She had been, just as she had said for five years, somewhere else entirely, innocent, while another person did the thing she had been condemned for.

Watching the footage, the people in that room were forced into a strange and vertiginous experience: they were seeing, with their own eyes, the truth of a thing they had spent five years believing the opposite of.

It is one thing to be told that a conviction was wrong.

It is another thing entirely to watch the actual crime take place and see, plainly and beyond argument, that the wrong person had been punished for it.

Every certainty they had carried was being overwritten in real time by the evidence of their own senses, and the mind resists that, even when the resistance is pointless.