Second Chances, Wrongful Convictions & All Things Criminal Justice

Jessica Henry

Award-Winning Book

Smoke but No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened

Smoke but No Fire is a Winner!

  • Montaigne Medal award for “most thought-provoking” book
  • Foreword INDIES 2020 Book of the Year Award (Silver, Political & Social Sciences)
  • First Horizon Award for “superior writing” by a “debut author”
  • Eric Hoffer Grand-Prize short-list

From University of California Press. Released August 4, 2020. Paperback now available!

Rodricus Crawford was convicted and sentenced to die for the murder by suffocation of his beautiful baby boy. After years on death row, evidence confirmed what Crawford had claimed all along: he was innocent, and his son had died from an undiagnosed illness. Crawford is not alone. A full one-third of all known exonerations stem from no-crime wrongful convictions.

The first book to explore this common but previously undocumented type of wrongful conviction, Smoke but No Fire tells the heartbreaking stories of innocent people convicted of crimes that simply never happened. LEARN MORE

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