In a living room in Berkeley, California, these six wrongfully convicted Americans sat, discussing their lives before, during, and after their incarcerations. They had been brought together under the auspices of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, to begin telling the stories that comprise this book. On the coffee table before them lay the front section of that day’s San Francisco Chronicle, across which roared the word GUILTY! The headline referred to Scott Peterson, the man convicted, the previous day, of murdering his pregnant wife. In the weeks leading up to that verdict, the residents of the Bay Area had made clear, in countless television and newspaper man-on-the-street interviews, their desire to see Peterson sent to prison and, for a good portion of those who were sure of his guilt, executed. Now Peterson’s guilt had been affirmed, and the public could rest assured that justice had been done. When the word GUILTY appears in four-inch-high letters across the daily newspaper, there can be no doubt about its veracity and finality.

John Stoll would disagree. In 1982, he was convicted of molesting dozens of children in Bakersfield, California; the case implicated a group of other adults, was wildly lurid in its details, and extremely public. The newspapers there and nationally reported that children had told stories of ritual abuse at Stoll’s house; that they had been photographed in sexual poses, given sleeping pills, and molested repeatedly. By the time both local and national media had broadcast the children’s stories, it is difficult to imagine any citizen of the Bakersfield community believing that a man accused by so many children—including his own son—of molestation, was in fact innocent. The carefully conducted work of the community’s law enforcement officers, social workers, prosecutors, jurors, and media would never, the public assumed, collectively convict the wrong person—much less convict a man of a crime when there was no crime. But indeed they did convict an innocent man. John Stoll served nineteen years and was released in 2004, when his accusers, children now grown, recanted their testimony; they had all been coerced or confused into fabricating their stories.

Stoll was forty-two when he entered prison. He is now sixty-one. Male life expectancy in the United States is seventy-five. The American system of justice stole almost one third of his life, and now Stoll struggles to reconcile his body, which is that of an older man, and his mind, which often forgets that he’s no longer forty. Stoll, like many exonerees, has to a certain extent set aside, or even blocked out, the time he served in prison. He wants his life to begin again where he left off, but he’s now coming to grips with the fact that his body can’t do the things it could before he was imprisoned. Even gardening is difficult. “My body is telling me, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m thinking I’m forty.”

Next to Stoll sat Beverly Monroe, who was convicted of the murder of her lover, who in fact took his own life. Monroe, sixty-seven, is graceful and soft-spoken, with teardrop eyes that she directs with palpable warmth into the face of anyone she’s addressing. With a degree in organic chemistry and three grown children—one a lawyer who helped overturn her conviction—Monroe is difficult to picture as an inmate. Monroe was the victim of an overzealous investigator, who, after the coroner declared the death of her lover a suicide, was convinced Monroe was the killer. There was no evidence to corroborate this theory, and yet she was convicted. He fabricated a confession, and told Monroe, “I can make you out to be the black widow spider of all time.” After serving seven years for the murder, her conviction was overturned in 2002, by a U.S. federal district court. In his ruling, Judge Richard Williams labeled Monroe’s case a “monument to prosecutorial indiscretions and mishandling,” and called the state police’s interviews of Monroe “deceitful and manipulative.”

Monroe, and the rest of the exonerees represented in this book, demonstrate that wrongful conviction can and does happen to people from any background, from any socioeconomic group. A grandmother can be convicted of a murder when there is no evidence against her. A father can be convicted of molestation, based on nothing but the coached testimony of five-year-olds. In many cases, the victims of wrongful conviction are literally plucked off the street, and their lives are thereafter altered irreversibly. In the case of John Stoll, he was taken in the middle of the night. He was woken in the early hours, dragged to the police station in his pajamas, and did not see his home again for nineteen years.

That afternoon in Berkeley, champagne was opened for Peter Rose. He had been released from prison only a week before, and the rest of the exonerees knew exactly how he was feeling. They toasted him—“To freedom!” they said—and Rose tried to muster the appropriate words, but couldn’t. He was still overcome, overwhelmed.

One day in 1994, while walking in town with his young son on his shoulders, Rose was stopped, handcuffed, and arrested for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. Rose served ten years for the crime, and was exonerated when DNA evidence proved his innocence. Rose, tall, trim and clean-cut, sat in a leather chair, joined the discussion when addressed directly, and otherwise sat quietly, shaking his head at it all. Rose, though affable and quick to laugh, was still adjusting to life outside. “When I went to San Francisco last night,” he said, “it’s just so much traffic and so much things going so fast that my eyes was trying to pick up everything at the same time and it actually made me dizzy.” John Stoll nodded in recognition. Rose continued, “I got nauseated from it. I got dizzy, because I couldn’t focus on what I was doing. I’m trying to look everywhere at the same time. My eyeballs were just going, ‘Whoop!’”

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