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My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit
William Morrow
March 2007
On Sale: February 28, 2007
352 pages
ISBN: 006057464X
EAN: 9780060574642
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A brilliant and unprecedented work, Chasing Justice is the riveting chronicle of how a smalltown murder became one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in American historyβand sent the author, an innocent man, to hell for twenty-two harrowing years. Kerry Max Cook is one of the longest-tenured death-row prisoners to be freed: This is his unbelievable story and the only fi rsthand account of its kind. Wrongfully convicted of killing a young woman in Texas, Cook was sentenced to death in 1978 and served two decades on death row, in a prison system so notoriously brutal and violent that in 1980 a federal court ruled that serving time in Texas's jails was "cruel and unusual punishment." As scores of men around him were executed, Cook relentlessly battled a legal system that wanted him dead; meanwhile he fought daily to survive amid unspeakable conditions and routine assaults. When an advocate and a crusading lawyer joined his struggle in the 1990s, a series of retrials was forced. At last, in November 1996, Texas's highest appeals court threw out Cook's conviction, citing overwhelming evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct. And finally in the spring of 1999 long-overlooked DNA evidence was tested and it linked another man to the rape and murder for which Cook had been convicted. Today, Cook is a free man and the proud father of a young son. A shocking look inside death row, a legal thriller, and an inspirational story of one man's ultimately triumphant fight against extreme adversity, Chasing Justice is a landmark work, written with the powerful authenticity of Cook's own hand. It will forever unsettle our view of the American justice system.
 Media BuzzTavis Smiley - March 5, 2007
Diane Rehm Show - NPR - February 27, 2007
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