A Voice for the Innocent, A Plea for the Forgotten
During the ���off season��� of ���Walking Dead��� last year, my husband and I were browsing for a new show to get hooked on for our Sunday night vegetation sessions. An advertisement for a show called ���Salem��� caught our eye, and we started watching. Although the content is somewhat odd at times, we found that it fulfilled our need���my husband enjoys the gore, while I like my eye candy a.k.a. Shane West (who also happens to be Landon in A Walk to Remember).
Besides drooling over the hunky protagonist, the show hooks me because of its sheer horror���not just from creepy side effects, but from the whole premise behind it. It���s hard to imagine that in our country, women and men were brutally tortured and murdered for their ���witchcraft������which was most likely nothing more than a few attention-seeking girls pointing false fingers.
The persecution of the innocence has always struck a chord within me. I guess it���s just the thought of knowing you didn���t do anything wrong, but being punished and shunned anyway. I imagine the terror and the pure disgust in humanity that Sarah Bishop must have felt when no matter what she did, she couldn���t convince everyone that she wasn���t a witch.
We like to think that the Puritans were just crazy, disillusioned, and na��ve people. It was hundreds of years ago; nothing like this would happen today.
Think again.
If you visit the Innocence Project���s website, you will see hundreds of similar stories.�� The victims may not be accused of witchcraft, but they are accused of the modern-day equivalents. Convicted murderers and rapists sitting on death row with one thing in common: they didn���t do it.
We like to think that in our society, this sort of thing doesn���t happen, couldn���t happen. We are scientific, knowledgeable, and advanced. Everyone in prison is certainly guilty; our justice system isn���t slipshod enough to let the innocent slip through the cracks made for the guilty.
Wrong.
It is utterly horrifying to read about how many men and women have lost years and decades of their lives because of false convictions. Ever since high school, I would think about the sheer terror of being behind bars and not having anyone believe the truth. I think about the loved ones of the convicted, and how they, too, lose everything based on inequitable events.
Obviously, then, Voice of Innocence stemmed from a place near to my heart and my fears. I guess I was always meant to write this book because it���s something that just haunts me.�� Even though I���ve never experienced this firsthand (and hopefully never will), it still strikes me as something that needs to be talked about. Corbin may be fictional, but there are plenty of real Corbins in the world.�� There are plenty of real Emma���s mourning the loss of him to a wrongful conviction.
It���s easy to write someone off as a criminal, to throw away the key based on ���evidence.��� It���s easy to point fingers and say the person somehow deserved it or that they have to be guilty. But like ���Salem��� reminds us, sometimes what we think of as ���evidence��� or 100% proof is nothing of the sort.
~Lindsay Detwiler, author of Voice of Innocence
