Chicago's long, ugly history with wrongful convictions is getting a full, book-length cross-examination.
In Crime Fictions, sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that Chicago police and Cook County prosecutors did not just make the occasional tragic mistake. Instead, she says they built a system that routinely produced wrongful murder convictions, especially against Black children and young men. Interrogation tactics, hidden "street files" and everyday courthouse routines, she contends, combined to create "crime fictions" that branded those kids as criminals before a jury ever walked in.
The full title, Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction, hints at the scope. The book is slated for release on May 19, 2026, according to Penguin Random House. Van Cleve, an associate professor of sociology at Brown University, grounds the narrative in years of interviews and archival digging, as laid out in her faculty profile at Brown University.
A county's staggering tally
The National Registry of Exonerations has logged hundreds of overturned convictions nationwide, and its data put Cook County in a league of its own. Since 1989, the county has seen roughly 215 murder exonerations, about 113 of them tied to false confessions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Van Cleve leans on those numbers to argue that the damage is systemic, not a run of bad luck.
Local coverage has treated that tally as a pattern worth worrying about, not a statistical fluke, a point underscored by reporting in the Chicago Sun-Times. In Van Cleve's telling, those exonerations are not the system "working" after the fact; they are evidence of how deep the original problems run.
Cases that shaped the book
To make that case, Van Cleve zeroes in on people whose lives were derailed by those crime stories that never quite matched the facts.
One centerpiece is a learning-disabled 14-year-old in 1961, whose case, she argues, shows how quickly a child could be steered toward a confession in the absence of real safeguards.
Another is the 1998 Englewood investigation tied to the killing of 11-year-old Ryan Harris, when police briefly accused a nonverbal 7-year-old boy and his 8-year-old friend. Van Cleve describes detectives using seemingly friendly, low-key pressure to draw kids into statements they did not fully understand. Detective James Cassidy, for example, is quoted reassuring a young suspect, "We're all friends here. You can tell me anything," according to an interview cited by WBEZ.
In the Ryan Harris case, the charges against the boys were ultimately dropped after forensic testing undercut the theory that they were responsible, as chronicled by CBS Chicago. For Van Cleve, that about-face reflects how far investigators had to stretch to make their original story hold together.
A different framing of false confessions
Van Cleve also takes direct aim at how police and courts talk about false confessions. She rejects the idea that such confessions are bizarre, once-in-a-generation anomalies. A false confession, she notes, is simply "admitting to a crime that you didn't do" and, in Cook County, the techniques that produced those admissions were deliberate, repeatable tools of the trade rather than innocent missteps, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The publisher's synopsis frames Crime Fictions as an inside look at how those stories were written, cast and protected inside the courthouse, from the first police report to closing arguments. It casts the book as an investigation into how "crime fictions" were produced and preserved, according to Penguin Random House.
Legal and policy fallout
All of this lands at an awkward moment for the people now running the same offices Van Cleve is scrutinizing.
Eileen O'Neill Burke, who worked in the Cook County state's attorney's office in the 1990s, once praised Detective Cassidy, a detail that has resurfaced as part of the broader reckoning over wrongful convictions, according to WBEZ. She went on to win the top prosecutor job in 2024, per election coverage by Axios.
Advocates have used cases like the ones in Van Cleve's book to push for reforms such as mandatory recording of interrogations and broader access to legal counsel for juveniles. Crime Fictions is poised to become another tool in that campaign, giving reformers a single narrative to point to when they argue that what happens in those interview rooms is not just a matter of a few bad apples.
Whether Van Cleve's work sparks new audits, lawsuits or legislative fixes remains to be seen. What it does do is reframe Cook County's exoneration record as the predictable result of institutional practices rather than isolated blunders, echoing concerns that local journalists have raised for years, including work by the Chicago Reporter. For Chicago readers, the book amounts to a blunt reminder: if you want to know who the criminal justice system punishes, you have to look closely at how cases are built and how confessions are treated from the start.
