Lola Vollen & David Eggars - Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted January 22, 2006

Sunday, January 22 - 6:00 PM (Note Time)

LOLA VOLLEN and DAVE EGGERS launch McSweeney's Voice of Witness series with SURVIVING JUSTICE: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated. Hundreds and men and women ? including 120 on death row ? have been released from America's prisons in the last several years, after incontrovertible proof of their innocence emerged. Their trials were undermined by the myriad problems that plague criminal proceedings ? inept defense lawyers, overzealous prosecutors, deceitful interrogation tactics, bad science, opportunistic snitches, and faulty eyewitnesses. Their lives were effectively wrecked. Now, finally free, they're facing a new set of problems, with little sympathy from society. In SURVIVING JUSTICE, thirteen exonerees describe their experiences ? the events that led to their convictions, their years in prison, and their new lives outside. Each oral history is a stark account of our criminal justice system?s unforgivable flaws. This volume, a joint project of McSweeney?s and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, brings together as editors Lola Vollen, a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses, and Dave Eggers, editor of McSweeney's and the author of three books. Joining them in discussion will be exonerees DAVID POPE and BEVERLY MONROE, and KALAMU AL SALLAM, who is working on the series upcoming book about the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Note that the film "After Innocence" (afterinnocence.com), which features exonerees and some subjects of this book, premiers in San Francisco and Berkeley on January 19 and 20.