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Part One Setting the Stage We began interviews with death row exonerees across the country in August 2003. For the next four years, we traveled from eastern North Carolina west to California and from the panhandle of Florida north to Chicago. We interviewed exonerees who had been out of prison for a little over a year and those out for over twenty years. Several had spent one-third to one-half of their lives incarcerated for a crime they did not commit. All had been convicted of capital crimes and told they were no longer worthy of life. All struggled with the ongoing impacts of their wrongful convictions for themselves and their loved ones and to rebuild lives based on acceptance, connection, and innocence . While we asked about their wrongful convictions, we focused much more on their transitions when they left prison free and innocent people. Part one sets the stage for the description and analysis of the obstacles they encounter in the challenge to rebuild their lives and strategies they use to cope along the way. Although the book is written to be as accessible as possible to lay audiences, we emphasize that it is a social scientific study of the postexoneration experiences of death row exonerees in the United States. It is not an anecdotal or journalistic account or an account based on practitioners’ work with this population. Our analysis is grounded in sociological methods. We cannot claim that this is better, more accurate, or better informed than others that have addressed similar issues, only that we focus less on each individual’s experience and more on illuminating patterns of struggle and coping that link together the experiences of our eighteen participants. Chapter 1 identifies the research questions that structure the study and situates the research in the broader wrongful conviction literature and other literatures on which we rely throughout the study. Chapter 2 explains the methodology used P S e t t i n g t h e S t a g e 2 to access and interview our participants and to analyze the sixteen hundred pages of transcript that resulted. Chapter 3 introduces the eighteen death row exonerees who participated in the study. It begins with descriptive information about the participants and their cases and then provides a brief overview of each participant’s case. These case reviews give context to the experiences discussed over the course of the book and introduce many of the people, places, and basic case facts mentioned . Part one lays the sociological foundation for the analysis to come. ...

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