While I believe this is a very important subject to discuss and more people should be aware of stories and circumstances described in this book, I personally felt that I was reading a textbook. It felt a little dry and I wasn't entirely happy with the formatting.

Very precise and engaging book about the Innocent Movement. No matter what your views may be, this book will enlighten you in some shape, form or fashion. To some, the Innocence Movement is a God-Send, to others there is no need for this. Read this book, I am sure your view will change on one thought that you may have. The book is very well written and gives a brilliant history of the Innocence Project. I want to thank NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the advanced reading copy of this wonderful book in exchange for my honest review. A must read!!!

I read a lot on justice/injustice and I generally find this particular topic compelling. Unfortunately, that was not the case with this book.

To begin with, this book is laid out and reads like a college thesis or dissertation. The introduction gives us a brief synopsis of every single chapter, which was a warning sign for me. Typically, this is only done in academic writing. When we get to the actual chapters, the writing is overloaded with endnote citations, with as many as four citations per paragraph. Again, this is more in line with academic requirements. A book structured this way is simply not conducive to an immersive reading experience.

The writing is dry. Nothing about it moved me. In fact, a line from the (very) old TV show Dragnet kept rolling through my mind: "Just the facts, ma'am." We don't examine any case studies. We learn next to nothing about the people who are, in fact, exonerated. We're told that this is emotional work for the people involved, but we never feel it. I know the intent of this book was a history of the innocence movement, not a case study of those victimized by false imprisonment, but the two are so heavily entwined that you can't really have one without the other. The absence of emotion and case studies is somewhat ironic, given that the author talks about how people are drawn to stories, and that an individual story moves us far more than statistics.

I have to mention the author's fondness for using the phrase "in other words". Honestly, it drove me so crazy that I counted the number of times it was used, which was 15 times. If you find yourself having to reword and reiterate a point that many times, then either you're not writing it clearly the first time or you don't trust that your readers are intelligent enough to grasp your meaning.

The content itself is repetitive and often long-winded. For instance, we spend a whole lot of time on the history of DNA, learning about the discovery and its transition for use within our legal system. While DNA is certainly an important aspect of criminal justice, I wound up feeling like I was reading a science book on DNA, rather than a book on our justice system.

In fairness, the material here is well researched. This book will likely work well as a study guide for college classes.

Before I discuss the actual content of the book I have to mention the terrible proof reading (so many unnecessary comma's!) and the formatting of the Kindle version. It's rather terrible, there are many times where words have four or five spaces between them, occasionally letters in a word are spaced, and the numbers for the reference notes are the same size as the regular font. This is very annoying and when it occurs before or after a date it is also very confusing! I hope that these issues are addressed before publication.

I had very high hopes for this book, it is a fascinating subject, but sadly it did not live up to expectations at all.

Halfway through the introduction I realised just how dry it was going to be. I recognised the structure of it from my university essays. When an introduction includes a brief synopsis of the chapters to come it is obviously good to be more of an academic study than a book you can sit down and get lost in!

And so it continued. Far too much time is dedicated to very dry details. For example, 10 pages are dedicated to a conference held in 1998 called The National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty. Obviously this is an extremely important cause but it could either have been explained in 2 - 3 pages maximum or a lot more details about the exoneree's could have been added. This is actually the problem through out the book. Details of the exoneration's are sparse, usually with as little detail as "he was exonerated by DNA".

When the author, rarely, tells the story of someone he really comes to life. He has a voice that can put across the suffering and circustance of a person in a very warm and interesting way. Had there been more of that writing it could have been a spectacular book.
As the book was about the Innocence Movement itself I was not expecting some true crime book but, had the dates and figures been interspersed with case studies it would have been great. It would have been nice to know exactly how someone was wrongfully imprisoned and how they were exonerated. Had this been the case I would have given a much higher rating.

The author himself calls this work a study. Unless this book is to be marketed solely for academic purposes, which I am sure it isn't, then it should not BE a study. It should be an accessible book for all people interested in the subject to enjoy.
The author is obviously very passionate about this subject - hence 2 stars instead of 1 - yet passion alone does not make a book good.

While many of these cases seem unique and uncommon, injustice happens daily in varying degrees. I was very interested in the kind of backstage glimpse Norris provides of the justice system and the individual lawyers, journalists, and investigators behind the innocence movement that helps exonerate innocent people after they have been falsely convicted.