For every innocent man sent to prison, there is a guilty one left on the outside. He doesn?t understand how the police and prosecutors got the wrong man, and he certainly doesn?t care. He just can?t believe his good luck. Time passes and he realizes that the mistake will not be corrected: the authorities believe in their case and are determined to get a conviction. He may even watch the trial of the person wrongly accused of his crime. He is relieved...

"Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he's done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn't want to die--he wants to be celebrated, understood. Through a kaleidoscope of women--a mother, a sister, a homicide detective--we learn the story of Ansel's life. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the...

Jack Tobin, a Florida trial lawyer, is dedicated to ending capital punishment one prisoner at a time. Jack is convinced that doomed convict Henry Wilson is innocent, but can he delay execution and get Henry a new trial in time? Benny Avrile is a small-time crook with his eye on an oilman's big billfold. But as he makes his move, a shot rings out and the oilman falls dead; Benny blacks out. Just when his fate is all but sealed, an old friend from Jack's...

Imagine having everything taken away from you-permanently-with no hope of resuming a normal life. This is the case for many teenagers in America who are tried and convicted as adults for the crime of murder. Here Susan Kuklin takes you behind bars for frank interviews with a collection of young men who will spend the better part of their lives in jail. She lets them speak for themselves, providing the raw details of their incarceration and the anger,...

Melvin Mars awaits his fate on Death Row. He was one of America's most promising football stars until, aged twenty-years-old, he was arrested and convicted for the murder of his parents just as he was due to begin a very lucrative contract with the NFL. When Amos Decker, newly appointed special agent with the FBI, hears the news that Melvin was saved in the final seconds before his execution because someone has confessed to the killings, he persuades...

Billy Wayne Sinclair was only 21 when he heard the Louisiana judge pronounce these words: "I hereby sentence you to death in the electric chair." It was the culmination of a botched holdup committed the year before in which Billy had accidentally shot and killed a man. Billy spent the next 40 years in Angola Prison, one of the country's worst, six of those years on death row. When in 1972 the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as arbitrary...

Falsely accused of murdering three eight-year-old boys in Arkansas, eighteen-year-old Echols, deemed the "ringleader" of the West Memphis Three, was sentenced to death. Then in August 2011 the WMT were released. In these pages, Echols describes the terrors he experienced every day and his outrage toward the American justice system, and offers a firsthand account of living on Death Row in heartbreaking, agonizing detail.

In 1919, Lewis E. Lawes moved his wife and young daughters into the warden's mansion at Sing Sing prison. They shared a yard with 1,096 of the toughest inmates in the world-murderers, rapists, and thieves who Lawes alone believed capable of redemption. Adamantly opposed to the death penalty, Lawes presided over 300 executions. His progressive ideas shocked many, but he taught the nation that a prison was a community. He allowed a kidnapper to care...

"Fifteen years ago, Lilith Wade was arrested for the brutal murder of six women. After a death row conviction, media frenzy, and the release of an unauthorized biography, her thirty-year-old daughter Edie Beckett is just trying to survive out of the spotlight. She's a recovering alcoholic with a dead-end city job and an unhealthy codependent relationship with her brother. Edie also has a disturbing secret: a growing obsession with the families of...