Northwestern University

After one son died in a house fire, Kristine Bunch of Greensburg did 16 years for murder and arson while separated from her other child. Eventually she won a grueling fight for freedom and a chance to be a mother again. But some things, she discovered, were lost forever.

For Kristine Bunch, prison was not hypothetical. It was her life—unjustly, she maintains—for more than 16 years before she was able to gather enough evidence, with the help of Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, to convince appellate judges she had been wrongly imprisoned for arson and the murder of her son.