Engaging, important, and expertly crafted. This is a recommended first purchase for most nonfiction collections,

A heartbreaking and upsetting account of 2 families devastated and decimated by the death of one child and the imprisonment of another. I found this book sad and haunting - two lives lost and so many impacted by a crime that can not be undone. Whew, what devastation.

3.5 The author was in law school when she learns her sixteen year old cousin has randomly killed a nine year old boy. Since she was so much older she didn't really know nor have a relationship with her cousin, but she did know he was a honor student. So how did he go from that to being a murderer?

She explores the concept of justice, punishment for youth offenders, the different permutations of heartbreak, mental illness and rehabilitation. Do youth offenders deserve life in prison, despite all the studies on brain development? Death sentences for youth offenders? She strives to understand, and though for the longest time she doesn't go to the prison to see her cousin, she does send him books.
She discusses the Supreme court rulings formed by Roper, Graham, Miller and Montgomery, rulings that might be moving towards something new for youth offenders. Though they aren't implicitly clear and depends on their interpretation by judges.

This book makes one think, question their own views on justice and the implementation of long sentences on youth offenders. Are these throwaway kids, incorrigible, unable to be rehabilitated?

Katherine Blake’s The Uninnocent: Notes on Violence and Mercy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) is one of the best non-fiction books I have read in recent memory. I purposefully do not call this book true crime because although it has many true crime elements—a violent murder and the search for the reasons why that crime was committed—Blake’s text resists the category of one genre. The Uninnocent examines a murder committed by Blake’s cousin, who experienced a psychological break and killed a young boy he didn’t know. The text uses this case to ask much larger questions, and by extension to be pigeonholed as straight true crime or straight memoir:
“What Didion borrowed from Yeats to describe San Francisco but also America more broadly with still true: the centre was not holding. Back then it was Vietnam and LSD, racism and assassination. Four decades later it was tent cities and evictions, opioids and meth, school shootings and racism and prisons filled to their literal ceilings with bodies.”
Blake follows in the footsteps of writers like Joan Didion to describe not only a place (San Francisco, the city in which Blake was born), but also a feeling, a context, a tone that pervades so strongly that one is compelled to put the feeling to paper. She does this here and throughout her text to take us beyond the context of a single crime to express a myriad of crimes, crimes within the justice system, and crimes at the national and state level.
Picture
Blake furthers the context from which she is writing by explaining that as the Sandy Hook parents were fighting for tougher gun laws in front of congress, she was graduating law school as those parents lost that fight. Blake also explains that “around the same time, my sixteen-year-old cousin, who’d had a mental break and murdered a child, was being tried as an adult and facing life in prison without parole. The world of law that I’d studied and worked to be a part of seemed irredeemable.” This case, the case of a young man who walks outside and stabs a stranger to death on a bike path, is what drew me to this book. Endless questions arise around a case like this. What I loved about this book is that Blake doesn’t spend her whole text trying to determine why her cousin murdered a young boy. Of course, she wonders. She explores the why, but alongside even larger questions. Questions about the law, and the system that underpins it, and her place within that system. She also questions what it means to be heartbroken in a context like this one. She wonders:
“Where did the word come from, why does it mean so many things, how do you keep your heart intact, how do you go on after it breaks, what does justice look like for the broken-hearted, what does it mean to heal, do you inherit the heartbreak of generations past?”
Blake spends a lot of time in The Uninnocent wondering about heartbreak within the context of the broken justice system, her own family, and the family of the boy her cousin murdered. I really connected with the philosophical musings of Blake’s text and thought it was incredibly apt that a true crime text deal with something like this directly. Because, as she explains in beautiful and poetic prose, all crimes begin and end with heartbreak:
“I didn't understand that this was a story about two sons. A story, on both sides, about losing your child, a primal story of pain. And I didn't understand that both ways had fallen prey—one to the violence of murder, and the other to a slow and steady violence, the invisible invasion of a disease, ravaging for days and months, maybe years.”
Blake does search for the “whys” in the case of her cousin, as she similarly searches for “whys” within the criminal justice system—that is, she explains that “we act as if fairness and justice are synonyms, but they are not. Fairness is technical, tied to the world we can see…but justice holds what is seen and unseen.” She follows this line of questioning through prison visits and law school classrooms and teaching the incarcerated. What she finds is grey in between the black and white, the “Uninnocent” between the innocent and the guilty. If you are looking for a book that is straight true crime, with case files dispersed between a beginning, middle, and end, then this book may not be for you, because this book offers much more than a beginning, middle, and end. It offers years of questions and discoveries about a crime and the system through which it was punished. If offers questions and discoveries about how our fundamental selves change when we are faced with violence and heartbreak. For its beautiful prose, intensive research, and apt storytelling, I cannot recommend this book enough.

The Uninnocent
Notes on Violence and Mercy
by Katharine Blake

On a Thursday morning in June 2010, Katharine Blake's sixteen-year-old cousin walked to a nearby bike path with a boxcutter and killed a young boy he didn’t know. It was a psychological break that tore through his brain, and into the hearts of those who loved both boys—one brutally killed, the other sentenced to die at Angola, one of the country’s most notorious prisons.

In The Uninnocent, Blake, a law student at Stanford at the time of the crime, wrestles with the implications of her cousin’s break, as well as the broken machinations of America’s justice system. As her cousin languished in a cell on death row, where he was assigned for his own protection, Blake struggled to keep her faith in the system she was training to join.

Consumed with understanding her family’s new reality, Blake became obsessed with heartbreak, seeing it everywhere: in her cousin’s isolation, in the loss at the center of the crime, in the students, she taught at various prisons, in the way our justice system breaks rather than mends, in the history of her parents and their violent childhoods. As she delves into a history of heartbreak—through science, medicine, and literature—and chronicles the uneasy yet ultimately tender bond she forms with her cousin, Blake asks probing questions about justice, faith, inheritance, family, and, most of all, mercy.

Sensitive, singular, and powerful, effortlessly bridging memoir, essay, and legalese, The Uninnocent is a reckoning with the unimaginable, unforgettable, and seemly irredeemable. With curiosity and vulnerability, Blake unravels a distressed tapestry, finding solace in both its tearing and its mending.


I guess I summed it up as mercy. A very thorough look into the lives and parts that can break a person., and those close to them. Justice can be brutal for some, and yes, sterotyped. I enjoyed the fiction/non fiction.

A heartfelt and heartbreaking addendum to Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, The Uninnocent is a stunning tour through the criminal justice system. Told through anecdotes, personal experience, and legalese, Katharine Blake has woven a moving and education portrait of the aftermath of violent crime. Her talent for blending together academia and storytelling is paralleled only by the masters of nonfiction like Mary Roach and Malcom Gladwell, and her voice and strength suffuses all. An incredible addition to any true crime/criminal justice collection.

A powerful, if difficult book. There is the feel of a story here that could have been serialized into a podcast.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. While the author was in law school at Stanford, her sixteen year old cousin kills a nine year old boy with a box cutter. Her cousin has had a psychological break and now is facing life in jail without the possibility of parole in Angola, one of America’s toughest prisons. The author spends the next decade trying to make her way in life, graduating from law school, working for the Children’s Defense Fund, among other places and getting married and having a son, but during this time, her cousin, his victim and what this crime and punishment mean, are never far from her thoughts. It’s a study of the hard truths of our legal system, but also a study of grief, heartbreak and, most importantly, mercy.

I’m not sure what to call this book I guess it’s technically true crime but since the author change the names and the event it’s technically also fiction. The main character has a cousin she’s not close to commit an abominable crime. While the crime is pretty straightforward it immediately intrigues the main character why this person committed this crime. She becomes vaguely obsessed with it and that becomes a subject of the book. I enjoyed this book immensely. I would highly recommend it.