Actual Innocence

A nightmare from a thousand B-movies: A horrible crime is committed in your neighborhood, and the police knock on your door. A witness swears you are the perpetrator; you have no alibi, and no one believes your protestations of innocence. You're convicted, sentenced to hard time in maximum security, or even death row, where you await the executioner's needle.

Tragically, this is no movie script, but reality for hundreds of American citizens. Our criminal justice system is broken, and people from all walks of life have been destroyed by its failures. But science, and a group of incredibly dedicated crusaders are working to repair the damage.

In the last ten years, DNA testing has uncovered some stone-cold proof that 65 completely innocent people were sent to prison and death row. But the criminal justice system only frees prisoners in cases where there is physical evidence after a torturous legal process. Incredibly, according to many trial judges, "actual innocence" is not grounds for release from prison.

At the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld have helped to free 37 wrongly-convicted people, and have taken up the cause of hundreds more. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jim Dwyer has been covering innocence cases for a decade. In Actual Innocence, Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer relate the harrowing stories of ten innocent men - convicted by sloppy police work, corrupt prosecutors, jailhouse snitches, mistaken eyewitnesses, and other all-too-common flaws of the trial system - and tell of the heroic efforts to free them.