Customer Reviews

A Promise of Justice: The Eighteen-Year Fight to Save Four Innocent Men

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This book tells the story of four men who were framed by police and prosecutors and put in prison and on death row for eighteen years. Although you know before reading the book that the men were eventually exonerated, the book grips you.

It's a courageous, honest, and intelligent story of prosecutorial corruption and defense lawyers' almost superhuman incompetence. Despite the paranoia that events like these create in victims of injustice and the cynicism they foster in do-gooders, this should be received as a hopeful book, proof that injustice is not invincible.

But hope should not become complacency. As the authors write:

"There's no way to know how many wrongful convictions there are, but even if the error rate in the criminal justice system were only one percent there'd be more than ten thousand cases in the country."

The police in this case had a standard procedure of keeping two files, one of them secret. The prosecutors had sophisticated systems in place for stifling the truth. These facts suggest an "error rate" potentially higher than one percent.

Citing a book by Michael Radelet, the authors report that there have been 421 Americans this century convicted of capital crimes and later proved innocent. In 23 of these cases the proof came too late.

In this case, the police had good leads on the actual criminals. These were kept quiet because of political connections until the wrong men had been publicly accused. After they had accused four men, prosecutors did not want to switch to accusing different ones just because the new ones looked like they might really be guilty. So the evidence was buried.

As a result, four families were ruined, and at least one of the actual criminals committed at least one more murder, thus destroying more lives. And, of course, courts were tied up with endless hours of ridiculously pointless work, while trust and relations between citizens and police was horribly damaged.

No police officers or prosecutors were charged with any crimes in this matter. Perhaps this book is an argument that they should be. Or perhaps it is an argument against the bizarre U.S. system of ELECTING prosecutors. On the last page of the book, one of the four victims of this outrage proposes five changes to the current system:

"abolishing capital punishment, allowing petitions for new trials to be presented any time evidence of innocence is discovered (a right that has been severely curtailed by the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996), repealing legislation intended to speed up capital appeals, raising the standards and reducing the caseloads of defense lawyers working at public expense, and ensuring every defendant's right to test possible DNA evidence"

They weren't naive. Having grown up in the predominately Black neighborhoods of Chicago, Dennis Williams, Ken Adams, Verneal Jimerson and Willie Rainge, knew that "justice" was often only a word loosely used, and not necessarily readily available to young, Black men. All too soon they were to become the victims of the "justice system". Wrongfully convicted of murder, rape and kidnapping, they were to spend the next 18 years locked in some of Illinois's most fearsome prisons. Two of them were confined to death row, appeals exhausted,clinging to the hope that someone, somewhere would make it right, would finally realize what police and prosecutorial misconduct, combined with an apathetic legal community, can do to young lives.

Protess and Warden, two of the nation's leading reporters of criminal injustice, as well as warriors of justice for the wrongfully accused and convicted, take us on a heartwrenching journey as they are joined by others det! ermined to unearth the true story before the executions are conducted.

This is a book that cannot be confined to the shelves marked "legal" or "history" or "investigations"---it's truly a book which should be mandatory reading for everyone. This story of the "Ford Heights Four" will be a wake-up call to a nation slumbering in the false assumption that there is "justice for all" in our system.

A Promise of Justice offers us a close look at a miscarriage of justice by our legal system. Four innocent men sentenced to death, ramrodded by prosecuters eager for headlines and career boosting convictions. Fabricated evidence, perjured testimony, sloppy police work, and pressure brought by extensive media coverage all led to the convictions of the wrong men. Four innocent men who were robbed of 18 years of their lives by a system whose checks and balances were ignored by those in charge of protecting our rights.

Hard work by investigative journalists Rob Warden and David Protess, and Lawrence Marshall's law school class (Northwestern University) eventually led to the exoneration of these four men and detailed in this book. This book showed me a side of our legal system that is both frightening and interesting, a side involving personal pride and prejudices, where the pursuit of truth is secondary to conviction rate and headlines.

An involving read for anyone, pa! rticularly those interested in justice, the death penalty, or the workings of our legal system.

I highly recommend this book.

It seems there are a growing number of "wrongly convicted" books emerging in recent years, but this is one of the originals and one of the best.

Students and lawyers examine a case where justice went wrong in Chicago. This was long before the days of the mass reversal of several death penalty cases in Illinois (which led to the moratorium on the death penalty in that state). This was a case that had mostly been forgotten by the public when a few lawyers and journalism students made it their cause. Their efforts and their findings are dramatically reported by David Protess who draws the reader into the story nicely, but while still showing a fair amount of objectivity.

This is a powerful book. Every American should read and take its message to heart. Protess and Warden are to be congratulated.

Rob Warden has been a hero of mine since 1984 when I was under investigation for a crime I did not commit and he came to my defense in Chicago Lawyer. He saved me from indictment, probable conviction, and perhaps a prison sentence. Having had this personal connection with him nearly 15 years ago, I was delighted when I happened to stumble across the fine book he has written with Professor David Protess, A Promise of Justice. It's nice to know that, although Mr. Warden has abandoned periodic journalism, he has not abandoned the cause of justice. This book is a monument to his skill as a writer and dedication as an investigator. I can only add my voice to Studs Terkel's: This effort deserves the Pulitzer Prize, at least.

This book is full of compassion, yet it can fairly be described as dispassionate. If that seems like a contradiction, it's only because the facts speak so eloquently and so strongly all by themselves. I read it and wept. The story is powerful enough, in the dispassionate telling, to make angels weep.

The title itself hints at the fact that justice will come to these four men. You know they'll get out, but you don't know how. Protess and Warden will keep you turning the pages and wanting more -- I could barely put the book down, even after I'd finished it! A magnificent retelling of the story of the Ford Heights Four.

It's all here, and it's scarier than the latest "Friday the 13th" - self-contradictory witnesses, tunnel vision investigators with secret files, over zealous prosecutors willing to trade truth for career goals, bad science, incompetent defenders, compromised experts and a credible public. The odds of Jason coming to get you are remote, but as this book makes clear, anyone can find him or herself in the cross hairs of wrongful prosecution. And make no mistake, they'll kill you. They had every intention of killing Dennis Williams, Kenny Adams, Willie Rainge, and Verneal Jimerson.

I can't think of anyone who shouldn't read this book, and the fact that it's a page-turner is a further incentive. It's a riveting read, and it's real. Thank God, literally, for David Protess and Robert Warden. In 1996 alone, 28 people who had been convicted by juries were exonerated by science (including these four). Many more remain in prison, and most of them will never be cleared. You could be next. You need to read this book.

A Promise of Justice is a great book, though the title is misleading. The prosecution of these four innocent black men shows the inherent flaws of the American adversarial system that often fails both the victims and the accused. The system often fails,with overzealous prosecutors or incompetent defense attorneys, perjured testimony, poor or incompetent police work, cynical or biased judges or jurors, flawed so called "expert" testimony , and all the flaws associated with the human personality. The exceptional courage and perseverence of these journalists and attorneys regretably are often the exception to the rule, as amply illustrated by the fact that it took 18 years to free these men who were plainly innocent. The adversarial system of justice means the wealthy, the educated and well appointed have a more practical oppprtunity for a fair trial than the poor or less educated . I cannot imagine how these innocent men were able to endure their convictions, imprisonment and in two cases - imminent threat of execution. This book compares well with "May God Have Mercy On You". As a civil litigation attorney, I find it appalling to find that the accused is provided less disclosure and less accessabilty to the facts/witnesses in a criminal case, when his life or liberty is at stake ,than is available in a civil case involving a fender bender. The prosecution and police can and often do conceal the fruits of their investigation. In this book it is shocking to find that a solid lead early in the police investigation shortly after the first indictments was not followed until 16 years later, exposing the real killers. Most of the public/legislators seem to complain that the death penalty for those convicted of heinous crimes takes too long to be implemented. In these cases, 18 years was nearly not enough ..This book illustrates how and why it can take so long to get to the truth, and in the words of Dennis Williams, offers some well thought out ways to improve our flawed system of justice. While the American criminal justice system is probably better in most ways than systems offered in other countries, this book amply shows the warts,blemishes and flaws of our system, whose worst feature may be a death penalty which kills the guilty, but very rarely, but unforgivably, the innocent as well.