Elizabeth Webster

Exhausted : Appealing False Conviction from Behind Bars Elizabeth Webster

With thousands of people exonerated in the US for crimes they didn't commit, the prevalence of false convictions has been well established. But what happens after sentencing has received little attention. In Exhausted, Elizabeth Webster and Belén Lowrey-Kinberg take a closer look at how the criminal legal system corrects false convictions and how the exonerated experience that process.

Exonerees' struggles to learn the law, their journey back to the courtroom, and their continued legal battles after release are vital to evaluating our system's error correction process. Exhausted analyzes interview and survey results with 36 men and women exonerated in non-capital cases from a sociolegal approach. Exonerees recount their experiences of the appellate process, their exoneration proceedings, their post-conviction interactions with courts and court professionals, and their suggestions for improving the system.

Through exonerees' accounts, the authors show that every stage of the appellate and postconviction process brought repeated experiences of injustice. They find that the substantive justice of the exoneration is undermined by the procedural injustice of the appellate process and the lack of apology and accountability after exoneration. They explore exonerees' involvement as active agents in their appeals and outreach, while recognizing variation in the extent to which they relied upon formal legal channels.

Ultimately, the book aims to demonstrate how the courts burden the falsely convicted with correcting errors of justice that the system is responsible for.