After robbing two video stores with a friend, Rene Lima-Marin was sentenced to almost 100 years in prison. Then, due to a clerical error, he was released 88 years too early.

The strange situation of Huntsville, Texas.

Being exonerated for a crime you didn’t commit is a hard-won triumph. But how can the state make up for what you’ve lost while in prison?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friends didn’t realize what he’d done until they saw his image on television.

A home for troubled children in California comes undone.

The rise of the Peoples Temple through the lens of an earlier group: Father Divine’s Peace Mission.

A man in Puerto Rico stumbles on a brick of cocaine, and rather than sell it he decides to bury it. Others, hearing his story, cook up a plan to retrieve it.

A profile of Judy Clarke, the publicity-shy anti-death-penalty attorney, who has defended the Unabomber, Susan Smith, and Jared Loughner.

The events that led the writer to spend 60 days in jail.

Paleram Chauhan, a 52-year-old Indian farmer, was shot dead during the summer of 2013. The reason: his opposition to a gang of criminals stealing his village’s sand to sell on the black market.

Beatrice Munyenyezi told her New Hampshire neighbors that she was refugee from the Rwandan genocide. Half of that was true.

Tommy Gilbert seemed like your average Beekman Place ne’er-do-well son—until his dad turned up dead.

The Scandinavians had an idea that seems wacky to Americans: make a prison safe and livable.

After DNA test cleared Clarence Harrison of a crime he didn’t commit, he was released from prison and awarded $1 million. But the redemption story he tells publicly hides a more complicated reality.

The most coveted items on the prison menu are salt and pepper packets.

One man’s story.

“When I was a child, Dad told me that he chose to become a cop because a cop was the most respected man on the block. When I took a seat at the grown folks table, he told me that he wanted control.”

The government says Matt DeHart is an online child predator. DeHart—and his parents—say he’s being framed over his knowledge of CIA secrets.

“In essence, Pez ordered his economic assassination,” said a fellow Pez dealer.

An essay on a fatal car crash in the author’s youth.

The lingering psychological effects of being one of the greatest crime reporters of all time.

Detroit is trying to end the longstanding practice of “scrapping,” which is the only way some of its residents can earn a living.

Santería or Vodou are explored as possibilities.

Even an “obstructionist bloc” can’t resist handing prosecutors the indictments they want.

An innocent man was executed – in 1761. Voltaire got on the case.