Wrongful Allegations
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9780198723301
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Picking Cotton
Author: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-01-05
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 1429962151
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe New York Times best selling true story of an unlikely friendship forged between a woman and the man she incorrectly identified as her rapist and sent to prison for 11 years. Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives. With Picking Cotton, Jennifer and Ronald tell in their own words the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.
Ghost of the Innocent Man
Author: Benjamin Rachlin
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 2018-08-21
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780316311502
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of the Best Books of 2017: National Public Radio, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness "Remarkable . . . Captivating . . . Rachlin is a skilled storyteller." --New York Times Book Review "A gripping legal-thriller mystery . . . Profoundly elevates good-cause advocacy to greater heights--to where innocent lives are saved." --USA Today "A crisply written page turner." --NPR A gripping account of one man's long road to freedom that will forever change how we understand our criminal justice system During the last three decades, more than two thousand American citizens have been wrongfully convicted. Ghost of the Innocent Man brings us one of the most dramatic of those cases and provides the clearest picture yet of the national scourge of wrongful conviction and of the opportunity for meaningful reform. When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his innocence and the identity of the true perpetrator. These were spearheaded by his relentless champion, Christine Mumma, a cofounder of North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission. That commission--unprecedented at its inception in 2006--remains a model organization unlike any other in the country, and one now responsible for a growing number of exonerations. With meticulous, prismatic research and pulse-quickening prose, Benjamin Rachlin presents one man's tragedy and triumph. The jarring and unsettling truth is that the story of Willie J. Grimes, for all its outrage, dignity, and grace, is not a unique travesty. But through the harrowing and suspenseful account of one life, told from the inside, we experience the full horror of wrongful conviction on a national scale. Ghost of the Innocent Man is both rare and essential, a masterwork of empathy. The book offers a profound reckoning not only with the shortcomings of our criminal justice system but also with its possibilities for redemption.
Race and Justice
Author: Marvin D. Free, Jr.
Publisher:
Published: 2015-03-25
Total Pages: 334
ISBN-13: 9781626372375
DOWNLOAD EBOOK¿This book will be the definitive scholarly reference on this topic and a must-read for anyone interested in miscarriages of justice. Essential.¿ ¿Choice ¿A good choice for academic collections and public libraries where social issues are of interest.¿ ¿Rebecca Vnuk, Booklist ¿Insightful and well-researched.... an important contribution. Free and Ruesink¿s approach provides much needed context for the large number of wrongful conviction cases involving African Americans.¿ ¿Shaun Gabbidon, Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg In this investigation of some 350 wrongful convictions of African American men, Marvin Free and Mitch Ruesink critically examine how issues of race undercut the larger goals of our criminal justice system. Free and Ruesink expand the focus of wrongful conviction studies to include not only homicide, but also sexual assault, drug dealing, and nonviolent crime. Their careful analysis reveals that black men accused of crimes against white victims account for a disproportionate number of wrongful convictions. They also uncover other disturbing failings on the part of prosecutors, police, witnesses, and informants. Highlighting the systemic role of race, the authors challenge us to move past the ¿just a few bad apples¿ explanation and to instead examine what it is about our criminal justice system that allows the innocent to be judged guilty. Marvin D. Free, Jr., is professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin¿Whitewater. He is coauthor of Crime, Justice, and Society and editor of Racial Issues in Criminal Justice: The Case of African Americans. Mitch Ruesink teaches psychology at Waukesha County Technical College.
The Lovely Bones
Author: Alice Sebold
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-09-25
Total Pages: 180
ISBN-13: 1786826704
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSusie Salmon is just like any other young American girl. She wants to be beautiful, adores her charm bracelet and has a crush on a boy from school. There's one big difference though – Susie is dead. Add: Now she can only observe while her family manage their grief in their different ways. Susie is desperate to help them and there might be a way of reaching them... Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones is a unique coming-of-age tale that captured the hearts of readers throughout the world. Award-winning playwright Bryony Lavery has adapted it for this unforgettable play about life after loss.
Rectify
Author: Lara Bazelon
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2018-10-16
Total Pages: 250
ISBN-13: 0807029173
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA powerful argument for adopting a model of restorative justice as part of the Innocence Movement—so exonerees, crime victims, and their communities can come together to heal In Rectify, a former Innocence Project director and journalist Lara Bazelon puts a face to the growing number of men and women exonerated from crimes that kept them behind bars for years—sometimes decades—and that devastate not only the exonerees but also their families, the crime victims who mistakenly identified them as perpetrators, the jurors who convicted them, and the prosecutors who realized too late that they helped convict an innocent person. Bazelon focuses on Thomas Haynesworth, a teenager arrested for multiple rapes in Virginia, and Janet Burke, a rape victim who mistakenly IDed him. It took over two decades before he was exonerated. Conventional wisdom points to an exoneration as a happy ending to tragic tales of injustice, such as Haynesworth’s. However, even when the physical shackles are left behind, invisible ones can be profoundly more difficult to unlock. In the midst of Bazelon’s frustration over the blatant limitations of courts and advocates, her hope is renewed by the fledgling but growing movement to apply the centuries-old practice of restorative justice to wrongful conviction cases. Using the stories of Thomas Haynesworth, Janet Burke, and other crime victims and exonerees, she demonstrates how the transformative experience of connecting isolated individuals around mutual trauma and a shared purpose of repairing harm unite unlikely allies. Movingly written and vigorously researched, Rectify takes to task the far-reaching failures of our criminal justice system and offers a window into a future where the power it yields can be used in pursuit of healing and unity rather than punishment and blame.
Manufacturing Guilt (2nd edition)
Author: Barrie Anderson
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2021-01-11T00:00:00Z
Total Pages: 176
ISBN-13: 1773634666
DOWNLOAD EBOOKManufacturing Guilt, 2nd edition, updates the cases presented in the first edition and includes two new chapters: one concerning the case of James Driskell and another regarding Dr. Charles Smith, whose role in forensic pathology evidence led to several wrongful convictions. In this new edition, the authors demonstrate that the same factors at play in the criminalization of the powerless and marginalized are found in cases of wrongful conviction. Contrary to popular belief, wrongful convictions are not due simply to “unintended errors,” but rather are too often the result of the deliberate actions of those working in the criminal justice system. Using Canadian cases of miscarriages of justice, the authors argue that understanding wrongful convictions and how to prevent them is incomplete outside the broader societal context in which they occur, particularly regarding racial and social inequality.
Redeeming Justice
Author: Jarrett Adams
Publisher: Convergent Books
Published: 2021-09-14
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0593137817
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“A moving and beautifully crafted memoir.”—SCOTT TUROW “A daring act of justified defiance.”—SHAKA SENGHOR “Nothing less than heroic.”—JOHN GRISHAM He was seventeen when an all-white jury sentenced him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now a pioneering lawyer, he recalls the journey that led to his exoneration—and inspired him to devote his life to fighting the many injustices in our legal system. Seventeen years old and facing nearly thirty years behind bars, Jarrett Adams sought to figure out the why behind his fate. Sustained by his mother and aunts who brought him back from the edge of despair through letters of prayer and encouragement, Adams became obsessed with our legal system in all its damaged glory. After studying how his constitutional rights to effective counsel had been violated, he solicited the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, an organization that exonerates the wrongfully convicted, and won his release after nearly ten years in prison. But the journey was far from over. Adams took the lessons he learned through his incarceration and worked his way through law school with the goal of helping those who, like himself, had faced our legal system at its worst. After earning his law degree, he worked with the New York Innocence Project, becoming the first exoneree ever hired by the nonprofit as a lawyer. In his first case with the Innocence Project, he argued before the same court that had convicted him a decade earlier—and won. In this illuminating story of hope and full-circle redemption, Adams draws on his life and the cases of his clients to show the racist tactics used to convict young men of color, the unique challenges facing exonerees once released, and how the lack of equal representation in our courts is a failure not only of empathy but of our collective ability to uncover the truth. Redeeming Justice is an unforgettable firsthand account of the limits—and possibilities—of our country’s system of law.
Wrongful Conviction in Sexual Assault
Author: Matthew Barry Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2020-10-19
Total Pages: 213
ISBN-13: 0190653051
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Wrongful Conviction in Sexual Assault: Stranger Rape, Acquaintance Rape, and Intra-Familial Child Sexual Assaults examines the phenomenon of innocent defendants who are convicted of rape and related sexual offenses. It presents findings that indicate sexual offenses are highly over represented among confirmed wrongful convictions. Drawing from Innocence Project and National Registry of Exoneration data and supplemented by social science and historical sources, the investigation explores various processes that lead to wrongful conviction, distinguishing the differential risk of wrongful conviction among stranger rape, acquaintance rape, and intra-familial child sexual assault. The book includes reference to established research on false confessions, eye witness mis-identification, erroneous expert and informant testimony, DNA evidence, racial bias, and 'manufactured' evidence. The work also introduces new terms and concepts (such as 'black box' investigation methods, the stranger rape thesis, the moral outrage - moral correction process, 'spontaneous mis-identification', victim status paths, the differential investigation challenge related to capable vs incapacitated rape victims, and the role of serial sexual offending in wrongful conviction) to clarify and illustrate unique aspects of wrongful conviction in sexual assault"--
Wrongful Conviction in Sexual Assault
Author: Matthew Barry Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-10-19
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 019065306X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Wrongful Conviction in Sexual Assault, Matthew Barry Johnson introduces new directions in wrongful conviction research and understanding. Citing Innocence Project and National Registry of Exoneration data, the book identifies sexual assault as the predominant offense type associated with confirmed wrongful convictions in the US. Johnson outlines the differential risk of wrongful conviction associated with stranger rape, acquaintance rape, and intra-familial child sexual abuse. He also introduces new terms and concepts such as "black box" investigation, illustrating the lack of transparency in the production of prosecution evidence; a four-part stranger rape thesis; and the "moral outrage - moral correction" process that results in cognitive and emotional factors that interfere with the evaluation of criminal evidence. The book also includes chapters on racial bias in rape prosecution, and the relationship of serial sex offending to wrongful conviction. Citing both foundational and newly-introduced conviction research, Johnson illustrates unexamined aspects of well-known wrongful conviction cases (i.e. The Central Park Five, Steve Avery, Ronald Cotton, The Norfolk Four) and presents the lessons from lesser known wrongful convictions. Wrongful Conviction in Sexual Assault provides valuable new perspectives and insight for psychologists, defense lawyers, prosecutors, crime investigators, and social justice scholars.
