Here are 100 books that It Happened to Audrey fans have personally recommended if you like
It Happened to Audrey.
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I am a queer woman, a queer mother, and a litigator who represents women and queer people who have been wrongly convicted. I’ve seen how women are convicted where no crime occurred: an electrical fire becomes an arson allegation, a child’s seizure becomes child abuse, and drugs administered at the hospital to a woman in labor become fetal harm charges. These are not aberrations, and the more we know about how women and queer people are targeted and misunderstood in the criminal legal system, the more we can stop it. Despite how common these convictions are, there's remarkably little written that puts gender and queerness at the center of the wrongful conviction story.
I was volunteering with the Appalachian Prison Book Project when Hugh Ryan’s book came out.
Suddenly, The Women’s House of Detention was everywhere—RuPaul’s Drag Race, Fresh Air, mainstream news—yet Hugh was willing to do a virtual book talk with volunteers in West Virginia who provide books to incarcerated people. The book tells the history of a prison 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, and the women and transgender individuals who were incarcerated there because of their gender performance and sexual orientation.
Hugh Ryan lays out how women were arrested for going out at night alone, wearing pants, accepting a date from a man, drunkenness, etc., if they were perceived as the “wrong kind of woman.” The prison stood in Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974, and the experience of women incarcerated there drives home the point that incarceration and punishment of women is not…
This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.
The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates—Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin,…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have spent most of my professional life trying to understand why the criminal justice system so often gets things wrong. For twenty-five years, I served as Director of the California Innocence Project and helped free innocent people from prison, including individuals serving life sentences and facing execution. Along the way, I became fascinated not only by wrongful convictions themselves, but by the larger cultural forces that shape how societies think about crime, punishment, race, fear, and justice. The books on this list deeply influenced both my work and my understanding of the human beings trapped inside the system. They are the books I return to when I want to remember why this work matters.
I found this book emotionally overwhelming in a way very few criminal justice books have ever been for me.
I have worked on many eyewitness misidentification cases, but this book personalizes the issue in such a human and heartbreaking way that it becomes impossible to dismiss as an abstract legal problem. What affected me most was not simply the wrongful conviction itself, but the extraordinary relationship that eventually develops between Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton.
I admire the honesty both authors bring to the story. Nobody is demonized, and nobody is simplified.
The New York Times best selling true story of an unlikely friendship forged between a woman and the man she incorrectly identified as her rapist and sent to prison for 11 years.
Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars.
After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released,…
I’ve written about, taught, and litigated wrongful conviction cases for decades. As Director and Co-Founder of the California Innocence Project, I was able to walk 40 innocent people out of prison. I’m proud to have been part of a small group of lawyers who started innocence organizations in the 1990s. That small group has now turned into a global movement. Free the innocents!
This book broke my heart. A college student goes for an exciting semester in Italy and has to deal with the tragic murder of her roommate, her own wrongful arrest for the crime, an internationally covered trial where she is portrayed as a monster, and more than four years in prison for a crime she did not commit.
I love this book because it not only tells the story of a wrongful conviction but is also the best book I have read about the prison experience that women around the world go through. It is beautifully written and tough to put down.
As seen in the Nextflix documentary Amanda Knox, in March 2015, the Supreme Court of Italy exonerated Amanda Knox, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Waiting To Be Heard. In an afterward to this newly issued paperback edition, Amanda updates readers on her life since 2011, introduces the individuals who helped her persevere as her case continued through the Italian courts, and shares her plans for helping others who have also been wrongfully convicted.
In November 2007, 20 year-old Amanda Knox had only been studying in Perugia, Italy, for a few weeks when her friend and roommate, British…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I have spent most of my professional life trying to understand why the criminal justice system so often gets things wrong. For twenty-five years, I served as Director of the California Innocence Project and helped free innocent people from prison, including individuals serving life sentences and facing execution. Along the way, I became fascinated not only by wrongful convictions themselves, but by the larger cultural forces that shape how societies think about crime, punishment, race, fear, and justice. The books on this list deeply influenced both my work and my understanding of the human beings trapped inside the system. They are the books I return to when I want to remember why this work matters.
What I appreciate most about this book is how grounded and practical it feels.
Mark Godsey understands that wrongful convictions are rarely caused by a single evil actor or one dramatic mistake. Instead, they emerge from a chain of assumptions, pressures, tunnel vision, and institutional habits that slowly push cases in the wrong direction. I found myself nodding along constantly because the stories mirrored so many cases I have personally encountered over the years.
I also admire the book because it avoids sensationalism. It explains complicated legal and psychological concepts in a way that is accessible without losing nuance. That balance is incredibly difficult to achieve, and Godsey pulls it off beautifully.
In this unprecedented view from the trenches, prosecutor turned champion for the innocent Mark Godsey takes us inside the frailties of the human mind as they unfold in real-world wrongful convictions. Drawing upon shocking, yet true, stories from his own career, Godsey shares how innate psychological flaws and the "tough on crime" political environment experienced by judges, police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and juries can cause investigations to go awry, leading to the convictions of innocent people. Each chapter explores a distinct psychological human weakness inherent in the criminal justice system-confirmation bias, memory malleability, credibility-determining errors, tunnel vision, cognitive dissonance, bureaucratic…
I’ve written about, taught, and litigated wrongful conviction cases for decades. As Director and Co-Founder of the California Innocence Project, I was able to walk 40 innocent people out of prison. I’m proud to have been part of a small group of lawyers who started innocence organizations in the 1990s. That small group has now turned into a global movement. Free the innocents!
Brian Banks was one of the best high school football players in the country when he was wrongfully arrested at the age of 16 years old for raping a classmate. He went to prison, and a decade later, his accuser admitted it never happened. I love this book because it gives a first-person view of what a child goes through when they are eaten alive by the criminal legal system.
It is also a great book about hope and determination. Brian never gives up on his dreams and ultimately lives them on an NFL field after more than a decade-long ordeal. This book has something for everyone.
Discover the unforgettable and inspiring true story of a young man who was wrongfully convicted as a teenager and imprisoned for more than five years, only to emerge with his spirit unbroken and determined to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL.
At age sixteen, Brian Banks was a nationally recruited All-American Football player, ranked eleventh in the nation as a linebacker. Before his seventeenth birthday, he was in jail, awaiting trial for a heinous crime he did not commit.
Although Brian was innocent, his attorney advised him that…
I am a queer woman, a queer mother, and a litigator who represents women and queer people who have been wrongly convicted. I’ve seen how women are convicted where no crime occurred: an electrical fire becomes an arson allegation, a child’s seizure becomes child abuse, and drugs administered at the hospital to a woman in labor become fetal harm charges. These are not aberrations, and the more we know about how women and queer people are targeted and misunderstood in the criminal legal system, the more we can stop it. Despite how common these convictions are, there's remarkably little written that puts gender and queerness at the center of the wrongful conviction story.
I read Queer (In)justice when it first came out in 2012, and it’s still one of the best, and only, books on how the criminal legal system has historically targeted queer people.
I was a staff attorney at the Mississippi Innocence Project at the time, and I was so taken with the book that I immediately reached out to the lead author about our case with Leigh Stubbs and Tami Vance, two women who were wrongly convicted based on their sexual orientation. On June 27, 2012, Leigh and Tami were exonerated after ten years wrongfully in prison.
Queer (In)Justice will, for me, always be connected with their exonerations. The book provided a framework for understanding how queer people have been falsely labeled as dangerous, deviant, and deceptive, and how the criminal legal system has punished us for our identities.
The first comprehensive work to turn a “queer eye” on the criminal justice system, providing an eye-opening study of LGBTQ+ rights and equality.
Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—from “gleeful gay killers” and “lethal lesbians” to “disease spreaders” and “deceptive gender benders”—to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
I am a queer woman, a queer mother, and a litigator who represents women and queer people who have been wrongly convicted. I’ve seen how women are convicted where no crime occurred: an electrical fire becomes an arson allegation, a child’s seizure becomes child abuse, and drugs administered at the hospital to a woman in labor become fetal harm charges. These are not aberrations, and the more we know about how women and queer people are targeted and misunderstood in the criminal legal system, the more we can stop it. Despite how common these convictions are, there's remarkably little written that puts gender and queerness at the center of the wrongful conviction story.
Every year, the Innocence Network hosts a national conference, gathering nearly 1000 people to learn about and fight against wrongful convictions.
I met Jessica Henry at the conference when she was writing Smoke But No Fire, and it is the first book to give a name to no-crime wrongful convictions. While women are only a part of the book, Jessica informs readers of the phenomenon where people are arrested, convicted, and punished, even though literally no crime occurred. Jessica shares how suicides are mislabeled and punished as homicides, and corrupt police plant drugs on innocent suspects.
The book lays the groundwork to understand that people are punished in our criminal legal system who have not committed any criminal acts. As we’ve learned in the time since her book, 75% of exonerated women were wrongly convicted when no crime occurred, which makes her book crucial reading for understanding the wrongful…
2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Winner, Silver (Political and Social Sciences) Winner of the Montaigne Medal, awarded to "the most thought-provoking books"
The first book to explore a shocking yet all-too-common type of wrongful conviction-one that locks away innocent people for crimes that never actually happened.
Rodricus Crawford was convicted and sentenced to die for the murder by suffocation of his beautiful baby boy. After years on death row, evidence confirmed what Crawford had claimed all along: he was innocent, and his son had died from an undiagnosed illness. Crawford is not alone. A full one-third of…
I am a queer woman, a queer mother, and a litigator who represents women and queer people who have been wrongly convicted. I’ve seen how women are convicted where no crime occurred: an electrical fire becomes an arson allegation, a child’s seizure becomes child abuse, and drugs administered at the hospital to a woman in labor become fetal harm charges. These are not aberrations, and the more we know about how women and queer people are targeted and misunderstood in the criminal legal system, the more we can stop it. Despite how common these convictions are, there's remarkably little written that puts gender and queerness at the center of the wrongful conviction story.
Kent Roach, co-founder of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions, has spent his career as a lawyer and law professor fighting against wrongful convictions in Canada.
Most known for his best-seller Wrongfully Convicted, Kent recently published Justice for Some, an open-access book comparing wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice internationally, from the U.S. and Canada to China and India. This robust guide (over 650 pages) is one of the first books to explicitly examine the role of gender and stereotypes in wrongful convictions internationally, and to bring attention to the wrongful convictions of Indigenous women.
Kent and I met and bonded over how a legal remedy called “miscarriage of justice” can free innocent women in no-crime cases by asking whether the state can uphold the integrity of the conviction. A miscarriage of justice standard can bring relief where there is false testimony by police, hidden exculpatory evidence by…
This book defines the differing concepts of miscarriages of justice, wrongful convictions and innocence in relation to the presumption of innocence and the rationing of justice. It compares inquisitorial systems, with examples from Europe, South America and Asia to adversarial systems. It contrasts England's focus on the miscarriage of justice and the remedial institutions of the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Cases Review Commission, with the United States and China's narrower focus on proven factual innocence It highlights new laws enacted in India in 2023 that increase the risk of wrongful convictions, and details how the International Criminal Court…
I am a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has worked for the past 10 years as the senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations. In that capacity, I have written nearly 2,500 individual accounts of men and women and teenagers who were wrongly convicted of crimes they did not commit. Some of them were sentenced to death. I have seen and written about these tragedies firsthand.
Chris Fabricant has written a compelling account of how the “junk science” of connecting bitemarks to human teeth has resulted in dozens of wrongful convictions of innocent people in America. I have known Chris for many years. He is a fierce advocate for truth and justice. This book powerfully exposes how forensic dentists have used methods with no scientific basis to convict the wrong people and the guilty people went free.
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.
Praise from John Grisham, author of A Time for Mercy: "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…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
People experiencing intimate partner and other forms of violence have been taught that police, prosecutors, and courts are there to respond when they are harmed and to keep them safe. But in my practice representing survivors of gender-based violence, I have both heard about and witnessed first-hand the many ways that the criminal system punishes the survivors that it promised to protect. Survivors are harassed, harmed, and arrested by police. Their experiences of trauma are minimized and denied by prosecutors and judges. They are held criminally responsible for acting in self-defense and for the actions of the people who abuse them.
When Kim Williams overdosed, Leigh Stubbs and Tami Vance sought help and performed CPR on her until paramedics arrived and took her to the hospital. The doctors who examined Kim said that she had been sexually assaulted. Police focused on Leigh and Tami, mainly, if not exclusively, because they were lesbians.
Leigh and Tami were wrongfully convicted of the assault and sentenced to 44 years in prison. Beety, an innocence litigator, highlights how medical malpractice, unscientific expert testimony, prosecutorial misconduct, problematic judicial rulings, and, above all, homophobia led to Leigh and Tami’s (and other manifestly unjust) convictions.
Through the lens of her work with the Innocence Movement and her client Leigh Stubbs—a woman denied a fair trial in 2000 largely due to her sexual orientation—innocence litigator, activist, and founder of the West Virginia Innocence Project Valena Beety examines the failures in America's criminal legal system and the reforms necessary to eliminate wrongful convictions—particularly with regards to women, the queer community, and people of color...
When Valena Beety first became a federal prosecutor, her goal was to protect victims, especially women, from cycles of violence. What she discovered was that not only did prosecutions often fail to help…
