Two men are coerced into confessing to a crime they did not commit, only to have the alleged dead man show up alive in a different state a few months later. It might sound like an episode of “Law and Order,” but it’s actually America’s first documented wrongful conviction case and the subject of a new book by Rob Warden, the executive director of Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions.
In 1874 Wilkie Collins, a well-known novelist, wrote a mystery novel called “The Dead Alive,” in which two men were convicted of a crime that never even occurred. In an afterward, Collins wrote that he had based his novel on an 1812 Vermont murder investigation, the case of Stephen and Jesse Boorn. Warden’s book takes the facts of the original case and puts them together with Collins’ fictionalized account.
“I thought it would be nice to tell the real, factual story along with the novel,” Warden said. “There is great deal of information about this case available in Vermont on public record. I don’t think anyone has put it all together quite like this.”
Warden has spent his professional career trying to exonerate people jailed for crimes they did not commit.
NU’s center has been involved in 12 of Illinois’ 18 death row exonerations since the death penalty was reinstated about 25 years ago. To Warden, putting together a book about the oldest wrongful conviction on record seemed to be a natural extension of the center’s work.
Warden’s book examines similar cases in which a person was presumed dead, and perpetrators were tried and convicted – and in two cases hanged – only to have the dead person turn up alive later on.
Although Warden found at least seven such instances, he said he doesn’t think such errors will happen again. In many of those investigations, animal bones were mistaken for human remains, but that is now impossible thanks to DNA testing.
“We will not have any more dead alive cases,” Warden said. “But the factors we saw in (such cases) still appear in modern wrongful conviction cases.”
Jailhouse snitching and false confessions, two of the factors that contributed to the wrongful conviction of Stephen and Jesse Boorn, are still major problems in modern cases. Jailhouse snitching is when people implicate others either to escape blame themselves or to make themselves look better to the police.
Warden said false confessions are a problem in about 15 percent of modern wrongful convictions. According to Warden, what makes the Boorn case so exceptional is that although they had falsely confessed, the two supposed killers were proven innocent when their supposed victim resurfaced in New Jersey.
“Exonerations in that day were exceedingly rare,” Warden said. “Convictions relied mostly on witness accounts – which could be coerced or falsified – and circumstantial evidence. Today, thanks to fingerprinting and scientific advances in DNA testing, we have exonerations that were impossible when the Boorn case occurred.”
Warden said he was not surprised the Boorn case so easily translated into a fictional mystery novel.
“It’s amazing how fiction so easily creeps into accounts that are purported to be factual,” Warden said.
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