Excerpt from When Truth Is All You Have by Jim McCloskey, Philip Lerman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When I look back on all the simple twists of fate that brought me here, I can still put my hands on the first one that set in motion the chain of events that led me to my calling in life. It was in the mid-1970s; I was living the life of a successful American suburban businessman, commuting on the train from Paoli into Philadelphia to work. On the ride, I'd read the paper, and I used to cut out articles that I found inspiring. One morning, in September 1976, I read a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer about an investigator in a public defender's office named Fred Hogan who spent thousands of hours, all on his own time, reinvestigating the case of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the boxer wrongly convicted of a triple murder in Paterson, New Jersey (and who, I would realize later, was in prison with Jorge de los Santos).

I remember thinking, this Fred Hogan is amazing; the guy is exhausting himself, trying to free an innocent man. I thought, wouldn't it be great to live your life doing something so important, so purposeful. Just one of those passing thoughts you have on a train at eight in the morning. Nothing more than that, an idea that drifts by like one of the sailboats on the Schuylkill River that I'd cross on the way into the city. It would be years before I realized how deeply that article had affected me.

I got to know Rubin Carter over the years, along with his lesser-known co-defendant, John Artis (who is the unsung hero in that case, by the way, but that's another story). I first met Rubin in Toronto around 1995 when he and some associates started an innocence project called the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted and they asked me to speak. Rubin used to razz me; he said that when I started freeing innocent people from prison, he had petitioned me to help in his case. I know I never heard from him, or I surely would have gotten involved. I would have jumped at the opportunity just to meet him. But he gave me a lot of grief about it nevertheless. In a good-hearted way, of course.

We stayed friends through the years. When Rubin was freed in 1985, he publicly vowed to never again set foot in New Jersey, and he never did—with the exception, in 2002, of coming to the twentieth anniversary celebration of Centurion at my home in Princeton. He asked if he could bring Fred Hogan with him.

"Are you kidding?" I said. "He's my hero!" I told him the story of reading the Inquirer article about Fred twenty-five years earlier. Rubin got a kick out of that and promised to bring Fred along. It was the first time I'd stood face to face with the man whose story, in a very real sense, was an inspiration for my own journey.

But when I enrolled in Princeton Theological Seminary's master of divinity degree program, I had no idea of the path that lay ahead of me.

Along the way, as I said, a lot would happen to shake my faith. I encountered police who lied on the witness stand, and prosecutors who knew it, and judges who turned a blind eye to the whole thing. I learned how terribly inaccurate eyewitness testimony could be, and how many people were sent to prison—or to their death—based on that flimsy, unreliable testimony. I learned that perjury on the stand was not only present; it was pervasive.

I learned how easy it was to get an innocent person to sign a confession just to end hour upon hour of unremitting interrogation, their decision hanging on the belief that recanting the confession the next day would set everything straight and put an end to these false accusations. And how incredibly hard it is—impossible, sometimes—to recant that testimony the next morning.

My work with Jorge de los Santos began ten years before DNA evidence came into use as a way to prove innocence and thirteen years before the founding of an extremely effective organization known as the Innocence Project, which has used DNA evidence to free hundreds of innocent inmates.

Excerpted from When Truth Is All You Have by Jim McCloskey and Philip Lerman. Copyright © 2020 by Jim McCloskey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.