Voice of Innocence: Highlighting the Tragedy of Wrongful Convictions

As Americans, we like to believe we live in a society where justice prevails. Our justice system is, in our opinions, solid, trustworthy, and reliable. Sadly, this is not always the case.

Wrongful convictions aren’t a thing of one decade in particular or one culture. Sadly, the innocent have been persecuted since the beginning of man.

I’ve always been haunted by the prospect that justice doesn’t always prevail, that the innocent don’t always go free. We like to tell ourselves that the truth always wins, that the good can’t be hurt. How wrong we are.

In college, this concept started to really plague me. I had seen many stories in the news of innocent men being convicted of crimes, spending decades in jail, only to be set free once the truth came out. The news always treated the story with a celebratory aire; how wonderful that the truth came out! For me, though, I always saw the story as a tragedy. Yes, the cliché “better late than never” certainly applies here. However, how can one celebrate the fact that a man lost twenty, thirty, or even forty years of his life? My mind always wandered to the family of the convicted. Although their faces weren’t plastered on the news, they certainly suffered, too. I got to thinking about what it would be like to be a loved one or even a lover of one these men. What emotions would you feel upon conviction? Would you eventually doubt the innocence of your loved one? Would you end up walking away, only to regret it once he was freed? All of these questions wouldn’t quiet, and eventually Emma and Corbin emerged from the resonating ideas.

Once I started writing their story, I became much more sensitive to the reality in their fictional tale. Sure, Emma and Corbin were simply fictional characters, but their story certainly has validity in the real world. When teaching The Crucible by Arthur Miller a few years later, I was reminded that many innocents were convicted and executed due to wrongful convictions during the Salem Witch Trials. As Arthur Miller highlights with his allegorical play, the McCarthy Era also produced similar results of false accusations. Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s and the lack of DNA evidence provided many errors. If you log onto the Innocence Project’s web page, you will find hundreds of stories of the innocent being convicted. One of those men, Kenny Waters, is the subject of the movie Conviction starring Hilary Swank (it is worth watching, by the way!).

In Voice of Innocence, my goal was to go behind the factual nature of the newspaper articles that highlight the plight of the wrongfully convicted. I wasn’t concerned with emphasizing the flaws of our justice system as much as I was highlighting the emotional torture that would accompany these situations. I wanted to examine the feelings that not only the convicted face but those around them. I wanted to explore the idea of whether or not a real love could survive something as life altering as a wrongful conviction. Emma and Corbin are simply the tools I used to delve into the emotional aspects of this concept.

For these reasons, Voice of Innocence isn’t your typical romance, as many readers have pointed out. Yes, it focuses on the expected emotions that accompany love and the power of the feeling. However, I would like to think that it does more than that. It explores not only the bond of a first love, but also the power that life’s injustices can exert. It explores the torrential downpour of sorrow that can sometimes overpower even the strongest relationship. It examines the truth—some loves are tested more than others, and sometimes it takes a miracle for the two participants to get through it in one piece.

To explore Emma and Corbin’s relationship, the power of first love, and the cruelty of the life’s injustices, pick up Voice of Innocence today, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TMX826K

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/voice-of-innocence-lindsay-detwiler/1121237080?ean=2940046578041