Justice denied

de James Morton

An incisive examination by the bestselling author of The Mammoth Book of Gangs of some of the many miscarriages of justice of this and the previous century, which have seen innocent men and women found guilty, and sometimes executed. Why were Amanda Knox and her boyfriend convicted of killing Meredith Kercher in Perugia, then released, then retried? How did the boxer Rubin The Hurricane Carter come to be wrongly convicted of a triple homicide? The alibi of Joe Hill, the Industrial Workers of the World activist wrongly executed for the murder of a Utah grocer and his son, came too late to save him from execution. On the other hand, Lindy Chamberlain (famously portrayed by Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark), has finally, thirty-two years after the fact, had her claim that her baby Azaria was taken by a dingo at Ayers Rock in the Australian Outback upheld by a coroner. Among many other cases, Morton also considers the 1910 case of two men convicted of the murder of a man still alive in 1926 and case of the West Memphis Three, who were convicted as teenagers in 1994 of the murders of three boys in Arkansas and released in 2011 in a plea bargain after eighteen years. The prosecution still refuses to accept their innocence.