New Book Shows How Innocence Project Freed Some Wrongly Convicted; What About Others?

A House of Cards producer and an exonerated ex-convict discussed justice reform during an innovative and compelling forum last week at the National Press Club.

John Mankiewicz, a screenwriter and executive producer for the Washington-set hit House of Cards series on Netflix starring Kevin Spacey as a U.S. president, described why he became fascinated with ordeal of Jerry Miller, a Chicago man exonerated by DNA evidence from a rape conviction in 2007 after Miller had spent nearly 25 years in prison. The 1982 sentence was for a 1981 kidnapping and rape committed by another man whom Miller did not know.

Miller underscored the challenges that occur even during successful vindication. He said that authorities shamed and scarred him so thoroughly as a “sex offender” and otherwise so that he felt even after his release on parole  “This is harder than being in jail.”

Miller and Mankiewicz (shown at far left and left, respectively in the photo below) collaborated in a new book featured by the panel. The book, Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted, paired 14 victims (as established by post-conviction evidence)  with a well-known thriller or mystery author.

The collection was co-edited by novelist Leslie S. Klinger. Introductions were by the prominent attorneys Scott Turow and Barry Scheck. The latter co-founded 25 years ago with Peter Neufeld the Innocence Project at Benjamin Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University in New York. It is the best known of an estimated 70 similar projects nationally, which are indexed here.

Speaking also on the panel was the book’s co-editor Laura Caldwell, a best-selling novelist, attorney and the founder/director of the Life After Innocence project at the Loyola University School of Law in Chicago. The moderator was Press Club President Jeffrey Ballou, who is shown with Caldwell at the right of the adjoining photo taken at the panel by the Justice Integrity Project. The collection was co-edited by novelist Leslie S. Klinger.

The anthology includes a previously unpublished essay by the late playwright Arthur Miller, who led a campaign in Connecticut nearly four decades ago to free Peter Reilly, who had been coerced by state police when he was teenager into a false confession that he had murdered his mother. That controversy provoked bitter struggles within the law enforcement community as major players struggled with outside public scrutiny.

Those problems are widespread and still with us, as illustrated by the other case studies beyond Jerry Miller’s and similar reports.

As a reminder also of the high stakes, the Trump Administration’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions (shown in an official photo) last month ordered the Justice Department to shut down its forensic science committee. That closure,  reported by the Washington Post here, prompted concern by last week’s forum panelists. 

If problems remain so do civic education efforts, as exemplified by the Anatomy of Innocence. The anthology uses the talents of well-known authors to showcase the injustices of a U.S. penal system that currently incarcerates some 2.2 million persons, which is more than any other major country’s total or population percentage.

How many might be wrongly held? That’s a timely question, especially as the new Trump administration ramps up efforts to implement its law-and-order campaign rhetoric.