Execution's Doorstep: True Stories of the Innocent and Nearly Damned

Journalist Lytle brings the capital punishment debate into sharp focus with her account of five men wrongly convicted and sentenced to death but later freed. The men, Lytle shows, were victims of false testimony and police coercion, among other ills of the justice system, and served up to 17 years in prison—much of it on death row. Michael Graham remained on death row for 14 years for the murder of en elderly couple before the key witness admitted fabricating her testimony. Madison Hobley, beaten and coerced into confessing to a deadly arson, spent 13 years on death row before he was pardoned. Randal Padgett, accused of raping and murdering his wife, was imprisoned for five and a half years—three and a half on death row—before he was granted a new trial and acquitted. Drawing on court documents and extensive interviews with the death row survivors, Lytle shines light on the often overlooked hardships these men face in returning to society after spending years in a six-by-nine-foot cell. (Nov.)