商品簡介
A powerful argument for adopting a model of restorative justice in wrongful conviction cases as part of legislative efforts towards criminal justice reform and community healing
At the age of seventeen, Thomas Haynesworth was arrested on multiple rape charges in Virginia. Despite his pleas of innocence, five rape victims, including 20 year-old Janet Burke, ID'ed him as the offender. Only after over two decades of legal wrangling was he exonerated by DNA evidence. Conventional wisdom points to an exoneration as a happy ending to tragic tales of injustice like Haynesworth's. However, even when the physical shackles are left behind, invisible ones can be profoundly more difficult to unlock.
In Rectify, former innocence project director and journalist Lara Bazelon takes stock of the massive damage inflicted by wrongful convictions. Despite a record 375 exonerations in the last three years, Bazelon argues that the criminal justice system has not done enough to rectify the devastation left in their wake--the suffering experienced by not only the exoneree, but their families, the crime victims who mistakenly identified them as perpetrators, the jurors who convicted them, and the prosecutors who realized too late that they helped convict an innocent person.
In the midst of her frustration over the blatant limitations of courts and advocates, Bazelon's hope is renewed by the fledgling but growing movement to apply the centuries-old practice of restorative justice to wrongful conviction cases. Using the stories of Thomas Haynesworth, Janet Burke, and other crime victims and exonerees, she demonstrates how the transformative experience of connecting isolated individuals around mutual trauma and a shared purpose of repairing harm unites unlikely allies in the common cause of just reparations. Poignantly written and vigorously researched, Bazelon takes to task the far-reaching failures of our criminal justice system, and offers a window into a future where the power it yields can be used in pursuit of healing and unity rather than punishment and blame.
作者簡介
Lara Bazelon is a writer, attorney and director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She is former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent and worked as a public defender in Los Angeles for seven years. Bazelon's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Politico, The Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, and Slate, where she is a contributing editor and has a long-running series about wrongful conviction cases. Bazelon is recipient of a writer-in-residency award from the MacDowell Colony in 2016 and from Mesa Refuge in 2017, where she was named a Langeloth Fellow for excellence in writing about issues relating to criminal justice. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.
