The Sing Sing Files
Dan Slepian
224 pages
Celadon Books
published September 10, 2024
I’m sure this one is a little bitter sweet for the author. Happy to have these stories out, but sad he could write this one in the first place.
I was moved when I watched Just Mercy with Michael B Jordan. The stat in the last moments of the movie was that for every nine people executed, one is exonerated. If you need to, read that again. It makes me think of the criminals in jail in a whole new light.
The author is a producer for Dateline and dug deep and investigated these six cases. He’s led to what is six wrongfully convicted men and the corruption that not only put them there but kept them there because they had their day in court. I understand how the system works but once there are facts that prove these men were wrongfully convicted, nothing changes for them. They remain behind bars.
It made me sad and it made me mad as I read his account of his investigation. It isn’t just one thing but multiple things stacked on top of each other.
It really has me rethinking a system that I thought worked for the most part. This could happen to anyone but is sadly more likely happen to poor men of color.
I really wish there was a way that the police could investigate a little more and make sure they have not a good suspect but the right one without being totally inefficient.
I feel for these men and their families.
Thanks @celadonbooks and the #CeladonBookClub for my #gifted copy. Also many thanks to the #sleuthcrew for reading and discussing this with me. It was an eye opening experience.
An NBC Dateline producer’s cinematic account of two decades navigating a broken criminal justice system to help free six innocent men.
In 2002, Dan Slepian, a veteran producer for NBC’s Dateline, received a tip from a Bronx homicide detective that would change his life. Two men were serving twenty-five years to life in prison for a murder in 1990, the cop said, and he knew for a fact that they did not commit that crime.
Haunted by what he had heard, Slepian began an investigation that eventually led to freedom for those two men, and launched him on a two-decade personal and professional journey through a system fiercely resistant to rectifying—or even acknowledging—its mistakes and their consequences.
The Sing Sing: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice is an investigative journalist’s account of how he took on that system and of the years of prison visits, court hearings and powerful Dateline reporting it took to bring justice to those two men and four others imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. It is also the story of the deep and lasting friendships Slepian formed with the men whose cases he pursued, and how one of them—Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez—provided aid and counsel to him from his cell in Sing Sing prison until his own release in 2021 after decades behind bars.
Like Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, The Sing Sing Files is a deeply personal account of wrongful imprisonment and the enormous effort required to redress it, and a powerful argument for reckoning and accountability. This extraordinary book, at once painful and full of hope, shines a light on a kind of injustice whose consequences we have only begun to confront.
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