Convicting the Innocent: Death Row and America's Broken System of Justice

Journalist Cohen (The Game They Played) opens his latest book with a graphic description of an execution of a prisoner on death row, citing its supporters. Among them, he points out, the recently deceased Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia who "appeared to view the death penalty as a recreational activity." But here's the catch-22: innocent people can be put to death owing to our flawed justice system. Cohen goes on to tell the stories of a number of people who sidestepped the death penalty, sometimes by the skin of their teeth, via a thorough investigation of their cases. Among the reasons for their wrongful convictions: eyewitness error, jailhouse snitches, racism, prosecutorial misconduct, and incompetent counsel. If the nation will not abolish the death penalty, Cohen argues that it should at the very least work not to execute the blameless. The accounts are often repetitive as the author pounds away at his message and may require the labor of love to read, but they are overall informative.