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It is estimated that somewhere around five per cent of the (extremely large) US prison population did not commit the crimes for which they are serving time. Some of these eventually are released, their convictions reversed, thanks often to the labours of the various Innocence Projects around the country that work on behalf of those who were the victims of police malice or indifference, a failure to be defended adequately, mistaken identification, or just plain bad luck.
ANATOMY OF INNOCENCE gathers together the stories of fourteen wrongfully convicted exonerees as recounted by an equal number of notable writers of crime fiction, including Sara Paretsky, Lee Child, Laurie R. King, Sarah Weinman, Phillip M. Margolin, and Brad Parks. In addition, there is a previously unpublished essay opposing the death penalty by Arthur Miller, based on his own defence of a young man, a neighbour. Three of the former prisoners are women. Of the men, six are African-American, four white, and one Hispanic. What almost all of them have in common is their class background - when arrested, most were unable to pay for an adequate defence and had to rely on over-worked public defenders. They also shared a lot of bad luck.
More than half of the crimes of which the men were accused were of a kind that creates public fear and outrage - a white woman jumped by a young black man in a car park, raped and murdered; little girls abducted and raped; serial rape; the kind of crimes that demand swift action on the part of the police. In the overwhelming majority of the cases recorded here, that action was a quick arrest followed by a coerced confession, a bribed witness statement, the suppression of evidence. There appears to have been a strange indifference to the fact that if the wrong man was convicted of a crime, that left the actual perpetrator free to carry on as he had begun.
Most of the men were young when they were arrested and some at least were undereducated, inexperienced, and possibly not terribly bright. They were vulnerable, scared, and defenceless in the face of a concerted attempt to extract a confession. If they refused to confess, suborned eyewitness testimony could be brought to bear. Whatever the means, the result for most of them was twenty or more years behind bars.
The three women whose testimony appears are less easy to characterize. One of them, a law student, was convicted on the basis of false testimony on the part of the actual criminal in exchange for a reduction in sentence. Another, in the kind of case that will be familiar to Canadian readers, was convicted of killing a child in her care by shaking her violently. It took ten years before the dubious medical evidence was challenged sufficiently to set her free. A third, accused of murdering her husband, was convicted on the medical evidence of a sham toxicologist.
Reading these accounts should shake any lingering faith that the reader may have in the infallibility of the legal system. They should also make for a certain degree of unease, since in so many of the cases it was bad luck that made the innocent the object of a blinkered investigation in the first place. They should arouse some rage as well in even the most invulnerable at the spectacle of the enormous waste of years that these life sentences engendered. Finally they all should inspire awe at the ability of all of these men and women to come to terms with the injustice they have suffered and the loss of years it imposed to emerge, finally and joyfully, into the free world. Certainly not everyone, or even most, in their predicament will fare as well but these people have and it is impressive.
The authors' royalties from the book will go to benefit LIFE AFTER INNOCENCE, a project at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law designed to aid exonerees once they are released.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2017
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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