Joe Conason went to see The Exonerated, an off-broadway play about the wrongfully convicted, and writes a powerful article about it.

Composed wholly from court records and interviews by playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, this documentary drama recounts true tales of horror from the American criminal-justice system. The actors sit downstage and read their parts as the stories of six innocent citizens condemned to death row unfold. If this sounds like a worthy endeavor, it is; if it sounds dull or didactic, it isn’t.

The Exonerated is so compelling as theater, in fact, that it has drawn a rotating marquee of talent to the 45 Bleecker Street Theatre—including Richard Dreyfuss, Jill Clayburgh, Sara Gilbert, Gabriel Byrne, Aidan Quinn, and director Bob Balaban. At the performance I saw, Mariska Hargitay, star of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, gave brilliant voice to Sunny Jacobs, a woman who spent almost 17 years in a Florida penitentiary—including five years on death row—for a double murder she didn’t commit.

In the article, Conason retells the story of another death row inmate, one who was brutally executed when he caught on fire in the electric chair. He also touts, as do we, Taryn Simon's new book, The Innocents, with commentary by Innocence Project co-founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld.

Funded in part by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ms Simon spent three years crisscrossing the country, interviewing and photographing the book’s subjects, whose wrongful convictions occurred in 18 different states, from California to Kentucky, Texas to Indiana.


The Innocents