Book info

• Title The Innocent Man
• Author John Grisham
• Year 2006
• Genre Non-fiction

In the baseball draft of 1971, Ron Williamson was the first player chosen from Oklahoma. Signing with Oakland, he said goodbye to his small home town and left for California to pursue his dreams of glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits - drinking, drugs and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept 20 hours a day on her sofa. In 1982, a 21 year-old cocktail waitress, Debra Sue Carter, was raped and murdered, and for five years the crime went unsolved. Finally, desperate for someone to blame, police came to suspect Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution's case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to Death Row. But as Grisham methodically lays out, there was no case against him. Ron Williamson was wrongly condemned to die. If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.

Thoughts

Difficult read this one. Grisham embarks on a non-fiction tale of wrongful conviction, a bit of a departure for him as he’s far more well known for criminal/law fiction instead. But this still reads something like a Grisham novel - establishing the characters, detailing the crime and then walking through the stages of law that follow - in particular the trial.

It’s so unsettling to know that this is all true though, and that two innocent men were convicted of such a horrible crime, and how close they came to losing their lives because of it! The book can be a bit slow in places, plodding through facts and figures and being quite stilted because of it. Naturally, it lacks the dialogue that I tend to enjoy in Grisham’s fiction work.

However, it’s an important book, if only to raise awareness.

Rating: 3 / 5