Smoke but No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened

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Univ of California Press, Aug 4, 2020 - Social Science - 264 pages
Rodricus Crawford was sentenced to die for the murder of his beautiful baby boy. After years on death row, evidence confirmed what Crawford had claimed all along: he was innocent, and his son had died from an undiagnosed illness.
 
In Smoke but No Fire, former New York City public defender Jessica S. Henry tells the heartbreaking stories of innocent people convicted of crimes that simply never occurred. A suicide is mislabeled a homicide. An accidental fire is mislabeled an arson. A false allegation of assault is invented to resolve a custody dispute. Henry exposes a deeply flawed criminal justice system that allows—even encourages—these no-crime wrongful convictions to regularly occur.
 
This eye-opening book grapples with the chilling reality that far too many innocent people spend real years behind bars for fictional crimes.

 
 

Contents

Misclassified Murders and Mislabeled Crimes
23
When Lies Become Courtroom Truths
43
Drowning in Cases
106
Not Minor Matters
152
Notes
197
Index
235
Copyright

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About the author (2020)

Jessica S. Henry was a public defender for nearly ten years in New York City before joining the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University, where she is an associate professor and a frequent commentator on national television, on radio, and in print media.
 

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