Akron Public Library

"Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her life forever--that of Sharanda Jones, single mother, business owner, and, like Brittany, Black daughter of the rural South. A victim of America's ... war on drugs, Sharanda had been torn away from her young daughter and was serving a life sentence without parole--for a first-time drug offense. In Sharanda, Brittany saw haunting echoes of her own life, both...

"Beverly Monroe spent seven years in prison for murdering her companion of thirteen years; in fact, he had killed himself. Christopher Ochoa was persuaded to confess to a rape and murder he did not commit, and served twelve years of his life sentence before he was freed by DNA evidence. Michael Evans and Paul Terry each spent twenty-seven years in prison for a brutal rape and murder they did not commit. They were teenagers when they entered prison;...

When a twenty-year-old murder case comes back to life, a detective must race against his failing sight to unravel the mystery When Allison Wallis was beaten to death, Detective Francis X. Loughlin found the killer-Julian Vega, a teenager with a crush on the murdered girl. Using his natural sense of empathy, he cozied up to young Julian, convincing him to give a confession that would put him away until he was thirty-six.   Twenty years later, Julian...

"In 1990, Ellen McGarrahan was a young reporter for the Miami Herald when she covered the execution of Jesse Tafero, a man convicted of murdering two police officers. When it later emerged that Tafero may not have committed the murders, McGarrahan became haunted by that grisly execution--and appalled by her unquestioning acceptance of the state's version of events. Decades later, in the midst of her successful career as a private investigator, McGarrahan...

Inertia — Friends Claire and Matt stopped speaking six months ago. When Matt gets into a car accident and his end looks certain, he requests a visitation, a procedure which allows him and Claire to revisit shared memories and a chance to discover what went wrong. The Spinners — Bounty hunter Atleigh Kent tracks and kills leeches, a predatory extraterrestrial race which illegal absorbs human host bodies. But death begets all death, and Atleigh...

Detective Shane Scully fights to save a man railroaded for murder, while he struggles to save his marriage.

Body cams and dashcams have fundamentally transformed law enforcement in recent years. These innovations can help prove someone committed a crime, or didn't. Real-life footage has cleared people initially accused of wrongdoing, and in certain instances even implicated officers. But that same type of footage can also be used to clear police falsely accused of misdeeds. From allegations of harassment or bias to false arrests or even criminal conduct,...

"When the final gavel clapped in a rural Southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his ... quarter-century-long journey to freedom, ... from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his...

Overview: Since 1996, death sentences in America have declined more than 60 percent, reversing a generation-long trend toward greater acceptance of capital punishment. In theory, most Americans continue to support the death penalty. But it is no longer seen as a theoretical matter. Prosecutors, judges, and juries across the country have moved in large numbers to give much greater credence to the possibility of mistakes-mistakes that in this arena...

Timothy Masters was a lonely, troubled teenager with a penchant for gory artwork when he first saw Peggy Lee Hettrick, her dead, mutilated body nearly frozen in the early morning of Fort Collins, Colorado. Not believing it could really be a dead body, thinking he was the victim of yet another prank by his abusive classmates, the fifteen-year-old didn't go to the police, but they came to him. So began a decade-long investigation led by a relentless...