Stars: ★★★★★ (Study This Book)
My formative years were spent immersed in a culture of Law and Order, CSI, NCIS, and Criminal Minds. While I intellectually knew that the shows were dramatized, they primed me to believe both prosecutors and expert witnesses proffering forensic evidence. I imagine many jurors trying these cases had similar experiences. The fact that a majority of this evidence is based on junk science was stunning to me. It is an infuriating but necessary read to understand how these false understanding have led to the imprisonment and death of innocent people.
Premise
The author is an attorney with the Innocence Project and walks through decades of case law and legal battles about forensic evidence that many people, especially jurors believed to be reliable. He focuses mostly on bite mark analysis and comparison cases, but also provides detailed examples of arson investigations, polygraphs, and ballistics analysis. He details cases in which people were wrongly executed or spent decades on death row for crimes they were hours away from with strong alibi evidence.
Loved
- The Detailed Stories
He walks through the detailed cases of Steven Chaney, Eddie Lee Howard, and Keith Harward, three men wrongly charged, prosecuted, and imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. He walks through how one injustice was compounded by another through decades of appeals trying to get past the technicalities and the indifference of those who should have been seeking justice zealously.
I also appreciate that he included stories of those with less happy endings. He shares stories of those who were executed or died in prison based on junk science before they were able to be exonerated. He also explains the times when the justice system came close to working only to be thwarted by those with personal interests in pursuing a “tough on crime” public stance. The details are horrifying but necessary to the truth.
- The Case Law
As someone who reads Supreme Court opinions for fun, I appreciate the case law that is included. He explains how the cases were chosen and used as examples. He then walks through Daubert and how it could have been a watershed moment, but it was almost exclusively applied to civil litigation instead of criminal prosecutions. When the parties have money on the line, it becomes more important to get the science and the facts correct. When the indigent stand to lose decades or their very lives, the science and the facts tend to matter significantly less.
- The Benefit of the Doubt
The author takes time to point out where he thought people were well-intentioned but dead wrong. I believe a majority of prosecutors and Justice Department lawyers got into the profession to seek justice, and the author presents this view when he believes it to be accurate. He does not let their good intentions take them off the hook though. They still allowed innocent people to be incarcerated based on junk science, and impact > intent every time.
Didn’t Love
While I highly recommend this book, I rage read most of it. While the author gives the benefit of the doubt to those who deserve it, there are plenty of people throughout the book who don’t. They lied to juries, concocted false evidence, and then used technicalities to keep innocent people behind bars after they had overwhelmingly demonstrated their innocence.
Lessons Learned
- The concept of “finality” of a verdict will trump even evidence of innocence. One of the my favorite parts of the book was when James Comey, then Director of the FBI, made it a policy not to fight overturned convictions on technicalities where the Innocence Project lawyers demonstrated junk science led to a false conviction. The author explains that the courts give such deference to a jury verdict that overturning it is nearly impossible. After reading this book, I believe one of the most important reforms we can make it is to move away from this concept of finality.
- The Innocence Project has had 239 victories to date. Although that is 239 who are no longer unjustly incarcerated, it is a terribly small number compared to those who are actually innocent and still be imprisoned for decades.