Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted
- Barry Sheck,
- Peter Neufeld &
- Jim Dwyer
Doubleday $24.95 (US)., 2000 0-385-49341-X | ISBN: 0-385-49341-X
On 30 January, 2000, Illinois Governor George Ryan made the unprecedented decision to block all executions in his state, pending a formal investigation of why Illinois has had more death sentences overturned than carried out. Since 1977 (the year Illinois reinstated the death penalty), 13 men who had been sentenced to die were instead released from prison because they were shown to be innocent or wrongfully convicted. In one case, the prisoner, Anthony Porter, had once been just two days from execution. Given the gravity of the death sentence, how could there possibly be so many errors in trials for capital crimes? If you want the answer, read Actual Innocence, a fast-paced, searing indictment of the criminal justice system by the United States’ most famous ‘DNA’ defense attorneys, Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer, a prominent crime journalist who writes for the New York Daily News.
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