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The Exoneree Diaries

by Alison Flowers, 2016

Review is copyright © 2020 by Wil C. Fry.

Published: 2020.06.13

Home > Book Reviews > The Exoneree Diaries

 

Cover design by John Yates

★★★★ (of 5)

(* page count depends on format of ebook reader; paperback lists 288.)

 

Summary

I was led to this book by the previous one (Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?) because the author, Alison Flowers wrote one of the essays in that previous book and some end notes mentioned this one — which had even higher ratings on Goodreads.

Flowers researched, interviewed, and documented the lives of four exonerated prisoners, giving each of them a section of this book. One from Indiana and three from Illinois, the four subjects were duly convicted of felony offenses by our criminal justice system but eventually freed once lengthy and expensive legal efforts showed they were innocent. Each story is a little different, all of them compelling and engrossing, and all of them pointing an accusing finger at the way we investigate, charge, try, convict, and imprison people in this country.

The four exonerees covered in this book are as follows (name, convicted of, years imprisoned):

 

Praise

For the most part, the book is well written and easy to read. Flowers doesn’t sugarcoat the lives of her subjects in some misguided attempt to paint them as perfect people or heroes — she includes their faults, mistakes, and personal weaknesses. They are faulty humans like the rest of us, but entirely innocent of the crimes that landed them in prison.

While a different book might focus on the laws, processes, statistics, and history to make similar points (and I would read that book too), this book’s focus on four individuals adds color and depth and personality to the national tragedy of regularly incarcerating innocent people and making it incredibly difficult for those people to regain their freedom.

I suppose another reason I liked it is my previous experience (2001-05) as a small-town journalist, during which I often covered felony cases and jury trials at the county courthouse in Wewoka, Oklahoma. More than once during that time, I wished I had the time (and courage) to delve deeper into the backgrounds and lives of the people I wrote about. The vast majority of my court-related stories were drawn from two sources: (1) my personal observations of court proceedings and (2) documents produced by either law enforcement or the offices of the court clerk. I almost never had the opportunity to interview the suspects/defendants themselves and the few times I did there was tremendous pushback from law enforcement.

 

Criticism

It bothered me that Flowers didn’t carefuly stick to a linear timeline while telling these stories and wasn’t always clear about when she’d switched time periods. I was fine with the general outline followed by all four stories: beginning with the exoneree walking free but then jumping back to give background on the person’s life before describing the crime(s) in question, the trial and conviction, the incarceration, and the exoneration process. It’s just that within that outline, Flowers sometimes skipped around, a few times within individual paragraphs. Frequently it wasn’t clear which part was referring to a previous event and which part was in the ongoing timeline of the story.

There were formatting problems as well. I’m not familiar with ebooks, having only read a few, so I don’t know if the following errors are common, but they were exhibited in both this book and the previous one. One, there are occasional line breaks in the midst of a paragraph, with the sentence cutting off abruptly, only to be continued in the following paragraph. A few times, this happened in the midst of a hyphenated word. Two, there was no blockquote formatting to set off a longer quotation (which usually includes indentation and a slightly smaller font size), so block quotes look like regular paragraphs; only the context tells the reader that a particular paragraph should have been a blockquote. (Note: both these ebooks are from the same publisher, so perhaps it is a fault particular to them.)

 

Conclusion

The overall effect of the book was powerful, emotionally. Simply documenting these four cases, with occasional mentions of the overall trends, should convince anyone that there are serious problems in our criminal justice system. I think I was aware of all or most of them before reading; it served to reinforce my positions on several items.

I would recommend the book to anyone, especially those with a near-infallible trust in our country’s courts and police.

 

Note: I’ve published a much shorter version of this review on Goodreads.

 





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