Excerpt from When Truth Is All You Have by Jim McCloskey, Philip Lerman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Like most people in the late 1970s, I still believed in the inherent justice of the criminal justice system—that cops had no reason to lie, that prosecutors would never want to put an innocent person behind bars, that judges were interested in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I do not believe that now. What I have seen over the last forty years has shown me exactly the opposite. Many days, I wondered how it was possible the system had become so corrupt. And many nights, I looked up at the sky and wondered how, if there were a God, that God could possibly let these people suffer so. Some nights, I still do. So this is the story of how I learned what a cruel, mindless, mean machine the justice system can be. How, in trying to combat evil in the world, the system can become just as evil—more so, because it is evil done in the name of all of us.

But this is also the story of faith. How I learned to look that evil in the eye and still understand there is good in the world. And how, if you allow it, you can become a catalyst for that good.

I want to tell you the stories of some of the horrible injustices I've seen, and how we've managed to right some of those wrongs—including freeing two inmates from Texas's infamous death row. One of them was just eleven days away from execution. The other, just six. And I'll be honest and admit when we went wrong: I'll tell you about the inmates that Centurion fought for because I believed they were innocent, but later found out they weren't.

Excerpted from When Truth Is All You Have by Jim McCloskey and Philip Lerman. Copyright © 2020 by Jim McCloskey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.