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.[2]:599 Godsey began teaching law in 2001, and was assigned to serve as the faculty supervisor for the Kentucky Innocence Project. He did not believe that innocent people were in prison, and thought that students were naive to try to prove the innocence of those who had been convicted.[2]:599

The book’s six main chapters each focus on one of the systematic flaws Godsey sees: “blind denial,” “blind ambition,” “blind bias,” “blind memory,” “blind intuition,” and “blind tunnel vision”.[2][3][4] The two most frequent contributors to wrongful conviction are false eyewitness accounts and problems with forensic science.[3] The book illustrates how these problems have led to wrongful convictions in cases taken up the by 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.”[3] He sees the system as routinely dehumanizing suspects in the eyes of prosecutor.