Listen free for 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Actual Innocence cover art

Actual Innocence

Written by: Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, Jim Dwyer
Narrated by: Michael Boatman
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $17.46

Buy Now for $17.46

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.

Publisher's Summary

A nightmare from a thousand B-movies: A horrible crime is committed in your neighborhood, and the police knock on your door. A witness swears you are the perpetrator; you have no alibi, and no one believes your protestations of innocence. You're convicted, sentenced to hard time in maximum security, or even death row, where you await the executioner's needle.

Tragically, this is no movie script, but reality for hundreds of American citizens. Our criminal justice system is broken, and people from all walks of life have been destroyed by its failures. But science, and a group of incredibly dedicated crusaders are working to repair the damage.

In the last ten years, DNA testing has uncovered some stone-cold proof that 65 completely innocent people were sent to prison and death row. But the criminal justice system only frees prisoners in cases where there is physical evidence after a torturous legal process. Incredibly, according to many trial judges, "actual innocence" is not grounds for release from prison.

At the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld have helped to free 37 wrongly-convicted people, and have taken up the cause of hundreds more. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jim Dwyer has been covering innocence cases for a decade. In Actual Innocence, Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer relate the harrowing stories of ten innocent men - convicted by sloppy police work, corrupt prosecutors, jailhouse snitches, mistaken eyewitnesses, and other all-too-common flaws of the trial system - and tell of the heroic efforts to free them.

©2000 Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer (P)2000 Random House, Inc.

What the critics say

"This may be the most important book on American criminal justice in a decade." (William Bernhardt, editor of Legal Briefs)
"[A] timely, troubling book...compelling." (New York Times Book Review)

What listeners say about Actual Innocence

Average Customer Ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.