Josie Duffy Rice

Now in an expanded paperback edition, Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo. "Fierce and absorbing . . . Fabricant chronicles the battles he and his colleagues have fought to unravel a century of fraudulent experts and the bad court decisions that allowed them to thrive." ―Washington Post"No one in America will ever know the number of innocent people convicted, sent to prison, and even executed because of the flood of rotten forensics and bogus scientific opinions presented to juries. In this intriguing and beautifully crafted book, Innocence Project lawyer M. Chris Fabricant illustrates how wrongful convictions occur, and he makes it obvious how they could be prevented.”―John Grisham, author of A Time for Mercy From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant's clients. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the "science" that destroyed their lives. Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City and beyond, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. At turns gripping, enraging, illuminating, and moving, Junk Science is a meticulously researched insider's perspective of the American criminal justice system. Previously untold stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science animate Fabricant's true crime narrative.

On stage during a snowstorm King Lear collapses, and the actor playing him, Hollywood star Arthur Leander, never gets up. Young Kirsten Raymonde, child actress, watches from the wings as Arthur dies. A former paparazzo-turned-EMT in the audience tries to save him, leaving to discover the early stages of a fast-spreading flu have descended on the city and the world. Arthur's former wife reflects on their time together and the graphic novel that is her great work of art. Fifteen years after Arthur's death, the Traveling Symphony tours the Great Lakes region of a sparsely populated, greatly altered United States. Time is marked as before and after the flu, and life—like the remnants of civilization—is still ever-fragile. An actress with the company, Kirsten bears an inscription from Star Trek on her arm—“Because survival is insufficient”—that is echoed on a Symphony caravan. In the town of St. Deborah by the Water, the Traveling Symphony provokes a local tyrant, a crisis that follows them onto the road. Emily St. John Mandel's New York Times bestselling Station Eleven is at once a gripping post-apocalyptic page turner and a hopeful, elegiac masterpiece that explores the connections that bind humanity. Shortlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, among many other honors and accolades, Station Eleven has joined the classic pantheon of imagined futures.

The single new writer to appear in The New Yorker magazine's 1996 fiction issue spins thirteen poignant, wry autobiographical tales about youthful romantic awakenings and adult betrayals involving dangerous neighborhood boys and too-friendly barflies. Tour.

Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes—including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian’s advocacy)—but few people with firsthand knowledge of America’s “injustice system” have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life. Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays “notable” author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly “ordinary” capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts—revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system’s weaknesses—purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny—is a recipe for injustice. Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.