Search results for ""author peter neufeld""

Taryn Simon’s earliest body of work, The Innocents (2002), documents the stories of individuals who served time in prison for violent crimes they did not commit. The series centres on the question of photography as credible witness and arbiter of justice, since the primary cause of wrongful conviction is mistaken identification. Suspected perpetrators are identified through photographs and lineups, a procedure that relies on the assumption of precise visual memory. But through exposure to composite sketches, mug shots, Polaroids, and lineups, eyewitness memory can change. In these cases, photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals. Simon photographed these men at sites that had particular significance to their illegitimate conviction: the scene of misidentification, the scene of arrest, the scene of the crime, or the scene of the alibi. The Innocents was first exhibited at MoMA PS1 in 2003. The 2021 edition of the book includes previously unpublished images, a new essay by Innocence Project co-founders Peter Neufeld and Barry C. Scheck, and an interview by professor and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood with criminal justice reform activist Tyra Patterson.

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Dr. Michael Baden has been involved in some of the most high-profile civil rights and police brutality cases in US history, from the government’s 1976 re-investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the 2014 death of Michael Brown, whose case sparked the initial Ferguson protests that grew into the Black Lives Matter movement. The playbook hasn’t changed since 1979, when Dr. Baden was demoted from his job as New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner after ruling that the death of a Black man in police custody was a homicide. So, in 2020 when the Floyd family, wary of the same system that oversaw George Floyd’s death, needed a second opinion - Dr. Baden is who they called. In these pages, Dr. Baden chronicles his six decades on the front lines of the fight for accountability within the legal system - including the long history of medical examiners of using a controversial syndrome called excited delirium (a term that shows up in the pathology report for George Floyd) to explain away the deaths of BIPOC restrained by police. In the process, he brings to life the political issues that go on in the wake of often unrecorded fatal police encounters and the standoff between law enforcement and those they are sworn to protect. Full of behind-the-scenes drama and surprising revelations, American Autopsy is an invigorating - and enraging - read that is both timely and crucial for this turning point in our nation’s history.

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