Exoneree Diaries

April 25, 2016
Flowers, an investigative reporter based in Chicago, offers four vivid, in-depth ethnographic portraits of exonerated prisoners, three of who are from Cook County, Ill.—an area known for its exceedingly high rate of wrongful convictions. Flowers profiles a single mother wrongly convicted of the accidental death of her three-year-old in a trailer fire, a gang member
mistakenly picked out of a lineup for a murder charge, a 22-year-old handyman incarcerated on fabricated evidence for arson in a fire where six people perished, and a musician and homemaker set up on a murder charge. She also introduces a Chicago detective with “a city-wide reputation for manipulating lineups and coercing witnesses,” a corrupt police chief who was later incarcerated for lying about police torture, and, on the other side, the lawyers and organizations that work tirelessly to overturn wrongful convictions, such as Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions and the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago. All four exonerees each spent at least a decade in prison, and Flowers highlights how little it took to erroneously convict them as well as the struggle to overcome the stigma of having been in prison as they try to find employment and housing. Through these searing portraits, readers will witness the fissures in the criminal justice system and the damage they cause to the wrongfully convicted, their families, and their communities.

March 15, 2016
Chicago journalist Flowers goes deep into the cases of three innocent men and a woman serving at least a decade in prison for crimes they never committed. The case of the woman's wrongful conviction occurred in mostly rural Decatur County, Indiana; the cases of all three men occurred in densely populated Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), infamous for a fractured criminal justice system. Each case received local media coverage over the years, but none of the four is well-known nationally. No author has covered the years after exoneration with the same depth as Flowers does in this disturbing book. Although the case studies are not intended as narratives of prison life, the author does provide insights into prison routines, including the many cruelties endured by inmates. As with thousands of other documented wrongful convictions across the United States, the cases chosen by Flowers seem absurd in hindsight: how could so many detectives, prosecutors, forensic analysts, judges, and jurors make such egregious errors, while the actual perpetrators remained unpunished? The only heroes within the system are the defense appellate lawyers who labor for years on wrongful conviction litigation. Flowers' primary focus, however, is the lack of compassion shown to the exonerated defendants after their releases from prison. Illinois, Indiana, and most other states erect obstacles to compensating exonerees financially for their lost years and their physical and emotional suffering, and some states provide no compensation. Flowers ably shows that even under the best of circumstances, exonerees struggle with family relationships, job searches, recovery from prison-related health problems, adjustments to new technologies, and more. She does offer examples of efforts, mostly poorly funded, to help exonerees, but she makes the significant point that prisoners actually guilty of crimes often receive more government assistance after release than exonerees. A thoroughly researched, provocative book of justice gone wrong.

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