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Getting Life : An Innocent Man

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Getting Life: An Innocent Man’s 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace is a memoir by Michael Morton that chronicles the time that he unjustly spent in prison for the murder of his wife, Christine Morton. Michael and his wife lived in Austin, Texas with their son, Eric, who was three years old at the time his mother was killed. On August 13, 1986, like any normal day, Michael woke up at five in the morning and went to work. Later in the day, he called home to check on his wife because she had not taken their son to the babysitter. He was shocked when Williamson County Sherriff Jim Boutwell answered Michael’s home phone and told him to come home immediately. Once Michael arrived, he learned that his wife had been bludgeoned to death. The…show more content…
In the last part of the book, peace, Michael writes about his exoneration and the welcomed journey of beginning his life outside of prison. The author uses the themes of pain, prison, and peace to create an emotional and firsthand account of what it is like to be sentenced to life in prison for a crime you did not commit.

Pain The author begins Getting Life with the section titled pain. The author’s purpose for this section is to describe the events that caused him so much pain and completely changed his life. The author supports the theme of pain throughout this section by providing the reader with a personal account of learning about his wife’s murder, being arrested for the murder, and then being sentenced to life in prison. The author’s account of the murder begins in chapter two, and Morton describes in detail how painful it was to learn that his wife had been murdered. After the sheriff told Michael that Christine was dead, Michael recounts that “it felt like I was falling-falling down, falling apart- breaking into pieces under the weight of the sheriff’s words” (Morton, 2014, p. 19). To make things worse, Michael was not able to peacefully mourn the death of his wife due to the immediate interrogation by the Sheriff’s Office. Six weeks after Christine’s death, Michael was arrested for her murder. Furthermore, the author discusses how difficult the murder trial was. After the chief medical examiner recounted
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