Uninnocent

A harrowing intellectual reckoning with crime, mercy, and heartbreak through the lens of a horrific murder


On a Thursday morning in June 2010, Katharine Blake McGowan's sixteen-year-old cousin Scott stole his father's hunting knife, walked to a nearby bike path, and killed an eight-year-old boy he didn't know. He turned himself in to the police soon after. It was a psychological break that tore through Scott's brain, and into the hearts of those who loved both boys-one brutally killed, the other sentenced to die in Angola, the country's most notorious prison.


In The Uninnocent, McGowan, a law student at Stanford at the time, wrestles with the fallout of her cousin's actions, as well as the broken machinations of America's justice system. As Scott languished on death row, and as his victim's family sought closure, McGowan struggled to keep her faith in the institution she was training to join. Consumed with understanding her and her family's new reality, McGowan became obsessed with heartbreak, seeing it everywhere: in Scott's isolation, in his victim's loss, in the students she taught at various prisons, in the way our justice system breaks rather than mends, in the history of her parents and their violent childhoods. As she delves into a history of heartbreak-through science, medicine, and literature-and chronicles her uneasy yet tender bond with Scott, McGowan asks probing questions about justice, faith, inheritance, family, and, most of all, mercy.

Sensitive, singular, and powerful, effortlessly bridging memoir, essay, and legalese, The Uninnocent is a reckoning with the unimaginable, unforgettable, and seemly irredeemable. With curiosity and vulnerability, McGowan unravels a distressed tapestry, finding solace in both its tearing and its mending.