Sarah Burns was born in Walpole, New Hampshire. She graduated from Yale University in 2004 with a degree in American Studies and went on to work for a small civil rights law firm called Moore & Goodman. There she did paralegal work and research on such varied cases as VAVA et al. v. Dow Chemical et al., a class action in which Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange sued the companies who produced that chemical, and U.S. v. al-Moayad, the criminal trial of a Yemeni sheik accused of funding terrorism.

Her book on the teenagers wrongly convicted in the Central Park Jogger case, The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding, was published by Knopf in May 2011. She is now producing a documentary film about the case for Florentine Films.