Good Kids, Bad City: A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America

From an award-winning investigative journalist—the dramatic story of the longest wrongful imprisonment in the United States to end in exoneration, and the city that convicted them

In the early 1970s, three African African American men—Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu, and Ricky Jackson—were accused and convicted of the brutal robbery and murder of a man outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. The prosecution’s case, which resulted in a combined 106 years in prison for the three men, rested on the testimony of Ed Vernon, a preteen with questionable motives of his own.

The actual murderer was never found. Almost four decades later, Vernon recanted his testimony, and Wiley, Kwame, and Ricky were released. Theirs was the longest wrongful imprisonment to end in exoneration in American history, and in Good Kids, Bad City, investigative journalist Kyle Swenson tells their story, and that of the city that wrongfully convicted them, for the first time.

As Swenson writes, "A wrongful conviction is a complete collapse of the justice system. Police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, the press, the whole of the public apparatus we dub the city itself—all these carry the burden.” Interweaving the dramatic details of the case with Cleveland’s history—one that, to this day, is fraught with systemic discrimination and racial tension—Swenson reveals how this outrage occurred and why. Written in the tradition of Ghettoside and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Good Kids, Bad City is a work of astonishing empathy and insight: an immersive exploration of race in America, the struggling Midwest, and how lost lives can be recovered.