Wrongfully Convicted

LINDA GREENHOUSE, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS


Week after week, the story unfolds before our eyes: “Wrongfully Imprisoned, Groundskeeper Returns” (The New York Times, March 28, 2018); “$10 Million for Man Wrongly Convicted of Murdering Parents” (The New York Times, April 21, 2018); “Philadelphia Man Freed After Serving 11 Years for Murder He Did Not Commit” (The New York Times, May 16, 2018). Since 1989, when what’s known today as the innocence movement started gaining momentum, over 2,200 convicted people have been exonerated in the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

That suggests, of course, that a worrisome number of guilty people may never have been caught (although about half of DNA exonerations actually result in the conviction of the true perpetrator). Estimates of wrongful convictions range between 2 and 5 percent, meaning that as many as 100,000 innocent people may be sitting in the country’s vast prison network. Death row exonerations have, at last count, reached 162. The image of these exonerees (an awkward word that entered the dictionary only in 2002) blinking in the sunlight after years or decades in prison is touching, troubling, and infuriating.

By now we know all this. The question is how and why wrongful convictions occur. The four books under review are among the latest to tackle aspects of the subject, through anecdote, personal testimony, and meticulous historical reconstruction. In different ways, each of the four contributes to a deeper understanding of the problem in its several dimensions: poor police work, unreliable witnesses, prosecutorial misconduct, juror gullibility, defense inadequacy, bad forensics passing for science, racism, and more.