The
Voice of Witness
Series.
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SURVIVING JUSTICE:
AMERICA'S WRONGFULLY
CONVICTED AND EXONERATED.
Edited by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen
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512 pages / paperback / $15
ISBN: 1932416234
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To order
Surviving Justice: America's
Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated,
click here.
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"There is no amount of money they could give me to replace 20 years of my life ... I missed my kids' childhoods. I always wanted to be a father to them.They can't give that back. I missed all of that."
—Exoneree Calvin Willis
In 2003, Calvin Willis walked out of Louisiana's Angola State Prison after 22 years of wrongful incarceration for a crime he didn't commit. He had no job, no money, and no apology from the system that took two decades out of his life. Left destitute, Willis had to fend for himself. Two years later, he's still struggling.
Hundreds of men and women—including 120 on death row—have been released from America's prisons in the last several years, after incontrovertible proof of their innocence emerged. Their trials were undermined by the myriad problems that plague criminal proceedings—inept defense lawyers, overzealous prosecutors, deceitful interrogation tactics, bad science, opportunistic snitches, faulty eyewitnesses. Their lives were effectively wrecked. Now, finally free, they're facing a new set of problems, with little sympathy from society.
In Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, 13 exonerees describe their experiences—the events that led to their convictions, their years in prison, and their new lives outside. Each oral history is a stark account of our criminal justice system's unforgivable flaws. Sidebars interspersed throughout the book offer context for their cases and the broader problem, with information on the causes of wrongful convictions and on the obstacles exonerees face in jail and after their release. Surviving Justice is an attempt to expose a disgraceful situation that continues throughout our country—men and women sent to prison for someone else's crime.
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ABOUT THE EDITORS
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Lola Vollen is a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human-rights abuses.
She has worked with survivors of systemic injustices in Somalia, South Africa, Israel, Croatia,
and Kosovo. With Physicians for Human Rights, she developed Bosnia's mass-grave exhumation
and identification program. She is the founder of the Life After Exoneration Program,
which assists exonerated prisoners in the United States after their release. She is also a visiting
scholar at UC Berkeley's Institute of International Studies and a
practicing clinician.
Dave Eggers is the editor of McSweeney's and the author of three books, including How We Are
Hungry and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the
winner of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As
a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the U.K.
Guardian, and other publications.
Surviving Justice is a joint project of McSweeney's and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
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THE VOICE OF WITNESS SERIES
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The Voice of Witness series allows those most affected by contemporary social injustice to speak for themselves. Using oral history as its foundation, Voice of Witness seeks to illustrate human-rights crises through the voices of their victims. These books will be designed for readers of all levels—from high-school and college students to policymakers—interested in a reality-based understanding of ongoing injustices in the United States and around the world.
The publication of Surviving Justice coincides with the New Yorker Films release of Jessica Sanders and Marc Simon's After Innocence, the winner of the Sundance Jury Prize in 2005.
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THE EXONEREES
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In 1988, police investigators threatened Christopher Ochoa with the death penalty, and he falsely
confessed to a rape and murder he did not commit. Ochoa and his co-worker, Richard Danziger, were
sentenced to life in prison; they both served 12 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
When Ochoa was freed, in 2001, he became a law student at the University of Wisconsin, the same
law school that worked to bring about his exoneration.
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When Juan Melendez moved from Puerto Rico to Delaware at the age of 17, he was looking
for a better life. Instead, he found himself hustling on the streets and struggling to make money. In
1984, he was convicted for the murder and armed robbery of a man he'd never met, based on the unreliable
testimony of a snitch. He was extradited to Florida, sentenced to death, and served 17
years before previously concealed evidence exonerated him. He now heads "Juan Melendez Voices
United for Justice," an advocacy group, and is an avid anti-death-penalty activist and speaker.
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Gary Gauger's parents were murdered on their Richmond, Illinois, farm in 1993. He was blamed.
During a grueling, manipulative interrogation, detectives temporarily convinced Gauger that he had
actually committed the crime. He was found guilty, sentenced to death—and released three years later.
A popular speaker on wrongful convictions, he lives on that same Illinois farm, still contending with
the psychological effects of his incarceration.
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James Newsome was living on the South Side of Chicago when a white grocer was shot to death in
a convenience store. Officers from the notoriously corrupt Area 2 police station made Newsome, who is black, their
prime suspect. Eyewitnesses misidentified him in a police lineup, and an all-white jury sentenced
him to life. He served 15 years before being exonerated by fingerprints lifted from the crime scene
and matched to an already incarcerated career criminal. After his release, Newsome won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the City of Chicago. He now owns a shoe store there—"Heelz."
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When a little girl was raped in Louisiana in 1982, Calvin Willis was blamed for it. Based on the eyewitness
identification of a frightened 9-year-old, Willis was convicted of rape and sentenced to life
in prison. One of his lawyers had a heart attack; the other was struck dead by lightning. It was only
through the help and dedication of a paralegal that Willis was able to raise enough money to have his
DNA tested in 2003. After 22 years in Louisiana's infamous Angola Prison, Willis lives in
Shreveport. He is awaiting compensation.
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In the mid-1980s, a series of child-abuse "witch hunts" swept California. A flurry of prosecutions and
convictions resulted, and John Stoll took the hardest fall. He was charged with molesting his own
son and several other boys and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He served 19; in 2004, the
boys recanted their testimony. For Stoll, who now lives in Oklahoma, the pain didn't end when he was
released—he no longer speaks to his own son, who continues to believe he was molested.
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In the early 1990s, Virginian Beverly Monroe was convicted of the murder of her longtime companion,
who had, in fact, killed himself. Her 22-year sentence was relatively light, but the
case against her seems almost incomprehensible. A police investigator persuaded her to sign a hypothetical
statement, later construed as a confession, and then convinced a convicted felon whom she
had never met to testify against her at trial. After a lengthy and complicated appellate process,
Monroe was freed in 2002. She lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.
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Michael Evans and Paul Terry were 17-year-old boys when they were convicted
of a rape and murder they knew nothing about. Because of the testimony of
a neighborhood woman seeking to claim reward money, the two were sentenced to
200- to 400-year sentences. Evans maintained his optimism during his time in the
toughest Illinois prisons, but Terry struggled to preserve his sanity. After 27
years, they were exonerated by DNA evidence. Grown men now, vastly
changed by the justice system's harsh indifference, both live in Chicago.
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David Pope spent 15 years in the Texas prison system for a rape he didn't commit. He was convicted
with now-discredited "voice spectrograph" technology that compared his voice to recorded conversations
with the actual rapist. After DNA from his case proved his innocence, in the late '90s, Pope stayed
in prison for years without a clue he'd been cleared. He was finally released in 2001, after Texas Governor
Rick Perry signed his pardon. He now lives in Bolinas, California, and is looking for work.
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In 1985, Joseph Amrine was accused and convicted of stabbing a fellow-inmate at a prison in Jefferson
City, Missouri. When it came time for his sentencing, he campaigned for the death penalty, hoping it
would draw attention and legal assistance to his case. It did. In 2003, Amrine was released after witnesses,
including jailhouse snitches and guards, recanted their testimony. He now lives in Kansas City
and works with the Public Interest Litigation Clinic legal group as a speaker and outreach coordinator.
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On a late-fall morning in 1994, a teenage girl was raped in Lodi, California. The girl's aunt implicated
Peter Rose, repeatedly suggesting to her niece that he was the assailant. Rose was convicted of rape
and kidnapping and sentenced to 27 years, leaving his own children without his support. He
served 10 years in California prisons before being cleared by DNA evidence. Rose now lives in Point
Arena, California, and works construction. He is awaiting compensation from the state.
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Kevin Green admits that, as a Marine, he was "young, dumb, and full of it." He had a rocky relationship
with his first wife, Diane, and when she was brutally assaulted by a serial rapist known as the
"Bedroom Basher," Green was accused of the crime. He was convicted, based on his wife's testimony,
and served 16 years in California prisons before DNA evidence exonerated him. He now lives in
Jefferson City, Missouri.
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