In 1984 Eddie Joe Lloyd was arrested for the brutal rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old girl in Detroit, Michigan. He would be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in the first degree, the jury deliberating in less than half an hour. Eleven years later and after exhausting all legal avenues, he reaches out to the Innocence Project, who helps him prove his innocence through DNA testing. And in 2002 he walked out a free man, but not after spending seventeen years locked up away from his family, away from his daughters who had lost touch with him throughout the years. This book tells the compelling life story of Eddie Joe Lloyd, retelling his early years from his first crime at the age nine, to his downward spiral as a petty criminal and an addict before he reached twenty, to the events that occurred during and after his seventeen-year incarceration, a scrutiny of one of America's most famous cases of wrongful conviction that exposed the failings of the United States criminal justice system.