The Innocence Revolution

The definitive history of the American justice system's most powerful truth-telling instrument--DNA technology--the movement to free the wrongly convicted, and the revolution it sparked in American understanding of the system and institutional reform. The American justice system was founded on a presumption of innocence and the ideal that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person. For decades, many believed that wrongful convictions either didn't exist or were rare aberrations, especially in capital cases. Today, though the number of wrongful convictions is impossible to know, most estimates range from one to five percent, meaning that over 100,000 people may be anguishing behind bars for crimes they didn't commit. In The Innocence Revolution, Tom Wells and Richard A. Leo tell the story of how tenacious advocates of the unjustly convicted combined new DNA technology and old-fashioned, top-to-bottom reinvestigations to expose the alarming frequency of wrongful convictions in the United States. Weaving together cases from the first DNA exoneration in 1989 to the present, the authors show how DNA evidence not only freed the wrongly convicted but exposed terrible failures at the heart of the American justice system, from eyewitness misidentifications and fabricated forensic science to prosecutorial misconduct and false confessions. The book profiles the trailblazing organizations that drove the innocence movement--including the Innocence Project, Centurion Ministries, and a host of other groups--and the landmark cases and controversies that tested and ultimately strengthened their cause. A fascinating look into the justice system's most transformative technology and the revolution in American awareness it sparked, The Innocence Revolution is at once a powerful history and a critical examination of the social and legal movement that changed the American justice system for the better.