Of the exonerees represented in this book, almost half considered suicide at one time or another. After being convicted of murder, Juan Melendez could not bear the double burden of his imprisonment and the knowledge that society as a whole was not listening to his pleas to be heard. “This is what the demons used to tell me all the time,” he says. “Why you got to satisfy them? Why let them kill you when you can do it yourself? You supposed to be a real Puerto Rican man, a real macho man. Don’t satisfy them. Do it yourself. You say you didn’t do the crime, you think they gonna believe you? They gonna kill you anyway. Don’t satisfy them. Satisfy yourself. Do it yourself.”

Even if they can stay sane and focused, exonerees must first educate themselves about their own cases. As James Newsome, exonerated after twenty-two years in prison, puts it, “The problem is, the wrongfully convicted person has the hardest time proving his innocence, because he doesn’t know anything about his own case.” Proving innocence from inside prison is a backwater proposition, where there is little connection to the outside world, where the state has control over everything—the mail one sends out, the visitors received. And prison is now meant for suffering. The days when American prisons were interested in rehabilitation, in releasing prisoners back into society as improved, reformed individuals, are long gone.

While all defendants are entitled to an attorney to represent them at trial, only those sentenced to death are automatically provided an appellate attorney. This fact drives some to extraordinary measures. Joseph Amrine, knowing that his case would receive more attention and legal assistance if he were given the death penalty, campaigned for it. “I tried my best to get the death penalty,” he says. “I’d seen a lot of other guys there who had life and fifty years without parole—they didn’t have no lawyers or nothing. So I’m thinking, rather than spend the rest of my life in prison, I’m gonna take my chances getting the death penalty for a murder I didn’t commit. If nothing else, I’ll have a lawyer throughout my appeal.” In lieu of state-sponsored legal assistance, the wrongfully convicted try to cobble together their savings and those of their families, or represent themselves pro se. Many become experts in the law, and slog through the mired appellate process. All the while, they struggle with varied obstacles, from the storage of legal documents in their cells to the long, debilitating waits between motions, appeals, and decisions. Bright moments and developments in their cases come from the unlikeliest places. One man, convicted of multiple rapes, learned of the possibility of proving innocence with DNA on Oprah. Twenty-two years into his sentence, DNA results freed him.

When the wrongfully convicted are released, they might be initially exultant, but they enter a world very different than that which they left. They usually have no marketable skills, they’ve received little to no vocational training in prison, and in most cases, the exonerees are released with nothing—no compensation, no apology, no ability to fend for themselves. In 2005, only nineteen states had laws providing compensation for the wrongfully convicted. Only a few exonerees have been successful in suing the counties where they were convicted.

More often, the exonerees become dependent on relatives, and some are simply too damaged to function successfully. Michael Evans and Paul Terry were convicted, at age seventeen, of the rape and murder of a young girl on the South Side of Chicago. They spent twenty-seven years in prison, before their release due to DNA evidence and the assistance of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. Michael Evans is a talkative and optimistic man, now middle-aged, struggling to move forward after being incarcerated for more than half his life and the entirety of his adult life. Paul Terry, though, was left a shell of his former self. He has no aspirations for the future and is content to hold a set of keys to his sister’s house, where he lives.

The inevitable questions addressed to exonerees—“Are you angry? Are you bitter?”—are difficult for them to answer. Often asked on the very day they are released, the day the fortunes of the wrongfully convicted turn, they are joyful, optimistic, ready to begin their lives again. But this period of grace is often short-lived, as the realities of their post-prison quandary become clear. What seems to irk exonerees is that few seem to care about what happened to them, much less how it continues to happen to others. Apologies from states, courts, and officials involved in their conviction are a rarity, and there is no review process, whereby a police department, prosecutor’s office, or court would reflect on its errors. Christopher Ochoa was convicted of a rape and murder and served twelve years for a crime that he didn’t commit. “Nobody, nobody,” he says, “has come out in public and said, ‘We screwed up.’ Not the DA, not the cop, not anybody. Nobody’s even apologized to me.”

Exonerees want something meaningful to grow from their horrific experience. But without recognizing and trying to correct the causes of wrongful convictions, without accountability for mistakes made at all levels, the decades these men and women spent in prison can seem to have been for nothing at all.

America has long played the role of watchdog for human rights abuses abroad—China, Iraq, Palestine, Kosovo, South Africa, Argentina—in each instance condemning the perpetrators and insisting on change, sometimes tied to sanctions and public censure. We are not accustomed to bearing witness to victims of systemic injustice at home; the lens is always pointed outward.

And yet wrongful conviction is a shocking and preventable injustice that affects countless numbers of Americans. This book gives voice to thirteen exonerated Americans. Their stories are told in plain language, and the issues raised by their narratives are elaborated upon in sidebars. We have attempted in this book to present stories that highlight different aspects of wrongful conviction—witness misidentification, forced confession, the preservation of biological evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, and so on. Selected on that basis, it should be noted, the racial composition of the book’s exonerees does not precisely match that of the wrongfully convicted at large; the incidence of wrongful conviction is considerably higher among African-Americans than any other minority.

Those unfamiliar with the phenomena of wrongful conviction very often assume that the wrongfully convicted person had something to do with the crime. One of the students in the UC Berkeley graduate class, when asked about her preconceptions about exonerees, said that she imagined that most were “African-American, poor, involved in some criminal activity,” and that “they were known by the cops, and saddled with some crime that they couldn’t solve otherwise.” Even the wife of exoneree Kevin Green, many years after his exoneration, still believes that “the police don’t just pick you off the street.”

But in the narratives of Surviving Justice, it becomes clear that wrongful conviction can and does happen to virtually anyone. Until stories like these are widely known and from them lessons learned, it will continue to happen to anyone.

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