The Innocent Man | 
 enlarge | Author: John Grisham
Publisher: Dell
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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Rating:  99 reviews
Sales Rank: 1307
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 3.9 x 1.4
ISBN: 0440243831
Dewey Decimal Number: 345.76602523
EAN: 9780440243830
Publication Date: November 20, 2007
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Product Description
In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. But on his way to the Big Leagues, Ron stumbled, his dreams broken by drinking, drugs, and women. Then, on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron’s home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered. The investigation led nowhere. Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson. The washed-up small-town hero was charged, tried, and sentenced to death—in a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence that would shatter a man’s already broken life…and let a true killer go free. Impeccably researched, grippingly told, filled with eleventh-hour drama, John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction reads like a page-turning legal thriller. It is a book that will terrify anyone who believes in the presumption of innocence—a book no American can afford to miss.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 94 more reviews...
 Guilty Until Proven Innocent? December 7, 2007
David Zimmerman (Baton Rouge, LA USA)
69 out of 72 found this review helpful
The phrase "Grisham book" and word "important" aren't often found in the same sentence, but John Grisham's 2006 non-fiction book, "The Innocent Man", allows me to state that Grisham has now written the most important book of his mega-successful career, and one of the most important I've read by any author.
The book recounts two murders in the small town of Ada, Oklahoma. Both victims are young women. In both cases, the local and state police investigating the case are stumped. But with a toxic blend of extremely circumstantial "evidence", shocking crime scene photos, junk science, inexpert experts, jailhouse snitches and critical "dream confessions" induced by near-torture tactics, the police pin the murders on four young men of the area, two per murder.
The "innocent man" of the title is 30-something ne'er-do-well Ron Williamson, a schoolboy baseball star whose dreams of playing in Yankee Stadium dissolve in the low minors in a mix of arm injuries, booze and the onset of mental illness. By the time of the murder that consumes most of Grisham's tale, Williamson has washed up back home in Ada, and deservedly earned a reputation as a loudmouth loose cannon of sorts. Still his worst crime is passing a $300 phony check.
Skipping forward quickly, Williamson becomes the focus of the police's investigation and ultimately finds himself on death row in an Oklahoma criminal justice system whose aim seems to be to continuously reduce the amount of respect shown to death row inmates until it reaches zero. Shrewd detectives that they are, the police "know" that there's a second killer because of a misspelled warning message written in catsup at the scene, "dont chase us or ealse." Enter suspect two, single father Dennis Fritz, whose main crime is to be a friend of Williamson.
I'll stop here regarding the "plot", even though this is a news story and you could look it up. While novelistic in format, "The Innocent Man" reads more like a newspaper report, or like a lawyer dispassionately recounting the facts of a case. (Well after awhile not so dispassionately, as the injustices against the accused and then convicted men pile up.) The issues raised by the case and brought to light by Grisham cover the gamut of criminal justice - abuse of police power, single-minded focus on particular suspects and deliberate ignorance of others, near-torture-induced confessions, prosecutorial arrogance, lack of resources provided to defendants, mishandling of evidence, coercion of expert witnesses, use of junk science to dazzle a jury, the general and mistaken belief by the community that the police only arrest guilty parties, and most compellingly in Williamson's case, the inability of the criminal justice system to recognize and deal humanely with mentally ill prisoners.
My wife read the almost 450-page paperback version in one day. She then bugged me to read it for several days until I interrupted my second attempt at Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer: A Novel and dove in. Even while sick, I finished it in a day-and-a-half. After his disappointing novella "Bleachers", I'd pretty much written off Grisham (never have considered him much better an airplane read in the first place), but I'm deeply grateful to him to recognizing the power of this story and bringing to the attention of so many people with this fine book. I also salute him for sticking to the non-fiction format, resisting the novelist's urge to fictionalize the story and embellish it with tie-ins to the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11 and the like. "The Innocent Man" may not stand up as literature to recently-deceased Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, but it's still a great book--the best true-crime story I've read with the most important messages about America's criminal justice system and its generally unrecognized threat to innocent men and women everywhere (and especially in Ada, OK where the DA that prosecuted the cases is still in office).
In Cold Blood April 4, 2008
Mr. Richard D. Coreno (Berea, Ohio USA)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
There are plenty of guilty parties in John Grisham's exploration of two murders in Ada, Oklahoma; corrupt police, inept and egotistical prosecutors, vindictive investigators, incompetent judges and lazy attorneys.
The research is impeccable and Grisham's biting commentary is poignant. This is a vital book on how the public trust in institutions pledged to uphold justice is ripped to shreds and the fate of the many victims left under the tracks of this runaway train.
Another "Can't Put It Down" from Grisham! November 30, 2007
K. Cantrell (Tennessee)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
I have always thoroughly enjoyed reading Grisham's legal fiction books, but I was a bit hesitant to read The Innocent Man because few writers can make the transition from fiction to nonfiction and maintain their quality of writing.
Not Grisham! In The Innocent Man, Grisham offers readers an indepth view into the legal wranglings of a murder trial; and how, with the manipulations of prosecutors, police and other officials, an innocent man can be wrongly convicted....and sentenced to death.
Other reviewers have comment on how this book was opinionated toward the prosecution. This is true, but within the first few pages readers can definitely understand why. I don't think Grisham is slanted against ALL prosecutors, just Bill Peterson and his team in Ada, Oklahoma; especially since the convictions of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz (the main story of this book) were not his first false convictions based on manipulated evidence and testimony.
If you're a fan of Grisham or just a true crime fan, this is a must read! For true crime readers, it will be a refreshing piece of work to read about someone who actually DIDN'T commit the crime, yet heartbreaking to read the hardships of those falsely accused.
a shocking book February 15, 2008
Paul Kolodner (Hoboken, NJ USA)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
WARNING: This review gives away the ending. If this is a problem for you, read elsewhere.
This book of non-fiction describes the sad case of Ron Williamson, a small-town misfit who ends up on Oklahoma death row for a rape and murder. In the end, he is exonerated and released, and he dies a broken man at around fifty years of age. Other reviews below describe the story eloquently and in more detail, so I'll leave it at that.
This book was riveting and kept me up past my bed-time. I recommend it highly. The decline of the main character, before and after his incarceration, was beyond tragic - this despite the fact that he was not a sympathetic person.
This story raised several issues worth pondering:
1. Williamson was exonerated beyond a shadow of a doubt by DNA evidence, which also conclusively showed that the real killer was a person the police never considered or even interviewed, even though he was the last person seen with the victim when she was alive. Nonetheless, the prosecutor never gave up pursuing Williamson and continued to threaten to re-open the prosecution after his exoneration. And a large fraction of the community never forgave Williamson, either, or felt safe after his release. These facts stun me. I can almost understand the response of the community: you grow to hate and fear a person who has committed a violent crime against a friend or loved one. Letting go of that when he is proven innocent must be very hard. But it's the only moral thing to do. The victim's mother was able to do this. The behavior of the prosecutor, though, is harder to accept and forgive, given his power. The police, prosecutor, judge, and defense attorney committed just about every error and injustice imaginable in order to get a conviction. In order to win a case like this - one with a hideous crime and very poor evidence - you have to be aggressive and committed. The focus and intensity must lead to a kind of professional blindness - one to which dishonest, incompetent, and insecure people are perhaps more susceptible than others! I was reminded of the concept of "diagnosis momentum" sometimes experienced by medical doctors, as described in the recent book How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman. When a thin woman with a long and well-documented history of nausea and diarrhea brings in a pile of paperwork describing her as only neurotic, how many doctors can break free of the diagnosis and consider other possibilities - like a wheat allergy? In both cases, going with the professional momentum solves the professional's problem: he can sign off on the paperwork and get home for dinner. The doctor gets paid; the prosecutor gets praised in the newspaper.
2. This book constitutes a strong argument against the death penalty. The problem of executing innocent people is obvious. But this story reveals a second and more subtle problem: the death penalty de-humanizes the executioners, and, by extension, all of us. Ron Williamson's jailers deliberately withheld psychiatric treatment and medication, exacerbating his severe mental problems. They took endless delight in taunting him over the intercom in his cell, pretending to be the victim asking why he killed her. This would trigger tantrums in which he pathetically shouted his innocence for hours at a time. By the time he was released, he had lost 90 pounds, his teeth had fallen out, his hair had turned white, and he was a helpless, ruined wreck of a man, shuffling slowly and hoarsely whispering his innocence. My intuition is that the people who enjoyed doing this to him had lost the capacity for insight or regret by the time he was proven innocent and released. This is what can happen when you have the legal power to kill someone.
3. We rely on the police to protect us from crime and to save us in emergencies. But if a detective starts to pressure you to confess to a crime, you have to view him as an adversary and repeat the magic words: "I will only answer questions in the presence of my lawyer."
Grisham Is Great in Non-Fiction Too! December 15, 2007
Anthony E. Waters (Germany)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
I am a fan of Grisham's fiction, and have always appreciated his ability to explore the corrupting influence of power, the law, and money, while still being entertaining. He does this as well in the non-fiction The Innocent Man which is about how the justice system in small-town Ada, Oklahoma, sent a unpopular local drunk Ron Williamson, to death row after a quick and perfunctory trial. In the trial the weak evidence presented by a police force and zealous prosecutor anxious to solve a brutal and notorious murder on behalf of a scared and anxious public led to a wrongful conviction, and quick sentence to Oklahoma's Death Row in 1988. Seemingly, there are no heroes in Ada. Prosecutors were willing to ignore exculpatory evidence, a public defender system tolerated incompetence, and a jail and prison system created and then tormented the mentally ill
On the surface, the bad guys in The Innocent Man are the individuals working for the police, court system, small towns, and even the local newspapers. However, look more deeply, and you will see that Grisham is really pointing his finger at a public which more than justice and protection from murderers, wants vengeance, at any cost. Ada, just like thousands of jurisdictions in the United States, gets exactly what the justice system they want when jurors willingly ignore evidence, voters elect politicians ready to demonize town drunks, and townspeople buy newspapers for their capacity to inflame rather than inform.
In short, the problem is not just the bad guys, town drunks, sloppy prosecutors, lazy defense lawyers, corrupt police officers, or scurrilous newspapers editors. The problem is us. Anyone having an interest in the American justice system should read this book. Is The Innocent Man always balanced in its presentation of Williamson's case? No, it is not. But so what? The case made by Grisham is against us in our role as citizens, and our responsibility as humans to both protect the least among us, and especially avoid persecuting them. In the public Grisham makes a great case. I for one in my middle class comfort plead guilty to too often hoping for the best of our criminal justice system, and assuming the worst of those who are arrested. The wrongful convictions of people like Ron Williamson tell us that we should be more thoughtful and careful as citizens, voters, and jurors. Grisham's point is that for the criminal justice system to be effective, we cannot demand the emotional comfort of prosecution, at the expense of justice.
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