Actual Innocence : Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted

In 1932, Professor Edwin M. Borchard wrote in his classic study, Convicting the Innocent , “ In an age when social justice has made such marked advances . . . it seems strange that so little attention has been given to one of the most flagrant of all publicly imposed wrongs—the plight of the innocent victim of unjust conviction in criminal cases.” 1 In the seven decades since Professor Borchard’s observation, the general cause of social justice has surely been advanced as the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1960s brought opportunity to previously neglected classes of Americans. Yet over the same period—at least until quite recently—the conviction of innocent individuals has remained a neglected topic among both policymakers and scholars. In the 1990s, the use of advanced DNA testing has freed many wrongfully incarcerated persons. 2 As a result, scholars 3 and the media 4 have