Review: Conviction - Julia Dahl

Review: Conviction - Book #3 Rebekah Roberts - Julia Dahl - March 2017

I recently saw this book advertised on Social Media and it sounded interesting, so I hopped on the Libby app hoping as it was an older book, my library would have an e-copy and they did. One of the things I love reading about is books set within "the innocence project" as it speaks to me as someone who loves true crime, just how many innocent people are sentenced to prison and have to spend most of their lives there before anyone will even listen to them and then that's only if they are lucky that the right person will pick up their case or see their letter as the project receives thousands of letters a day and some of those people are guilty, but you get some that truly are innocent. In Conviction, we meet reporter Rebekah Roberts who has recently won a journalism fellowship and reported about a mass shooting at a Hasidic Jew temple for the American Voice. She is busy working freelance for the New York Tribune and meets Amanda at a fellowship lunch. Amanda is a true crime blogger who has been sent some letters as part of a wrongful criminal conviction story. Rebekah looks into this and comes across one from DeShawn Perkins who back in 1992 was arrested as a 16-year-old for the murders of his foster family. The case is flimsy and DeShawn had an alibi, but it seems the police didn't look further, and was an open-and-shut / slam-dunk case. Now twenty years later, Rebekah is determined to find out the truth and once she does - she will uncover a twenty-year-old mistake and unearth evidence of foul play and negligence in not only the police station but other areas of the justice system. What will happen though when the case and her queries start to hit closer to home in the form of her biological mother whom she has just met - her new husband Saul Katz who was the officer on the scene twenty years ago? Find out in Conviction by Julia Dahl. It is interesting this and the justice system, as the past six months - I have dealt with the court systems and seen it with my brother who was indirectly involved with an incident and has been labelled a Christian extremist, that he did a hate crime, etc and he even supposedly said words he didn't and his case too was a bit of a trial by media and it opened my eyes more to the system rather than just reading about it. Thank goodness and yes I did also pray, my brother was fortunate to have a fair judge and somebody who not only held compassion but the understanding of someone who has mental health and disabilities yet played fair to the justice system and followed the law he pledged an oath to uphold. Armed with the knowledge of my brother's case and then stories like this one which IRL we saw with the Central Park Five, it does make you think and somber at the same time as to how many people in prison are there due to wrongful convictions and no matter how hard they protest their innocence are there till the day they die.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3Ppq0mL