Triple Jeopardy: A Story of Law at Its Best-And Worst

On November 16, 1973, near Phoenix, Arizona, a fire swept through John Knapp's home and killed his two tiny daughters in their bedroom. Twelve days later Knapp was charged with deliberately setting the fire, and a year later he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Five times warrants were issued for his execution, and once he came within forty-eight hours of dying in the gas chamber. In this dramatic minute-by-minute case study, Roger Parloff presents a chilling account of how an indigent, uneducated man became a victim of the legal system. Gradually, however, a handful of dedicated defense lawyers discovered that Knapp's conviction was the product of every form of distortion and mistake to which a trial can be subject - sly lawyering, mistaken memory, faulty science, withheld and destroyed evidence, and, perhaps, perjury. For almost two decades they fought to reverse the injustice.