In his highly readable and spellbinding memoir, Jim McCloskey describes his first assignment as a chaplain at New Jersey’s Trenton State Prison, where he discovered it was the will of God and Jesus that he devote his life to pursuing justice for prisoners who were innocent of the crimes for which they were imprisoned.
McCloskey violated “Rule No. 1” — not to get involved with any of the inmates’ cases or personal lives — after several meetings with Jorge de los Santos and becoming convinced that Chiefie (Santos’ nickname) was innocent of the murder for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
“When Truth Is All You Have” tells the remarkable story of how McCloskey not only succeeded to win Chiefie’s exoneration, but also of how he founded Centurion Ministries, the first organization in America devoted to overturning wrongful convictions. McCloskey’s own efforts, along with the help of forensic experts, lawyers, investigators and volunteers, resulted in the freedom of 63 innocent prisoners.
McCloskey tells the powerful stories of people who were freed from life imprisonment or from death row, and the stories of people McCloskey tried to help, but for whom justice remained elusive. And, we learn about two of McCloskey’s clients, whose executions he witnessed, whose cases later caused McCloskey to question whether they were really innocent.
For several decades, I volunteered to evaluate prisoners’ innocence claims for Rochester’s Judicial Process........