CDColin Dabkowski
← Journalism
McSweeney’s · Voice of Witness · 2005

Surviving Justice

America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated

Managing editor

In May 2005, a year out of Syracuse and freelancing for The Buffalo News, I heard that Dr. Lola Vollen and Dave Eggers needed help with the first book in Voice of Witness, a new oral history series from McSweeney’s. The book had to be on shelves by October. A few days later I was driving from Buffalo to San Francisco.

Surviving Justice collects the stories of people who were convicted of crimes they didn’t commit and later exonerated, told in their own words. When I arrived, several of the narratives were unfinished and the staff, at the time, was two people. Over the next five months I helped turn it into a finished, 512-page book.

After it came out, I moved to New Orleans to collect stories from Hurricane Katrina survivors for the series’ next book.

“Real, raw, terrifying tales of ‘justice.’”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The 13 exonerees’ first-person narratives … make for an amazing read.”
Paul McMorrow, Weekly Dig (Boston) · December 2005
“After reading Surviving Justice, you realize how easily wrongful imprisonment can happen.”
Liz Spikol, Philadelphia Weekly · 2005

What I did

  1. 01

    Built and ran the team

    Recruited and managed about 20 interns, and coordinated the writing, editing, fact-checking, design, PR and marketing.

  2. 02

    Finished the narratives

    Edited the oral histories, many of them first recorded by UC Berkeley journalism students, and worked directly with exonerees to complete and check their stories.

  3. 03

    Made the book

    Designed the sidebars, ran fact-checking and permissions, and took the 512-page book through layout and final proofs to the printer.

  4. 04

    Got it read

    Drafted the press materials, helped line up readings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York, and pitched C-SPAN, whose Book TV filmed the New York event with Dave Eggers and exonerees.

From the final proofs

I signed off on the last proofs on Oct. 13, 2005, and the printer started making plates the next day. Both of these pages carry a fix from that final round.

The printer’s proof of the Surviving Justice cover, showing the back cover, spine and front cover. The back cover carries a quote from Scott Turow’s foreword.
The printer’s final cover proof. I caught a misspelling of “Kafkaesque” in Scott Turow’s quote on the back.
Page 88 of Surviving Justice in proof, the opening of a section of Gary Gauger’s story titled “If I Killed My Parents, I Want to Know About It.”
Page 88, from Gary Gauger’s story. Its running head read “Gary Gauger” until I caught it. It should have read “Surviving Justice.”

Still in print

Surviving Justice has stayed in print for more than 20 years, through several editions from McSweeney’s and one from Verso. In 2026, Voice of Witness returned to McSweeney’s, where the series began.