Genres: True Crime
Setting: New York
Source: ARC, NetGalley
Narrator: Dan Slepian
Goodreads
An NBC Dateline producer's cinematic account of two decades navigating a broken criminal justice system to help free six innocent men.
In 2002, Dan Slepian, a veteran producer for NBC’s Dateline, received a tip from a Bronx homicide detective that would change his life. Two men were serving twenty-five years to life in prison for a murder in 1990, the cop said, and he knew for a fact that they did not commit that crime.
Haunted by what he had heard, Slepian began an investigation that eventually led to freedom for those two men, and launched him on a two-decade personal and professional journey through a system fiercely resistant to rectifying—or even acknowledging—its mistakes and their consequences.
The Sing Sing: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice is an investigative journalist’s account of how he took on that system and of the years of prison visits, court hearings and powerful Dateline reporting it took to bring justice to those two men and four others imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. It is also the story of the deep and lasting friendships Slepian formed with the men whose cases he pursued, and how one of them—Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez—provided aid and counsel to him from his cell in Sing Sing prison until his own release in 2021 after decades behind bars.
Like Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, The Sing Sing Files is a deeply personal account of wrongful imprisonment and the enormous effort required to redress it, and a powerful argument for reckoning and accountability. This extraordinary book, at once painful and full of hope, shines a light on a kind of injustice whose consequences we have only begun to confront.
The Sing Sing Files was a very interesting story. Dan works for NBC and specifically Dateline, so he had access and a vehicle to tell the stories. Dan approaches the idea of wrongful convictions in the same way a lot of people do-The system wouldn’t get it THAT wrong. It has failsafes to protect people. He learns that for some, that system was broken.
He focuses on 6 men he encountered, but I think the biggest focus was on JJ Velasquez. These 6 cases were pretty obvious miscarriages of justice, but I think the bigger take away was how hard people worked to KEEP these innocent men in prison. Cops and lawyers refused to face evidence they were wrong. These are the kinds of cases that should infuriate people-when there is CLEAR evidence of innocence (not just possible evidence or alibi) or clear evidence of prosecutorial misconduct-and nothing is done.
If you are a fan of books like Just Mercy, The Sing Sing Files is a must listen. I really enjoyed the audiobook! Slepian narrates well. Apparently, there is also a podcast, if you want to check out more of the story.
Just Mercy by Brian Stephenson, The Innocent Man by John Grisham …then you will probably like The Sing Sing Files!
Leave a Reply