Kerry Cook has a new book coming out on Feb 27th. Kerry spent 20 years on Texas death row for a crime he did not commit. You can pre-order his book on Amazon. In 2001, Kerry was TMN’s “Outstanding Lobbyist” for his actions during the 2001 Texas Legislature when he was instrumental in convincing two committees to pass moratorium on executions legislation.
He is also on MySpace.
My book/memoir is scheduled to hit book stores February 27th, 2007. It is titled “Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit” By Kerry Max Cook.
“A brilliant and unprecedented work, Chasing Justice is the riveting chronicle of how a smalltown murder became one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in American history—and sent the author, an innocent man, to hell for twenty-two harrowing years. Kerry Max Cook is one of the longest-tenured death-row prisoners to be freed: This is his unbelievable story and the only first-hand account of its kind. Wrongfully convicted of killing a young woman in Texas, Cook was sentenced to death in 1978 and served two decades on death row, in a prison system so notoriously brutal and violent that in 1980 a federal court ruled that serving time in Texas’s jails was “cruel and unusual punishment.” As scores of men around him were executed, Cook relentlessly battled a legal system that wanted him dead; meanwhile he fought daily to survive amid unspeakable conditions and routine assaults. When an advocate and a
crusading lawyer joined his struggle in the 1990s, a series of retrials was forced. At last, in November 1996, Texas’s highest appeals court threw out Cook’s conviction, citing overwhelming evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct. And finally in the spring of 1999 long-overlooked DNA evidence was tested and it linked
another man to the rape and murder for which Cook had been convicted.Today, Cook is a free man and the proud father of a young son. A shocking look inside death row, a legal thriller, and an inspirational story of one man’s ultimately triumphant fight against extreme adversity, Chasing Justice is a landmark work, written with the powerful authenticity of Cook’s own hand. It will forever unsettle our view of the American justice system.” My story was featured in the award-winning, long-running New York City off-Broadway play, “The Exonerated.” Later, the Court TV network made it into a television movie, and premiering it on network telvision in January of 2005. I am a 2003 Senior Justice Fellow for the Open Society Institute in New York.