"Chronicles how a smalltown murder became one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in American history, and sent the author, an innocent man, to hell for 22 harrowing years--Cook is one of the longest-tenured death-row prisoners to be freed. Convicted of killing a young woman in Texas, Cook was sentenced to death in 1978 and served two decades 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." 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. Finally in 1999 long-overlooked DNA evidence linked another man to the rape and murder for which Cook had been convicted.--From publisher description."--Source other than the Library of Congress.
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