#ReadWithClutch: Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions

The Book and Its Author

Mark Godsey is a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and co-founder and director of the Ohio Innocence Project. Before that he was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Blind Injustice, published by the University of California Press in 2017, is the account of what he learned when he crossed the aisle and started reading his old profession’s work product from the other side of the table.

Books written by converts have a characteristic risk. They tend to overcorrect, and they tend to flatter the author’s own moral journey. This one does not, and the reason is that Godsey keeps implicating himself. He describes his own prosecutorial instincts, the ones that felt like judgment and were actually bias, with the same clinical attention he applies to the officials who fought his clients’ exonerations. That choice is what makes the book usable rather than merely satisfying.

The book was adapted into an opera by Cincinnati Opera in 2019, which sounds like a novelty detail and is not. It tells you the material carries narrative weight. But narrative weight is not why the book belongs on a Clutch Justice reading list. It belongs here because it names mechanisms, and named mechanisms are what you need before you can document a pattern.

The Argument: Blindness Is Structural, Not Personal

Godsey’s central move is to stop asking whether the officials in wrongful conviction cases were bad people, and start asking what conditions reliably produce bad outcomes from ordinary people. The book works through a sequence of cognitive and institutional failures: denial, ambition, bias, memory, intuition, and tunnel vision. Each is treated as a normal feature of human reasoning that becomes catastrophic when it is installed inside a system with enormous power and almost no correction mechanism.

Confirmation bias, in this account, is not a character flaw. It is the default setting of a mind that has formed a theory and is now sorting incoming information. Tunnel vision is not laziness. It is what happens when an investigator commits to a suspect early and every subsequent piece of evidence gets read through that commitment. Memory contamination is not lying. It is the documented tendency of eyewitness recall to reshape itself around suggestion, feedback, and repetition, and to become more confident as it becomes less accurate.

The reason this framing matters for accountability work is practical. If misconduct requires a villain, then every case becomes a fight about someone’s character, and character fights are unwinnable and easy to deflect. If misconduct is the predictable output of a process, then the process is the thing you document, and the documentation travels across cases.

The Ohio Cases

Clarence Elkins: The Cigarette Butt

Clarence Elkins was convicted in 1999 of the murder of his mother-in-law, Judith Johnson, and the rape and assault of his six-year-old niece, who survived and initially identified him. He was sentenced to life. DNA testing later excluded him from the crime scene evidence, and his niece recanted her identification.

What happened next is the part of the case that should be taught in every court reporting seminar. Prosecutors did not concede. Elkins, still incarcerated, identified a fellow prisoner named Earl Mann as a likely suspect, waited for Mann to discard a cigarette butt, retrieved it, and got it to his attorneys. Testing on that discarded item connected Mann to the crime scene evidence. Elkins was released in December 2005 after roughly six years, and Ohio’s then Attorney General publicly backed his innocence claim.

An innocent man in a state prison ran a more effective investigation than the office that convicted him. That is not a colorful anecdote. That is a measurement of how much correction capacity the system actually contains.

Ricky Jackson: Thirty-Nine Years on One Witness

Ricky Jackson was convicted, along with two other men, of the 1975 killing of Harold Franks outside a Cleveland convenience store. The prosecution’s case rested on the testimony of a boy who was twelve at the time and who said he had witnessed the shooting. There was no physical evidence connecting Jackson to the crime.

Decades later the witness recanted completely, stating he had not seen the killing at all and had been pressured into his account. Jackson was exonerated in November 2014 after 39 years in custody, at that point the longest wrongful incarceration ever ended by exoneration in this country. He had been sentenced to death and came within weeks of execution before a procedural error converted the sentence.

The Jackson case answers a question that comes up constantly in accountability reporting: how much evidence does it actually take to convict someone? The answer, on this record, is one witness, no corroboration, and a system with no built-in requirement to check.

The Mechanism: Denial as Institutional Design

The chapter on denial is the one that earns the book its place in institutional accountability work, because it describes a behavior that looks irrational until you understand the incentives producing it.

When post-conviction DNA excludes a defendant, the logically available response is to reopen the investigation. What Godsey documents instead is a repertoire of alternative theories generated to preserve the original conviction: the unindicted co-ejaculator theory, the consensual sex with an unnamed partner theory, the contamination theory, the argument that the defendant was present but did not personally commit the act. These are not offered as good-faith hypotheses supported by evidence. They are offered because the alternative is an admission, and admissions have institutional costs.

This is the same structure Clutch Justice documents in Michigan judicial oversight. A disciplinary body that reviewed conduct once and cleared it has an institutional stake in that clearance. A court that affirmed a conviction on direct appeal has an institutional stake in the affirmance. The machinery that would correct the error is staffed and governed by the people whose prior decisions the correction would indict. Nothing about that requires anyone to act in bad faith. It only requires everyone to act normally.

What It Is Missing

Two honest limitations. First, the book is heavily Ohio-weighted, which is a strength for depth and a weakness for generalization. Readers wanting a national statistical picture should pair it with Brandon Garrett’s transcript-based study of the first 250 DNA exonerations, which supplies the numbers Godsey supplies the psychology for.

Second, the reform section is thinner than the diagnosis. Godsey advocates for conviction integrity units, recorded interrogations, and reformed identification procedures, all of which are sound and none of which he stress-tests against the denial dynamic he spent the previous chapters proving. A conviction integrity unit housed inside the office that produced the conviction is subject to precisely the institutional incentives the book identifies. That tension goes largely unexamined.

Assessment

I recommend this book more often than any other title in the wrongful conviction canon, and the reason is that it is the most portable. The cases are Ohio, but the mechanisms are jurisdiction-neutral. Every dynamic Godsey names shows up in Michigan family court files, in Judicial Tenure Commission dispositions, and in prosecutor’s office charging patterns, and once you have the vocabulary you start seeing it in records you have already read.

The book is also unusually generous, which is a strange thing to say about a text this damning. Godsey does not need the officials in these cases to be monsters, and he declines to make them into monsters even when the record would let him. That restraint is a methodological choice, not a soft one. Naming a person is an accusation. Naming a mechanism is a finding, and findings survive scrutiny.

Read it first if you are new to this work. Reread it if you have been doing it long enough to have gotten comfortable with your own certainty.