In 1945, a Black man named George Floyd was accused of being drunk on a Saturday evening and jailed. After he protested against a second invasive search, the arresting officer beat him to death as he lay on the cell floor. To Professor Margaret Burnham, the discovery of this precursor to the 2020 George Floyd murder was striking, but not shocking. “Lawless police acting on behalf of the state has defined how Black people experienced American law for two centuries,” says Burnham. Though the white officer who killed Floyd in 2020 was tried and convicted, many such killings have been carried out with impu- nity. In By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), Burnham examines the true scope and nature of Jim Crow-era violence, the laws that condoned it and their legacy today.

By Hands Now Known focuses on the 20th century but is acutely relevant to the 21st century. Burnham probes arguments for reparations, apologies and truth proceedings that could further recover this history and allow communities to confront it and reform legal structures tainted by the legacy of Jim Crow. Publishers Weekly has called it, “an essential reckoning with America’s history of racial violence.” Kirkus Reviews said it’s “An indispens- able addition to the literature of social justice and civil rights.”

By Hands Now Known was a finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction, longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Nonfiction and one of Oprah Daily’s 45 Favorite Books of 2022.

Professor Daniel Medwed has spent more than 20 years in the field of criminal justice, serving as a public defender, as cofounder of a law school clinic that investi- gated post-conviction innocence claims and now as a professor at Northeastern Law advocating for justice reform. He’s seen firsthand the deep-seated issues that plague the criminal process, namely how the system is complicit in putting innocent people behind bars. In his new book, BARRED: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison (Basic Books/Hachette Book Group, 2022), Medwed reveals how convoluted legal procedures — essentially technicalities — make exonerations nearly impossible.

BARRED tells heartbreaking stories of people who have been wrongfully convicted to expose how technicalities are keeping innocent people behind bars. It is a powerful call to reform a system that has valued finality and efficiency over justice. “People sometimes say that prisoners get out on ‘technicalities,’” says Medwed. “That’s a misguided view. If anything, procedural technicalities are often what keep those who deserve freedom behind bars.” His previous books include Prosecution Complex: America’s Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent (NYU Press, 2012) and Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: Twenty-Five Years of Freeing the Innocent (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

BARREDwas hailed as one of The Best Fall Books by Bloomberg, a Great Criminal Justice Book by Proclaim Justice, one of the Innocence Project’s Nine Must-Reads of 2022 and a Fall 2022 Notable Book: Politics & Current Events by Publishers Weekly.