Book Review: Blind Justice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567718776360
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Marvin Zalman
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

been done (quite consciously) to reform and improve rather than undermine or supplant the system.

Second, reducing the risk of wrongful convictions often involves technical fixes to how its partici-

pants conduct specific tasks (eyewitness identifications, custodial interrogations, forensic analyses,

etc.) rather than sweeping changes to the system’s goals. This makes it a valuable window into the

effect of many factors that drive the criminal justice system (race, class, and gender) but not

necessarily a means of addressing them. This careful attention to grounding his history makes the

book a valuable reference for social scientists, graduate students, and anyone seeking to understand

the dynamics of change in the legal system.

Godsey, M. (2017).

Blind Justice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions. Oakland: University of

California Press. xi, 254 pp. $29.95, ISBN 9780520962958.

Reviewed by: Marvin Zalman, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567718776360

A publishing event in 2000—Actual Innocence by Innocence Project founders Barry Scheck and

Peter Neufeld and journalist Jim Dwyer—announced the advent of the innocence movement. A

substantial library of books (and thousands of scholarly articles) written since 2000 have analyzed

wrongful convictions and their consequences. The genres range from scholarly monographs and

anthologies to true crime. A few books are designed or are adaptable for use in law school or social

science classrooms. Every wrongful conviction book is didactic, as even true crime accounts of

specific false convictions try to explain why a crime investigation snared an innocent person. While

all scholarly accounts draw on wrongful conviction narratives, some focus on single causes or issues

while others cover a range.

And quite a range it is. Every element in an investigation, prosecution, and adjudication can

misfire. Wrongful conviction literature examines the forensic sciences, eyewitness identification,

investigative error, interrogations and false confessions, the psychology of justice system error, legal

issues (from plea bargaining through habeas corpus), informants, prosecutors, defense attorneys,

judges, juries, the psychological effects of wrongful conviction, public policy aspects of wrongful

conviction reforms, and the innocence movement itself.

Among the volumes in the wrongful conviction library, Mark Godsey’s Blind Justice is unique. It

is in part a memoir by an attorney and director of one of the more than fifty innocence organizations

(the preferred generic title of “innocence projects”) operating in the United States today and in part a

didactic explanation of wrongful convictions. These two elements blend seamlessly into an

attention-grabbing book that powerfully instructs.

Godsey’s impossible-to-replicate book is a conversion narrative, a “personal journey” (p. 3) of his

transition from an experienced federal prosecutor, indeed “a prosecutor’s prosecutor” (p. 3), to an

innocence lawyer who has freed at least 25 innocent prisoners. When he became a law school

professor, he grudgingly agreed to fill in for an innocence clinic director on sabbatical, skeptical

that a client’s innocence would be proven. In the early 2000s, when innocence consciousness was in

its infancy, Godsey’s skepticism was the norm. But he was blindsided—the DNA exoneration of the

client, Herman May, upset all his professional experience and opened a path to professional enlight-

enment. Today, as knowledge of actual innocence is widespread, as wrongful conviction courses are

taught in law schools, and as prosecutor’s offices are beginning to institute “conviction integrity

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