Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Sourcebooks, and author Brian Patrick O’Donoghue for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

In my life, I’ve seen firsthand someone accused of a murder they didn’t commit. Although that person was never arrested, the police told the victim’s family and co-workers that they knew he did it, they just couldn’t find enough evidence to convince a jury. That potential miscarriage of justice was thwarted when, a year later, a man arrested for a completely different murder “happened” to confess to my co-worker’s murder. He wasn’t even being questioned about it when he revealed it. This was after causing the original suspect they were so sure had done it to have to move away to escape the stigma of the police accusations.

One night in October of 1997, 15-year-old John Gilbert Hartman was found beaten by the side of a road in Fairbanks, Alaska. He died two days later. The police pick up four young men, all under 21, who are of Native American and Native Alaskan descent. They are tried, convicted, and receive hefty prison terms.

Local journalist and professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Brian Patrick O’Donoghue, is teaching a class on investigative journalism and has his students begin looking into the case. What they uncover is racism, shoddy police work, and a broken justice system. It takes nearly twenty years for the four innocent men to be freed.

As you can imagine, with a story that spans twenty years, events move rather slowly. Although O’Donoghue and his students never give up, every year he must bring a new group of students up to speed. He manages to keep them from repeating the same investigation as they focus on different aspects of the crime and the investigation. There were glaring problems from the start. Two of the convicted men were picked up and questioned while still drunk. One of the so-called eyewitnesses doesn’t appear credible. There’s no forensic evidence to connect the four men to the crime. With how badly Hartman was beaten, there should have been traces of his blood on the perpetrators’ clothes and in the vehicle that was allegedly being driven.

It appears the police never looked for any of that. In a culture where the Native Alaskans are looked down on by many, it was easy to convict the young men, despite the fact that they all asserted their innocence, and there was no real evidence against them.

O’Donoghue details the many steps he and his journalism students took to investigate this. Some of it involved interviewing people involved. They recorded these interviews whenever they could get consent. O’Donoghue himself engaged in many conversations with inmates, who had to call him collect. In Alaska, the law is such that he could record these conversations without informing them, even though it’s a given that the jail itself was recording the calls. Not only did he invest his time and his students’ time in proving their innocence, he invested a great deal of money.

The book is written in such a way that it’s not obvious how much time is passing. Eventually, O’Donoghue’s and his students’ work grabbed the attention of the Alaskan Innocence Project. Even still, it seems like it took a lot longer than it should have to free these men from jail. There’s a point near the end where he points out that some of the problems with the case were known to the prosecutors as early as 2009, and yet the men languished in jail. Even as they are arguing in front of a judge for the verdicts to be set aside, the prosecutors are fighting them. Do they really believe they have the perpetrators in jail? It seems doubtful. In fact, it seems more like they were concerned with the men, once free, suing the State of Alaska and individuals for reparations. Whatever their motivation, it’s not what justice is supposed to be about.

The system is broken. The system is especially broken if you are a minority.

O’Donoghue has “the birth of a movement” as part of his title. I don’t know exactly what he means by that. Everything that went into freeing these men from jail was cetered on them. Even the Native Alaskans who spoke up are focused on the miscarriage of justice of these four convictions. I don’t see a call for overhauling the justic system, and the fact that they had to sign an agreement not to sue to get out of jail precludes that likely happening. People don’t seem to care nowadays unless it affects them personally. Considering that they taxpayers of Alaska got away without footing the bill for reparations to these men, most likely won’t put much thought into how many other similar cases there might be.

I can’t say I enjoyed reading The Fairbanks Four. It confirmed opinions I had formed many years before about the justice system. It made me angry that these young men lost the best years of their lives to prison. I found it to be well-researched and easy to read. The details helped me understand how things in the 49th state operate a little differently than the lower 48.