Drawing on Godsey's experience as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York prior to his work at OIP, the book examines how the culture of the justice system is complicit in wrongful convictions.

[1] The book is part-memoir in which Godsey describes his personal journey from being a "hard-nosed prosecutor" to the co-founder of the Ohio Innocence Project.

[5] Godsey writes that judges, prosecutors, and police contribute to wrongful convictions by taking "unreasonable and intellectually dishonest positions"[4] and that they operate "under a bureaucratic fog of denial".

When later DNA testing showed that he was not the source of the skin cells and semen found at the crime scene, prosecutors put forth improbable theories to explain why Elkins must still be guilty.

In the cases of both Clarence Elkins and Chris Bennett, local prosecutors and judges denied the validity of new evidence, and the convictions were over turned at the state level.

In the "blind intuition" chapter, Godsey discusses human's belief in their ability to correctly identify deceptive behavior.

When he sued the detectives whose testimony had led to his wrongful conviction, one claimed to have never arrested an innocent person in her career, saying that she was "a human lie detector, with no rate of error.

In the chapter on "blind tunnel vision", Godsey describes a prosecutorial penchant for becoming attached to one interpretation of events and being unwilling to consider alternatives.

He writes that greater care in handling witnesses and more comprehensive use of video recording to capture interrogations from beginning to end can help fight the "massive disaster" of wrongful convictions.

[4] A review in Salon described the book as "compelling" and called Godsey "one of the heroes we need now more than ever" for his work exonerating the wrongfully imprisoned.