John Freeman

The thirteen men and women featured in this oral history were sent to prison for crimes they did not commit. Some languished for years on death row. Others were sentenced to life in prison. And yet they consider themselves fortunate. Thanks to their own calls for help and sheer dumb luck, the judicial system grudgingly admitted mistakes and set them free.

Judging from their stories, we can only assume there are many who are not so fortunate. Christopher Ochoa confessed to a murder he did not commit to avoid the death penalty detectives held over his head, while Juan Melendez, who served seventeen years, much of it on death row, went to jail because prosecutors buried mounting evidence of his innocence.

One by one, these interviews pinpoint lingering problems in our criminal-justice system, from the inaccuracy of eyewitness accounts or polygraph tests to the need for better public defenders. But it is the voices themselves that bring home the awful cost of wrongful convictions.

"I always was a problem in prison because of my crime," says one man, who was wrongly imprisoned for twenty-seven years for kidnapping and rape. "I got stabbed in the side...I acted like it never happened. I went back to my cell, and I duct-taped it up. I just taped it up because you don't want to tell on the person stabbing you."

"Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated"

Edited by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen

Voice of Witness/McSweeney's Books,

497 pages, $16

(2005-11-21)

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