Criminal Intent

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Unfortunately, Father Beale’s fate in this novel is all too real. Actual Innocence, a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jim Dwyer with Peter Neufeld and Barry Schreck, provides horrifying details about sixty-five convicts who were sent to prison or death row-after being convicted by a unanimous jury-before DNA testing produced stone-cold proof of their innocence. Unfortunately, even after these convicts’ guiltlessness was established, many of them were not freed, because under current appellate law, “actual innocence” is not necessarily grounds for release from prison. Worse, because post-conviction appeals have been sharply truncated, many innocent convicts found themselves without legal recourse before the DNA technology to exonerate them even existed. A recent report produced by Equal Justice USA, a project of the Hyattsville-based Quixote Center, found that sixteen men in seven states had been executed despite “compelling evidence of their innocence.” How does this happen? Eyewitnesses are often mistaken, snitches lie, confessions are coerced or fabricated, junk science is permitted, and lawyers fail. If all this is true, how many Father Beales must there be in our American prisons?

To help correct this injustice, lawyer Peter Neufeld has founded the pro bono Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. The Innocence Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using DNA evidence to seek releases in the hundreds of remaining cases of wrongly convicted persons. They have also proposed a bipartisan Innocence Protection Act, which would give inmates the right to DNA tests to prove their innocence and would require the preservation of evidence after conviction. There have been more than one hundred post-conviction exonerations based upon DNA evidence in the last few years-but there is still much work to be done. Persons wanting to know more about this endeavor can visit: http://www.cardozo.yu.edu/innocence_project/.

Once again, I want to thank my editor, Joe Blades, and my agents, Robert Gottlieb and Matt Bialer, for their guidance and support. I want to thank Arlene Joplin, my criminal law expert, and William McConnell, my Episcopal church expert, for reading and commenting on an early draft of the book. And I want to thank my family, Kirsten and Harry and Alice and Ralph, for keeping me relatively sane.

Readers are invited to E-mail me at: wb@williambernhardt.com. You can also visit my Web site and sign up for my E-mail newsletter: www.williambernhardt.com.