"Innocent Men Set Free" - New Book by Matthew Daher and Kristen Mason

Matt Daher, the lead attorney for Criminal Appeals Advocates’ Texas practice, has co-authored a new 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 now in paperback (ISBN 979-8-199015-19-6, Amazon link).

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. 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.

“Most innocent people in prison never will be. This book is about closing that gap.”

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, Matt and Kristen 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 and how, on rare occasions, they are undone. 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.

About Matt Daher

Matt Daher is the lead attorney for CAA’s Texas practice and has more than sixteen years of experience litigating in state and federal courts. His Texas practice focuses on direct appeals, Article 11.07 writs of habeas corpus, and federal habeas petitions. He is the author of Justice Lost, Justice Gained: How Five Texas Inmates Won Their 11.07 Appeals and Inequality in the Texas Criminal Justice System, a report on racial disparities throughout the Texas criminal justice system.

Innocent Men Set Free is available now in paperback, ISBN 979-8-199015-19-6. For a consultation on a Texas criminal appeal or post-conviction case, contact Mr. Daher at (737) 338-3233.