Smoke But No Fire

2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Winner, Silver (Political and Social Sciences) Winner of the Montaigne Medal, awarded to "the most thought-provoking books" The first book to explore a shocking yet all-too-common type of wrongful conviction—one that locks away innocent people for crimes that never actually happened. Rodricus Crawford was convicted and sentenced to die for the murder by suffocation of his beautiful baby boy. After years on death row, evidence confirmed what Crawford had claimed all along: he was innocent, and his son had died from an undiagnosed illness. Crawford is not alone. A full one-third of all known exonerations stem from no-crime wrongful convictions. The first book to explore this common but previously undocumented type of wrongful conviction, Smoke but No Fire tells the heartbreaking stories of innocent people convicted of crimes that simply never happened. A suicide is mislabeled a homicide. An accidental fire is mislabeled an arson. Corrupt police plant drugs on an innocent suspect. A false allegation of assault is invented to resolve a custody dispute. With this book, former New York City public defender Jessica S. Henry sheds essential light on a deeply flawed criminal justice system that allows—even encourages—these convictions to regularly occur. Smoke but No Fire promises to be eye-opening reading for legal professionals, students, activists, and the general public alike as it grapples with the chilling reality that far too many innocent people spend real years behind bars for fictional crimes.

The unforgettable, haunting story of a young woman’s perilous fight for freedom and justice for her brother, the first novel published in English by a female Kurdish writer Set primarily in Iran, this extraordinary debut novel weaves 50 years of modern Kurdish history through a story of a family facing oppression and injustices all too familiar to the Kurds. Leila dreams of making films to bring the suppressed stories of her people onto the global stage, but obstacles keep piling up. Her younger brother, Chia, influenced by their father’s past torture, imprisonment, and his deep-seated desire for justice, begins to engage with social and political affairs. But his activism grows increasingly risky and one day he disappears in Tehran. Seeking answers about her brother’s whereabouts, Leila fears the worst and begins a campaign to save him. But when she publishes Chia’s writings online, she finds herself in grave danger as well. Inspired by the life of Kurdish human rights activist Farzad Kamangar and published to coincide with the 10th anniversary of his execution, Daughters of Smoke and Fire is an evocative portrait of the lives and stakes faced by 40 million stateless Kurds. It’s an unflinching but compassionate and powerful story that brilliantly illuminates the meaning of identity and the complex bonds of family. A landmark novel for our troubled world, Daughters of Smoke and Fire is a gripping and important read, perfect for fans of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

The Smelter explosion in the early hours of Aug 8th 2000 became a watershed moment for the company, its employees, family members and all residents of Flin Flon. Like 9/11, nothing would ever be the same again. We must always be open to rethinking the way we do things. Change must be constant. To go to work each day without getting hurt has to be an expectation we all have. In Flin Flon, the last fatality prior to the smelter explosion had been five years earlier. That had been the longest period between fatalities in the company's history. There has not been a work - related fatality in the 19 years since the explosion, but that is not to say the battle to create a harm-free workplace has been won. We could so easily have had fatalities many times over the years. Sometimes the outcome was a question of sheer luck or twist of fate, a matter of inches, or seconds making the difference between life and death. It is all the more important to revisit and communicate the important lessons learned from them. I have included many of them in the second part of this book under "Work Shouldn't Hurt" along with other examples I have experienced in my 49 years in the work force. Lessons can be learned every day. They can apply to everyone who goes to work. It doesn't matter if you are a CEO, Manager, supervisor or worker, everyone is an important cog in the wheel. Examples given and discussions throughout this book are not intended to demean or point a finger at any individual, group or company. They are purely used as learning opportunities to help people recognize and understand that sometimes it is only incredible luck or good fortune that they don't end up seriously injured, or even killed. The examples are mostly centred around heavy industry, but many similar occurrences lay dormant in many workplaces, and even outside the work environment. To reiterate, this book is not about blame or finger pointing. It is an attempt to capture and understand the circumstances that led up to the explosion and what goes into a recipe for such a disaster. Seldom is anything made from one ingredient. Similarly, a disaster is usually triggered by more than one single event or "ingredient". The fatality list that is included in this book demonstrates the tremendous sacrifice employees have made over the history of Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting. Many workplace safety and health regulations have been implemented as a direct result of lessons learned. The list does not cover the tremendous number of accidents that did not result in death but did inflict life-changing injuries. Every name on the list represents a son, brother, uncle, husband or father, and many represent every single one of those relationships, which left wives without husbands, children without dads.

You can't run forever... Celeste has been running from her past for seven years. But now her past has found her. For seven years, Celeste has battled her guilt and shame over the tragic events that led to her little brother's death. But when her high-school boyfriend comes back into her life just as she gains a stalker, she wonders if there's more to the story than she realized. Celeste is determined to discover the truth – but she's about to find out that when you play with fire, you get burned... Perfect for fans of The Silent Patient, Sleep and Whisper Man.

Brady Stewart lives for the fire. Nightmares of the fire haunt Nicole McMillan. Whether fighting fires in the Kuwaiti desert, in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the heartland of Oklahoma, both women hide behind a smoke screen of who they really are. When they meet and face the challenge of their lives, their passion ignites because where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

While recovering from injuries suffered on the job, former fire fighter, D.S. Lliteras, found himself compelled to consider what it means "to be." The result is this book about some brave and honorable firefighters and the beautiful and dreadful things encountered on the fireground.