New Scholarship Spotlight: False Justice and the “True Prosecutor”

Jim Petro

Here is the final version of my latest article, which honors former Ohio AG Jim Petro and discusses the problem of prosecutorial tunnel vision and resistance to innocence claims…The abstract states:

This article is a review of False Justice: Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent by Jim and Nancy Petro. But this article is also a memoir, in that I tell the story, from my own perspective as Director of the Ohio Innocence Project, of how I have watched Jim Petro go from prosecutor and elected Attorney General of Ohio to a leading champion of the wrongfully convicted across the nation. The article is also a commentary in that, along the way, I address what makes Jim Petro so different from many prosecutors in this country. In this respect, I discuss problems in our criminal justice system that unfortunately lead some prosecutors, in far too many instances, to contest post-conviction claims of innocence in ways that I believe are contrary to our profession’s ethical standards. With this article, I hold out Jim Petro as a national model – an example that all other prosecutors should strive to emulate.