I hope I go to neither heaven nor hell. I wish that at the time of my death that I could go to sleep and never wake up and never have a bad dream.

These are the words of Ron Williamson, a man who served eleven years of a death sentence for a brutal rape and murder that he didn't commit. One of 47 people profiled in The Innocents, all wrongly convicted of brutal crimes, and all cleared by post-conviction DNA testing, Williamson's words speak to the terrible scars left by these miscarriages of justice.

Each profile includes a photograph by Taryn Simon, usually at some significant location like the scene of the crime or the arrest; commentary on the case by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, whose organization The Innocence Project has played such a crucial role in winning each individual's exoneration; and a brief statement from the wrongfully convicted man or woman.

This is a sobering book, not because it highlights mistakes within our criminal justice system, but because it makes a powerful statement about the nature of those mistakes. Many of the innocents are African-American, some of them are developmentally or psychologically disabled, and almost all of them are poor. The class biases of the legal system, in which unequal access to good counsel and technology help to facilitate wrongful convictions, as well as the fundamentally flawed nature of the identification process, quickly become apparent to the reader.

I was horrified to discover that so many of the cases profiled here were NOT the result of good-faith mistakes, but the product of deliberate and willful indifference on the part of investigators and prosecutors, who ignored or suppressed any evidence that did not fit their (incorrect) theories of the crime. Take the case of Tim Durham, sentenced to 3,220 years in prison for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, despite the fact that he had 11 alibi witnesses who could place him at a shooting competition at the time of the crime. Or Marvin Anderson, who served 15 years of a 210-year sentence, despite the fact that the real perpetrator confessed five years after his conviction.

Finally, I was particularly struck, while reading The Innocents, by the fact that almost every one of these cases involved the brutal rape of a woman or child. I found myself, as a woman, trying to imagine being the victim of such a heinous crime, of enduring the trauma of testifying about it in public, only to discover years later that my attacker was not who I thought it was. And then I found myself trying to imagine being falsely accused of such a crime, of pleading my innocence to the indifferent or hostile powers-that-be, of being imprisoned for a crime I didn't commit, of being freed years later, and dumped out into the world with no assistance.

There were two sets of crimes here, and as I perused this powerful collection of photographs and stories, I kept thinking that these men were the victims of both crimes. Yes, they were railroaded by a legal system that was stacked against them. But they were also ensnared by a culture that permits widespread violence against women. I find that heartbreaking. ( )