The Uninnocent

Notes on Violence and Mercy

By: Katharine Blake

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

On a Thursday morning in June 2010, Katharine Blake's sixteen-year-old cousin walked to a nearby bike path with a boxcutter, and killed a young boy he didn't know. It was a psychological break that tore through his brain, and into the hearts of those who loved both boys—one brutally killed, the other sentenced to die at Angola.

In The Uninnocent, Blake wrestles with the implications of her cousin's break, as well as the broken machinations of America's justice system. As her cousin languished in a cell on death row, where he was assigned for his own protection, Blake struggled to keep her faith in the system she was training to join.

Consumed with understanding her family's new reality, Blake became obsessed with heartbreak, seeing it everywhere. As she delves into a history of heartbreak—through science, medicine, and literature—and chronicles the uneasy yet ultimately tender bond she forms with her cousin, Blake 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.

©2021 Katharine Blake (P)2022 Tantor

What a beautifully-written, heartbreaking story

Katharine’s prose is as lovely as she is. The emotion she conveys in this memoir is astonishing and heartbreaking. To achieve any change, we need everyone to understand the heartbreak of this story that, in so many ways, parallels the heartbreak that exists throughout the juvenile justice system.