I recently read “Smoke But No Fire: Convicting The Innocent Of Crimes That Never Happened” by Jessica S. Henry, who was a public defender for 10 years before she joined the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University as an associate professor.

She teaches courses on wrongful convictions. Henry explains that she teaches about the factors that contribute to wrongful convictions, the legal standards that apply to them, and the stories of innocent people whose lives were totally devastated after being convicted of crimes they did not commit.

For example, in 2018, Gregory Counts and Van Dyke Perry were exonerated from rape and kidnapping convictions in New York City after their accuser acknowledged she fabricated her accusations to help her then-boyfriend who owed money to Counts and Perry. If the two men were in prison, they could not collect the debt. Counts was imprisoned for 26 years prior to the exoneration. Perry had been imprisoned for 11 years before he was paroled and required to register as a sex offender.

In her book, Henry examines other cases such as when actual suicides or medical conditions are mislabeled as murders; when accidental fires are mislabeled as arson; when people knowingly make false accusations against innocent people; when prosecutors fail to turn over critical exculpatory evidence to the defense; when cases involving “tunnel vision” contribute to the creation of criminal cases against innocent suspects; when people are wrongly convicted of homicide when, in reality, the deaths resulted from mechanical or other technical failures; when forensic science........

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