INJUSTICE TOWN

When an innocent man fights his murder conviction against all odds, truth is the only weapon he has.

In journalist Tulsky’s account, we first meet Lamonte McIntyre as a 17-year-old sitting in an adult jail for a crime he did not commit, convinced he will shortly be released because, as he wrote in his journal, “there was no way the state could convict an innocent man.” But, Tulsky writes, McIntyre was convicted of two murders despite flimsy evidence, shoddy police work, and dubious eyewitness accounts. He was sent to an adult prison, Hutchinson Correctional Facility, 220 miles from his home in Kansas City, Kansas. He was old enough to be sentenced to two life terms, but not old enough to buy cigarettes from the commissary. As McIntyre’s quest for exoneration unfolds, Tulsky writes that the guilty verdict resulted from the “perfect storm of a dirty cop, an unethical prosecutor, deplorable court-appointed defense, and a judge who had an affair with the prosecutor.” McIntyre’s mother tried hard to overturn her son’s conviction, hiring a private attorney and a private investigator and seeking help from Centurion Ministries, an organization known for helping exonerate the wrongly convicted. They learned that proving someone innocent after conviction is enormously difficult, even when the only eyewitnesses recant and the victim’s family testifies for your innocence. The author details a history of racism and corruption that stretched back for decades in Kansas City political circles and the police force. After writing about McIntyre’s case, Tulsky broadens the narrative to analyze endemic causes of injustice nationwide, highlighting the efforts and obstacles to reform. This book is a page-turner; its tension is enhanced by language as crisp as a court reporter’s and as intimate as an inmate’s private journal.

A gripping exposé reveals that the true criminal is not the man behind bars.