No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice:
The True Story of Jeremy Barney

(Forthcoming, October 2012)

Early in 2004, in bucolic, upscale Litchfield County, Connecticut, seventeen-year-old Jeremy Barney was arraigned on charges that he had raped, sodomized, and tortured a neighborhood family’s three children over a period of eighteen months, while employed as their babysitter.

According to interviews with the family, Jeremy beat and burned the children, cut them with knives and glass, raped their pets as the children watched, and vowed to kill their parents if the children told.

Aside from the statements of the accusing family, however, no evidence indicated that Jeremy had committed these crimes.

In fact, no evidence indicated that these crimes had ever occurred.

Jeremy did not hide that he and thirteen-year-old Carson, friends for a decade, had been having consensual sex, but Jeremy denied the other allegations.

On June 10, 2005, Jeremy received a “bench trial”: a trial without a jury—which required little more than an hour to see the high-school senior sentenced to a maximum security prison for twenty years.

Painstakingly researched and reconstructed from the original case files as well as recent interviews, No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice explores the incomparable power of allegations of child sexual assault. An examination of a national issue and a local tragedy, good intentions and malicious lies, homophobia and gross incompetence; The True Story of Jeremy Barney is the story of three children who have been forced to keep a tragic family secret, and the story of a teenage boy serving 20 years in prison not for crimes that he didn’t commit, but for crimes that never occurred.

Early review copies will be available in Spring 2012. If you would like to be added to the list of advance reviewers, please contact the publishers, GenPop Books, by sending an email to media [at] genpopbooks [dot] com.