2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Winner, Silver
****(Political and Social Sciences)
Winner of the Montaigne Medal, awarded to "the most thought-provoking
books"
The first book to explore a shocking yet all-too-common type of
wrongful conviction--one that locks away innocent people for crimes that
never actually happened.
Rodricus Crawford was convicted and sentenced to die for the murder by
suffocation 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. Crawford is not alone.
A full one-third of all known exonerations stem from no-crime wrongful
convictions.
The first book to explore this common but previously undocumented type
of wrongful conviction, Smoke but No Fire tells the heartbreaking
stories of innocent people convicted of crimes that simply never
happened. A suicide is mislabeled a homicide. An accidental fire is
mislabeled an arson. Corrupt police plant drugs on an innocent suspect.
A false allegation of assault is invented to resolve a custody dispute.
With this book, former New York City public defender Jessica S. Henry
sheds essential light on a deeply flawed criminal justice system that
allows--even encourages--these convictions to regularly occur. Smoke
but No Fire promises to be eye-opening reading for legal professionals,
students, activists, and the general public alike as it grapples with
the chilling reality that far too many innocent people spend real years
behind bars for fictional crimes.
