: Actual assailants identified. Those actual perpetrators went on to be convicted of 154 additional violent crimes, including 83 sexual assaults, 36 murders, and 35 other violent crimes while the innocent sat behind bars for their earlier offenses.
Advocate for the innocent.Jailhouse Informants.Inadequate Defense.Misused Forensic Science.Access to Post-Conviction DNA Testing.False Confessions.Eyewitness Misidentification.
To date, 375 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 21 who served time on death row. These people served an average of 14 years in prison before exoneration and release.
Almost none would get the death penalty.... The death penalty is dying, not because of the courage of lawmakers or judges, but because of the compassion shown by jurors who are fully informed in trials that are fair....
The leading cause of wrongful convictions is eyewitness misinterpretation. This is mostly just an honest mistake that can happen because most crimes take place very quickly. Also, those committing the crime often hide their appearance.
Prisons across the country house inmates who received severe sentences for minor charges, while far too many criminal cases are rushed through the legal system due to an overzealous prosecution or a lack of proper financial and legal resources on the part of the defense.
In 1947 Chicago, a Black man named James Hickman shot and killed the landlord he believed was responsible for a house fire that took the lives of his four children.
Prisons across the country house inmates who received severe sentences for minor charges, while far too many criminal cases are rushed through the legal system due to an overzealous prosecution or a lack of proper financial and legal resources on the part of the defense.
When Dorothy Marcic’s uncle LaVerne Stordock was shot and killed by his wife, she struggled to accept the details of the murder. LaVerne was a well-respected family man, a pillar of the community, and a former police detective. His death sent shockwaves through his town, and despite investigators considering the case open-and-shut after a confession and insanity plea from LaVerne's widow, something seemed amiss.
Jennifer Thompson was brutally raped at knifepoint in her own home, but managed to escape her attacker before he could kill her. When she identified Ronald Cotton as her rapist, the police investigation stopped there. Cotton was arrested and sent to prison. It was not until 11 years later that DNA evidence cleared Cotton's name and led to his exoneration.
In the first example, Wilson described how a security officer had assumed she must be a defendant rather than a barrister. A fellow lawyer and a court clerk separately assumed that she was being represented in court, rather than appearing as a barrister.
(CNN) A UK lawyer who wrote a book about discrimination in the court system has said she was racially profiled four times in one day, including being mistaken for a defendant.
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. Atlanta newlyweds Roy and Celestial are ready to take on the world, but when Roy is convicted of a crime he did not commit, their union is jolted. What I admired most was Jones’s focus on the intimate details of what injustice does to people who love each other.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. In 1815, sailor Edmond Dantès is about to marry his love when three friends falsely accuse him of treason. He is imprisoned for more than a decade and when he escapes exacts all kinds of spectacular revenge.
One of the most common causes of wrongful convictions is faulty eyewitness testimony. But that knowledge doesn’t tell us why or how someone could make such a major mistake. In Atonement, however, we get to go inside the mind of a 13-year-old girl whose misidentification destroys lives.
In 1984, 22-year-old North Carolina college student Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint. In a lineup and later in court, she identified Ronald Cotton as her assailant, and he was convicted. But she picked the wrong man; after 11 years behind bars, Cotton took a DNA test that proved his innocence.
Stevenson is now one of America’s leading voices on poverty, inequality and racial injustice, but in the early 1980s, he was a law student with no vision for his future.
During the period from 1985 to 2005, the maniac Sergei Tkach raped and killed women and girls, and always carefully concealed the traces. Not only women but also men suffered from a brutal killer in the Zaporozhye region of Ukraine.#N#+
Racism caused a miscarriage of justice that resulted in Timothy Cole being sentenced to life imprisonment for rape. He had an alibi and an excellent reputation as a war veteran, but prosecutors constantly drew the attention of judges to the color of the accused's skin.#N#+
The first was due to the fact that the footballer offended Furtseva’s daughter, according to the second, they talked about his unreliability. Witnesses more than once#N#stated that Streltsov spoke many times about the desire to play abroad.#N#+
The Innocence Network is a state-by-state index of innocence projects, with a map of coverage and a list of international projects.
From Wikipedia: House of Cards is an American political drama web television series created by Beau Willimon. It is an adaptation of the BBC's mini-series of the same name and is based on the novel by Michael Dobbs. The thirteen-episode first season premiered on February 1, 2013, on the streaming service Netflix.
Washington Post, Sessions follows Obama playbook on prosecuting officers, but not on police reform, Matt Zapotosky, May 5, 2017. Where the Justice Department under the previous administration saw fatal shootings by police as a product of cultural problems in law enforcement, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is inclined to see them as the result of a few bad officers..
WhoWhatWhy, Sex Scandal Confirms Targeted Voter Suppression in Alabama, Sean Steinberg, April 24, 2017. Sometimes a scandal can bring other hidden things to light. In the case of the disgraced former Alabama governor, we now learn that GOP rationalizations to close DMVs were indeed nothing but a ruse for a deliberate voter suppression effort.
Washington Post, Organized crime ring made millions smuggling cigarettes and writing bad checks in Va., police say, Justin Jouvenal and Dana Hedgpeth, May 5, 2017.
Walter McMillian. Official misconduct and racial bias led to Mr. McMillian’s wrongful conviction and death sentence. Counties, states, and the federal government all have different rules and policies about preserving evidence and providing access to testing that could prove an incarcerated person’s innocence.
Diane Jones and Walter McMillian were wrongfully convicted in Alabama. There are more innocent people in our jails and prisons today than ever before. The rate of exonerations continues to rise, revealing an unreliable system of criminal justice. A lack of accountability for police and prosecutors, reliance on junk science ...
Raising Innocence in Death Penalty Cases. Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit because of racial bias, inadequate counsel, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence.
Innocent Black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people, and Black people who are convicted of murder are about 50% more likely to be innocent than non-Black people convicted of murder.7. (March 7, 2017).
Inadequate lawyers can cause wrongful convictions, too. Overworked and underfunded defense lawyers lack the resources to vigorously test the prosecution’s evidence at trial, and people who are wrongly convicted and imprisoned have no right to counsel after their cases are affirmed on direct appeal.
In the first example, Wilson described how a security officer had assumed she must be a defendant rather than a barrister. A fellow lawyer and a court clerk separately assumed that she was being represented in court, rather than appearing as a barrister.
(CNN) A UK lawyer who wrote a book about discrimination in the court system has said she was racially profiled four times in one day, including being mistaken for a defendant.