First articles, then books. Updated from an earlier version.
• See below a list of books about wrongful convictions and related issues, recommended by the highly valued Innocence Project, which works nationwide to free the innocent and reform our criminal justice system. See The Innocence Project: A Short History Since 1983 (Black Past). "DNA testing has exonerated more than 345 innocent people in the United States – and others are still waiting for justice."
• Also of interest: The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), based in Montgomery, Alabama, "provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who may have been denied a fair trial." Read about it in the bestseller Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. On EJI's website (with links to material on racial justice, children in prison, mass incarceration, the death penalty, and "just mercy"): "Since 1973, 166 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence was uncovered. A shocking rate of error has emerged: for every nine people executed in this country, one innocent person has been exonerated."
• Native American activist leaves prison after Biden commutation (Praveena Somasundaram, WashPost, 2-19-25) Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted in 1977 of killing two FBI agents, walked out of a federal prison in Florida on Tuesday to return to his tribal homelands in North Dakota. He will serve the remainder of his two life sentences under home confinement.
"Peltier was convicted of murdering the agents after a shootout in 1975 at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where they were attempting to serve an arrest warrant on a different man. Peltier has maintained his innocence for nearly half a century, and his supporters have argued that his trial was unfair. Law enforcement officials, however, have staunchly opposed clemency for him. Peltier, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota, was active in the American Indian Movement. In the 1970s, AIM became known for public and large-scale demonstrations organized to protest the federal government’s mistreatment of Native Americans.
"After Peltier’s conviction, his legal team had filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act and received thousands of pages of FBI documents that were not shown in court, though a prosecutor said there had been “total disclosure.”
In a 2021 letter to Biden, James Reynolds, the U.S. attorney whose office had handled the prosecution and appeal on Peltier’s case, said his conviction rested on the fact that “he was present with a weapon at the Reservation that day.”
---Injustice in Sioux Territory (Hal Hinson, WaPo, 5-21-92) Documentary reopens Peltier case.
---Anger at a cop killer, a plea for clemency, and a fight over free expression at American U. (Susan Svrluga, WaPo, 1-4-17)The statue of Leonard Peltier was meant to raise awareness of his Native American activism, his artistry and his decades spent in prison for killing two FBI agents, a crime he says he didn’t commit. But just as a federal prosecutor in the case against him wrote to President Obama supporting Peltier’s request for clemency, the sculpture has sparked outrage at American University. Conservative media outlets took note of the sculpture at AU, and so did an American University student, who commented on Twitter: “A 9-ft cop killer is right in front of my dorm.”
Articles about wrongful convictions (and exonerations)
• He Went to Jail for Stealing Someone’s Identity. But It Was His All Along. (Mitch Smith, NY Times, 2-3-25) A decades-long theft of a man's identity raised questions about who gets believed in the justice system, and what happens when your name is taken. “I'm trying to go on and continue on and not to pull myself down, but bring myself back up,” said William Woods, who had his identity stolen for decades.
• Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent:The Role of Prosecutors, Police and Other Law Enforcement (Samuel R. Gross, Maurice J. Possley, Kaitlin Jackson Roll, Klara Huber Stephens,National Registry of Exonerations, 9-1-20) The study cites five types of misconduct that lead to wrongful convictions: witness tampering, misconduct in interrogations, fabricating evidence, concealing exculpatory evidence and misconduct at trial. It found that Black defendants were slightly more likely than White defendants to be victims of misconduct, 57 percent to 52 percent, but that the racial difference was much larger for drug crimes — 47 to 22 percent — and in murder cases, 78 to 64 percent. In some instances, authorities purposefully sought to improperly influence a case; other times their missteps were unintentional or based on flawed techniques.
• Crime victims form unlikely bonds with wrongfully convicted men (Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes, 3-17-24)
• Capturing the emotional journey of Healing Justice (Will Croxton, 60 Minutes, 3-17-24)
• Why rape survivors and exonerees went on a retreat together (Lesley Stahl, Aliza Chasan, Shari Finkelstein, Collette Richards, 60 Minutes Overtime, 3-17-24) A rape survivor, guilt ridden after learning that an innocent man had been sent to prison in her case, brings together crime victims and exonerees to help heal those impacted by wrongful convictions.
• Finally, Justice (Jake Tapper, The Atlantic, 3-24) Two years ago, he wrote an Atlantic cover story about the case of C. J. Rice, a Philadelphia teenager convicted of attempted homicide. Today, Rice was exonerated. C. J. Rice is now a free man.
---C. J. Rice’s Conviction Is Overturned (Andrew Aoyama, The Atlantic, 11-28-23) After a cover story in The Atlantic, a man convicted of a crime he insists he did not commit now has a chance to be freed from prison.
• Sentenced to death, but innocent: These are stories of justice gone wrong. (Phillip Morris, National Geographic, 2-18-21) Since 1973, more than 8,700 people in the U.S. have been sent to death row. At least 182 weren’t guilty—their lives upended by a system that nearly killed them.
• More than half of all wrongful criminal convictions are caused by government misconduct, study finds (Tom Jackman, Washington Post, 9-16-20) Misconduct can be intentional or unintentional, but either way innocent people are found guilty
• National Registry of Exonerations (a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law) See Registry tallies over 2,000 wrongful convictions since 1989 (David G. Savage, Washington Bureau, Los Angeles Times, 5-20-12) More than 2,000 people have been freed from prison in the U.S. since 1989 after they were found to have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes, according to a new National Registry of Exonerations compiled by University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University. Follow Exoneration Registry.
• % Exonerations by Contributing Factor (National Registry of Exonerations) Factors: Mistaken Witness ID, Perjury or False Accusation, False Confession, False or Misleading Forensic Evidence, Official Misconduct.
• Wrongful conviction podcasts
• Wrongful Convictions (National Institute of Justice) Articles and other resources on such topics as DNA testing,forensic science, erroneous identification.
• Causes of wrongful conviction (Innocence Clinic, Michigan Law, University of MIchigan)
• List of Wrongful Convictions (Wikipedia)
• New Docuseries Highlights the Impact of Wrong Convictions (Sameer Rao, ColorLines, 10-30-18) The first episode of Vice’s “Innocence Ignored” explores the many drawbacks of Alford pleas, which prevent compensation for the wrongfully convicted.
• Wrongful Convictions: A New Exoneration Registry Tests Stubborn Judges (Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic, 5-21-12)
• Righting Wrongful Convictions of Youth: What You Can Do (Terry Keleher, ColorLines, 10-4-09) Each year in the US, millions of young people interact with juvenile and criminal courts where they often face unfair treatment and racial discrimination.
• The Neighbors Who Destroyed Their Lives (Robert Kolker, The Atlantic, 12-22-23) Murder and lies in small-town Hawaii. "Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests."
• Articles about wrongful convictions (ColorLines)
Books about wrongful conviction and related issues
*DISCLOSURE: Buy anything from Amazon after clicking on a link here and I get a minuscule referral fee for your purchases, with no additional cost to you. Even better, encourage your library to buy these books from the publisher, and check them out of the library.
• Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make it Right by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer (2000)
• Adams vs. Texas: The True Story Made Famous by the Highly Acclaimed Film The Thin Blue Line by Randall Adams, with William Hoffer and . Read More