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Beverly Monroe spent seven years in prison
for murdering her companion of thirteen years; in fact, he
had killed himself. Christopher Ochoa was persuaded to confess
to a rape and murder he did not commit, and served twelve
years of his life sentence before he was freed by DNA evidence.
Michael Evans and Paul Terry each spent twenty-seven years
in prison for a brutal rape and murder they did not commit.
They were teenagers when they entered prison; they were middle-aged
men when DNA proved their innocence.
After spending years behind bars, hundreds
of men and women with incontrovertible proof of their innocence—including
120 from death row—have been released from America’s
prisons. They were wrongfully convicted because of problems
that plague many criminal proceedings—inept defense
lawyers, overzealous prosecutors, deceitful and coercive interrogation
tactics, bad science, snitches, and eyewitness misidentification.
The lives of these victims of the U.S. criminal justice system
were effectively wrecked. Finally free, usually after more
than a decade of incarceration, they re-enter society with
nothing but the scars from a harrowing descent into prison
only to struggle to survive on the outside.
The thirteen men and women portrayed here,
and the hundreds of others who have been exonerated, are the
tip of the iceberg. There are countless others—thousands
by all estimates—who are in prison today for crimes
they did not commit. These are the stories of some of the
wrongfully convicted, who have managed, often by sheer luck,
to prove their innocence. Their stories are spellbinding,
heartbreaking, unimaginable, and ultimately inspiring. After
reading these deeply personal accounts, you will never look
at the criminal justice system the same way.
Read all about Dave Eggers, Founder of McSweeney’s,
at www.mcsweeneys.net.
Scott Turow is an attorney and an
author. Mr. Turow’s first book, One L, about
his experience as a first-year student at Harvard Law School,
was published in 1977. Ten years later, he achieved a life-long
ambition, with the publication of his first novel, Presumed
Innocent, followed by The Burden of Proof and
Pleading Guilty. His fourth novel, The Laws
of Our Fathers, was published in 1996. Personal Injuries
was published in October, 1999 and Reversible Errors
was published in November 2002. Mr. Turow’s books have
been translated into more than 25 languages and, in total,
have sold approximately twenty-five million copies worldwide.
They have won a number of literary awards. His latest book,
Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing
with the Death Penalty, was published on October 1, 2003.
(From www.scottturow.com)
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