In the public conscience, New York-based defense attorney Barry Scheck—and, to a lesser extent, his partner Peter Neufeld—will always be tainted by his prominent role as the most tenacious (and many felt abrasive) member of O.J. Simpson's "Dream Team" at the criminal trial. His skills as both a brilliant trial lawyer and a leading forensics expert were particularly evident during his vicious eight-day cross-examination of police criminologist Dennis Fung, when he reduced the prosecution's "mountain of evidence" to a pile of ash. But Scheck's anger over mishandled evidence and sloppy lab work was rooted in a more noble cause than few in the court of public opinion have ever acknowledged. In 1991, he and Neufeld founded The Innocence Project, an organization that uses DNA evidence to reopen cases and free the wrongly convicted. Co-written by New York Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer, their largely persuasive book Actual Innocence is a bold affront to the complacent American justice system, which operates under the assumption that only the guilty are sent to prison. While their prose is often perfunctory at best, flowery at worst, the authors march through a series of wrenching case studies that speak for themselves. Each chapter highlights a different factor that can lead an innocent person to jail, including incompetent lawyering, police or prosecutorial misconduct, false confessions, unreliable snitches, and, most common of all, mistaken eyewitness identification. Among the 67 people exonerated by DNA "fingerprinting," a few injustices are especially startling: a Dallas man, falsely convicted of raping an 11-year-old girl, suffers savage beatings from inmates who believe he's a child molester; a prosecutor, unmoved by solid DNA evidence, tells Scheck his client is still going to get "needled" (i.e., lethally injected); and, on a 60 Minutes segment, Ed Bradley discovers that a phony forensics "expert" stores blood samples next to the picante sauce in his fridge. The Simpson trial is conspicuously absent from Actual Innocence, as is any discussion of DNA's usefulness in proving guilt as well as innocence; perhaps Scheck and Neufeld are too accustomed to giving nothing to their adversaries across the aisle. But, in their quest to sharpen a legal system riddled with flaws, the lawyers deliver an urgent, convincing plea on behalf of the innocents who line America's prisons.