Surviving Justice ─ America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated

Surviving Justice presents oral histories of thirteen people from all walks of life, who, through a combination of all-too-common factors—overzealous prosecutors, inept defense lawyers, coercive interrogation tactics, eyewitness misidentification— found themselves imprisoned for crimes that they did not commit. The stories these exonerated men and women tell are spellbinding, heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring. These narrators include:

Paul Terry, who spent twenty-seven years wrongfully imprisoned, and emerged psychologically devastated and barely able to communicate.

Beverly Monroe, an organic chemist who was coerced into falsely confessing to the murder of her lover. Free after seven years, she faces the daunting task of rebuilding her life from the ground up.

Joseph Amrine, who was sentenced to death for murder. Seventeen years later, when DNA evidence exonerated him, Amrine emerged from prison with nothing but the fourteen dollars in his inmate account.

Lola Vollen is a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses. She has worked with survivors of systemic injustices in Somalia, South Africa, Israel, Croatia, and Kosovo. Working with Physicians for Human Rights, she developed Bosnia’s mass-grave exhumation and identification program. She is the founder of the Life After Exoneration Program, which helps exonerated prisoners in the United States with their transitions after release. She is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, co-editor of the Voice of Witness series, and a practicing clinician.

Dave Eggers is the editor of McSweeney’s and the author of four books, including What is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a journalist, his work has appeared in the the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Guardian, and other publications. His first book of oral histories, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers—co-edited and co-written with Daniel Moulthrop and Nínive Calegari, appeared in July of 2005. In 2004–2005 he taught a course at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with Lola Vollen, and co-founded the Voice of Witness series.