Kerry Max Cook

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Information about the author.

Works

Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit

Kerry Max Cook

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 history—and 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 firsthand 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.” In November 1996, Texas’s highest appeals court threw out Cook’s conviction, citing overwhelming evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct.

 
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