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  • Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated
  • Barbara Eckstein
Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated. By Lola Vollen and Dave Eggers. San Francisco, CA: Voice of Witness Press, 2005. 378 pp. + 90 pp. of appendices. Softbound, $16.00.

On Independence Day 2008, the Associated Press distributed a story about a Texas man released from prison after serving fifteen years. He was the nineteenth Dallas County man since 2001 shown to be innocent by DNA evidence (“DNA Clears Texan,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, July 4, 2008: 7A). This was the highest number of any county in the nation. Wrongful conviction is, however, not limited to Dallas County, TX, nor is exoneration always the result of DNA tests. Just five days earlier, The Des Moines Register had published a front-page story about a man spending his twelfth year in an Iowa prison. He had been convicted in Des Moines’s Polk County of a 1996 murder, but the many red flags in the case finally warranted a hearing and a possible reversal of the verdict. In two words, Steve Weinberg, an investigative journalist at the University of Missouri, summarized for the Register the common theme in wrongful convictions: “tunnel vision” (“Hopes and Fears,” Des Moines Sunday Register, June 29, 2008: 4A). Tunnel vision in the early stages of an investigation remains with a case through [End Page 107] conviction and appeal, he argues. Weinberg could be describing the cases of the thirteen exonerated individuals whose life stories comprise Surviving Justice

These stories reveal that tunnel vision can condemn women as well as men, whites as well as blacks and Latinos, even members of the middle class as well as the working class or the unemployed. Those with great faith in the U.S. justice system may come to this book cynical about prisoners’ claims of innocence. Those who presume that the poor suffer disproportionately in the U.S. justice system (I am one of those) may come to this book confident that they will find further evidence of that inequality. What both readers will find is their own vulnerability to an investigators’ tunnel vision—not all investigators all the time, mind you, but enough to result in a frightening number of wrongful convictions and centuries of life spent separated from family, friends, a stroll down a city street, or a walk on a mountain trail.

A reporter experienced in prison issues first interviewed many of the thirteen survivors included in the book. Subsequently, University of California Berkeley students from the Graduate School of Journalism interviewed twelve of the survivors. A sister of the thirteenth survivor, unwilling to participate himself, replaced him in the interview process with his permission. At the behest of their instructors, the students transcribed the taped interviews (on average 45,000 words) and then edited them and checked the facts. The goals of the process were accuracy through the involvement of the interviewees and also “narratives concise, and as linear as possible” (about 12,000 words) (379). The result is thirteen interviews printed as free indirect discourse, that is, monologues missing the interview questions and seemingly in the voices of the survivors. Some life stories contain intermittent, italicized, third-person comments on events in the case. One transcribed interview attempts to maintain the dialect of the speaker. In the end, however, all are “concise narratives” resulting from students interviewing the subjects and then editing those interviews. At the back of the book are four appendices: causes of wrongful conviction (eighteen are listed), the prison experience, life after exoneration, and supplemental material (including telling excerpts from an interrogation manual). These contextualizing appendices imply an important thesis for the collection: investigative tunnel vision makes anyone vulnerable to wrongful conviction with devastating results for the victims of this process and their loved ones. The appendices do not, however, either explicitly or implicitly reflect on the method of the collection itself.

The production of the interviews as free indirect discourse is a decision the book’s editors and its publisher, Voice of Witness, entered into deliberately, mindfully, as evidenced by their “Note on Methodology.” Anyone faced with a long unwieldy interview tape can sympathize with a choice...

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