Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction

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A powerful argument for adopting a model of restorative justice in wrongful conviction cases as part of legislative efforts towards criminal justice reform and community healing. At the age of seventeen, Thomas Haynesworth was arrested on multiple rape charges in Virginia. Despite his pleas of innocence, five rape victims, including 20 year-old Janet Burke, ID'ed him as the offender. Only after over two decades of legal wrangling was he exonerated by DNA evidence. Conventional wisdom points to an exoneration as a happy ending to tragic tales of injustice like Haynesworth's. However, even when the physical shackles are left behind, invisible ones can be profoundly more difficult to unlock. In Rectify, former innocence project director and journalist Lara Bazelon takes stock of the massive damage inflicted by wrongful convictions. Despite a record 375 exonerations in the last three years, Bazelon argues that the criminal justice system has not done enough to rectify the devastation left in their wake--the suffering experienced by not only the exoneree, but their families, the crime victims who mistakenly identified them as perpetrators, the jurors who convicted them, and the prosecutors who realized too late that they helped convict an innocent person. In the midst of her frustration over the blatant limitations of courts and advocates, Bazelon's hope is renewed by the fledgling but growing movement to apply the centuries-old practice of restorative justice to wrongful conviction cases. Using the stories of Thomas Haynesworth, Janet Burke, and other crime victims and exonerees, she demonstrates how the transformative experience of connecting isolated individuals around mutual trauma and a shared purpose of repairing harm unites unlikely allies in the common cause of just reparations. Poignantly written and vigorously researched, Bazelon takes to task the far-reaching failures of our criminal justice system, and offers a window into a future where the power it yields can be used in pursuit of healing and unity rather than punishment and blame.

Reviews

Lara Bazelons groundbreaking book Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction is a searing indictment of the criminal justice systems penchant for flawed practices, depraved indifference toward offenders and wanton abuses of power.
Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

Rectify takes perhaps the first fair and balanced look at the unique and devastating harm that wrongful convictions inflict. From the original victims and the innocent men and women to our families and wider communities, Lara Bazelons groundbreaking work demonstrates that by collectively showing up and bearing witness to each others trauma, we can unpack our grief, restore our voices, and become strong and powerful wounded healers.
Jennifer Thompson, coauthor of Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption and founder of Healing Justice

Lara Bazelon is a personal hero of mine. She fearlessly tackles treacherous legal issues with her brain and her pen, and the results are profound. In Rectify, she shines a light on the second punishment that follows exoneration: the stigmas and obstacles that former prisoners and crime victims face even though theyve already paid a terrible price. I highly recommend this book.
Jason Flom, CEO of Lava Records and host of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom

Almost always, discussions of restorative justice consider only its role in mending the lives of victims, offenders, and the community when guilt is clear and accepted. But, to paraphrase a senior legislator this vital book quotes, in courts it is not only justice that we do; it is injustice too. Now Lara Bazelon focuses her remarkable ability to tell stories on that overlooked rip in the fabric: the cases in which the convict is innocent, in which the person in prison is not the offender at all. As she shows movingly and simply, the principles of restorative justice have an invaluable role in mending there too. Starting today, no examination of restorative justice will be adequate without considering what Lara Bazelon has added with Rectify.
Dean Strang, defense lawyer in State of Wisconsin v. Steven Avery and author of Worse Than the Devil

The innocence movement transformed the way we think about the criminal justice system by exonerating thousands of wrongfully convicted men and women. Rectify asks what healing looks like, for them and for the crime victims whose lives have been upended. It is a story about restorative justice that is by turns tragic, inspiring, and triumphant.
Barry Scheck, cofounder and director of the Innocence Project

Author Bio

Lara Bazelon is a writer, attorney and director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She is former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent and worked as a public defender in Los Angeles for seven years. Bazelon's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Politico, The Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, and Slate, where she is a contributing editor and has a long-running series about wrongful conviction cases. Bazelon is recipient of a writer-in-residency award from the MacDowell Colony in 2016 and from Mesa Refuge in 2017, where she was named a Langeloth Fellow for excellence in writing about issues relating to criminal justice. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.