Matt Daher, founding attorney of Daher Law Group, co-authored a book about how the American criminal justice system convicts innocent people, and how hard it fights to keep them inside once it has. Innocent Men Set Free: Two Post-Conviction Lawyers Examine Stories of Injustice in the Law, written with California appeals attorney Kristen Mason, is available in paperback (ISBN 979-8-199015-19-6).
The book tells four true stories in full: a father in Texas, a teenager in East Los Angeles, a commuter in Brooklyn, and a former Coast Guard rescuer in Florida. Different decades, different crimes, the same patterns running underneath each one.
"Four innocent men. Four states. Decades stolen for crimes they never committed."
Four Cases, One Set of Patterns
The four men in this book have almost nothing in common. They differ in race, age, education, criminal history, and the kind of crime each was accused of. What put them in prison does not differ at all: mistaken eyewitnesses who were certain, coercive plea deals, court-appointed lawyers who declined to investigate, and forensic testimony — including early DNA evidence — that was overstated to juries who had no way to push back.
For Texas readers, the case closest to home is that of Adam Sanchez, a San Antonio father who could barely read or write and was pressed by his own court-appointed attorney into a no-contest plea and a 25-year sentence. His two young children later admitted that the abuse he had been accused of never happened. After more than five years in custody, he was freed through a Texas writ of habeas corpus and recognized, in the eyes of the law, as an innocent man.
What Actually Set These Men Free
One of the book's hardest lessons is that the system rarely corrects itself. Direct appeals were affirmed. Post-conviction motions were denied, sometimes for years. What finally undid these convictions came from the outside: a minister with a typewriter who wrote the letters an illiterate man could not, a woman from a man's past who paid investigators out of her own savings, a law-school investigator who found a recanting witness on Facebook, and an attorney who heard an old case described on a podcast and decided to look into it.
That is why the book is written for the people who can actually make that difference. Alongside the four stories, the authors lay out, in plain language, the post-conviction tools that families can use to fight a wrongful conviction — from direct appeal through state habeas under Texas Article 11.07 and federal habeas corpus — and the reforms that would have changed these four outcomes.
Who Should Read It
Innocent Men Set Free is written for incarcerated people, for the families fighting for them from the outside, and for anyone who wants an honest account of how wrongful convictions happen. It is drawn entirely from the public record: trial transcripts, appellate opinions, district attorney press releases, conviction-review reports, the National Registry of Exonerations, and local news coverage.
The book is available in paperback on Amazon. For a consultation on a Texas criminal appeal or post-conviction case, contact Daher Law Group.