The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice

An NBC Dateline producer's cinematic account of two decades navigating a broken criminal justice system to help free six innocent men.

In 2002, Dan Slepian, a veteran producer for NBC's Dateline, received a tip from a Bronx homicide detective that would change his life. Two men were serving twenty-five years to life in prison for a murder in 1990, the cop said, and he knew for a fact that they did not commit that crime.

Haunted by what he had heard, Slepian began an investigation that eventually led to freedom for those two men, and launched him on a two-decade personal and professional journey through a system fiercely resistant to rectifying--or even acknowledging--its mistakes and their consequences.

The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice is an investigative journalist's account of how he took on that system and of the years of prison visits, court hearings and powerful Dateline reporting it took to bring justice to those two men and four others imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. It is also the story of the deep and lasting friendships Slepian formed with the men whose cases he pursued, and how one of them--Jon-Adrian "JJ" Velazquez--provided aid and counsel to him from his cell in Sing Sing prison until his own release in 2021 after decades behind bars.

Like Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, The Sing Sing Files is a deeply personal account of wrongful imprisonment and the enormous effort required to redress it, and a powerful argument for reckoning and accountability. This extraordinary book, at once painful and full of hope, shines a light on a kind of injustice whose consequences we have only begun to confront.

Author: Dan Slepian
Publisher: Celadon Books
Published: 09/10/2024
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781250897701

About the Author

Dan Slepian is an award-winning journalist at NBC News and a veteran producer of its signature news magazine, Dateline. Over more than two decades at NBC, Slepian has spearheaded dozens of documentaries and hidden camera investigations, and is known for his in-depth reporting about the criminal legal system and, specifically, wrongful convictions.

His documentaries on the topic have earned him a total of twelve Emmy nominations and in February 2023, NBC News released "Letters From Sing Sing," an eight-episode award-winning podcast hosted by Slepian that hit #1 on Apple's top charts the day of its release.