JEFF ROSEN: The Wrongful Conviction As A Way Of Life. A review of Brandon Garrett’s Convicting The Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong. “Since the late 1980s, DNA testing has exonerated more than 250 wrongly convicted people, who spent an average of 13 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. (There is every reason to think that more people have been wrongly convicted since then, but only these 250 have been definitively exonerated by postconviction DNA tests.) Seventeen of the 250 were sentenced to die, and 80 to spend the rest of their lives in prison. . . . Garrett’s statistical analysis is invaluable, but the most dramatic parts of his book are those that provide narrative details of trials that failed to prevent the innocent from being wrongly convicted. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to prove your innocence: most people don’t remember where they were on a particular day months ago, and can present only weak alibis.”