Chasing Justice
Kerry Max Cook. Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit. New York: William Morrow, 2007. KF224.C66 C66 2007.
From Publishers’ Weekly:
Despite some amateurish prose, this
depressing account of an unfair criminal justice system that almost
claimed the author’s life deserves a wide readership alongside John
Grisham’s The Innocent Man.
After being arrested in 1977 for a brutal mutilation murder in Tyler,
Tex., that he did not commit, Cook, then 21 years old, was repeatedly
railroaded by corrupt police officers, prosecutors and judges bent on
ignoring all the rules to get him convicted. After his first trial,
Cook ended up on death row and underwent a hellish ordeal behind bars;
two subsequent trials ended in a mistrial and another conviction and
death sentence. The subtitle notwithstanding, Cook’s eventual freedom
was largely due to a team of dedicated attorneys, working from the
Capital Punishment Project or pro bono, who fought tooth-and-nail to
obtain his freedom in the late 1990s. Readers familiar with similar
travesties, such as the Randall Dale Adams case chronicled in Errol
Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line, will be outraged anew,
especially at the authorities’ deliberate disregard of another suspect,
linked to the crime by an eyewitness and DNA evidence.