Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated (Voice of Witness)

Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated presents oral histories of thirteen people from all walks of life, who, through a combination of all-too-common factors-overzealous prosecutors, inept defense lawyers, coercive interrogation tactics, eyewitness misidentification-found themselves imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. The stories these exonerated men and women tell are spellbinding, heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring.

Lola Vollen is a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses. She has worked with survivors of systemic injustices in Somalia, South Africa, Israel, Croatia, and Kosovo. Working with Physicians for Human Rights, she developed Bosnia's mass-grave exhumation and identification program. She is the founder of the Life After Exoneration Program, which helps exonerated prisoners in the United States with their transitions after release. She is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies, co-editor of the Voice of Witness series, and a practicing clinician. Dave Eggers is the editor of McSweeney's and the author of four books, including What is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a journalist, his work has appeared in the the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Guardian, and other publications. His first book of oral histories, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers--co-edited and co-written with Daniel Moulthrop and N nive Calegari, appeared in July of 2005. In 2004-2005 he taught a course at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with Lola Vollen, and co-founded the Voice of Witness series.