The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town | John Grisham

The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town | John Grisham | The innocent man

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The Innocent Man: ...

	The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town John Grisham Doubleday, 2006 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 440 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

John Grisham?s first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller yet.

In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A?s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league 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 twenty hours a day on her sofa.

In 1982, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital 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.

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.

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a native adan's review

Having lived in Ada during the writing of this book and also being an employee of the Ada Evening News during the same period, the detail of this book is remarkable. The author truly got to know the characters. I knew most of the law enforcement and court characters. This gave me a true flavor for Ada, even if I had not been a native.

The innocent man

John Grisham is a good author. I don't usually read nonfiction but this intreagued me. I bought other publications to read other's accounts of this true story. All were in agreement with what happened.

Amazing read!

I started reading this book over the weekend while at my sister's house, and it was so amazing, that I started reading it to her and we were instantly hooked! We finished the book in three days! He grabs your attention in the very first chapter.
I actually lived in Ada, Oklahoma from 1997-2000...three horribly long years. I never really knew what the town was like until after I read this book. I was pretty naive, I guess! Thanks for a great book, John Grisham! I am purchasing the other books mentioned in your story now...so is my sister!

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Great for Anne Rule fans

I thuroughly enjoyed this book. I'm a huge Grisham fan, as well as a huge Anne Rule fan. I don't know if it's good or bad that I kept forgetting it was a Grisham book and not a Rule book. I felt the detail and the realism were right on. I didn't read anything about the book (summary or any reviews), I just picked it up and bought it and I'm glad I did. It's a big step from his usual lawyer dramas and I loved it!

A Legal System Out of Control

Ron Williamson was at one time one of the favorite sons of Ada, Oklahoma. He was a young man with tremendous athletic skills and many locals believed that he just might be the next Micky Mantle, who is still the greatest baseball player to ever come from that state. But largely because of chronic injury problems that started in high school, Ron was not destined to become a great professional ballplayer. He got his shot, and managed to stay in the minors a lot longer than he probably should have, but baseball is not the thing for which Ron Williamson is remembered by citizens of Ada, Oklahoma.

No, when the people of Ada think of Williamson, what they recall is the rape and murder of which he was convicted and the years that he spent on death row. They remember that he came within five days of actually being executed for a crime with which he had absolutely nothing to do. Well that's what most of them remember, anyway. Other Ada locals perhaps still want believe the local prosecutor who refuses to admit that he was wrong to ever charge Williamson with the crime, and who still wants to hold out the possibility that the DNA evidence that exonerated him does not prove that he was not involved in some way.

When it came to pinning the rape and murder on someone, Ron Williamson was certainly an easy target. Ron's drinking problem began in high school and, when his baseball career unraveled, alcohol, drugs, and struggles with depression made it impossible for him to hold a job or to move on with his life. So when the baffled investigators and prosecutors in Ada decided that the crime was so brutal that it had to involve two people, Ron and his running buddy Dennis Fritz were "chosen" as the crime's most logical perpetrators.

Now all they needed was the evidence to convict the two innocent men and cover themselves in glory as great crime fighters. There was no evidence to be found, however, something that did very little to slow down the police investigators or the local prosecutor who had already decided that Fritz and Williamson were guilty. A combination of creatively coerced "confessions," testimony from local lowlifes (one who was later to be convicted of the very crime in question), sloppy testimony from experts, a judge who proved his own incompetence, and lies suggested to, and regurgitated by, jailhouse snitches, managed to convict both the men.

Their story is one that most of us would like to believe never happens in this country. Unfortunately, as Grisham proves in The Innocent Man, it probably happens much more often than we know. All it takes is the right combination of incompetent policemen, investigators, expert witnesses, prosecutors and judges to make it possible. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz had years stolen from them and their lives were largely ruined by the very people charged with protecting the public welfare. This is one scary story.

Grisham tells the Fritz and Williamson story in a very straightforward way. There is no attempt to "novelize" what happened through the use of extensively recreated dialogue or by speaking from the points-of-view of its main characters. That does make for some rather dry reading at times but the details resulting from Grisham's research makes his straight reporting of the facts a fascinating one. The 10-disc unabridged audio version of The Innocent Man is read by Craig Wasson who does a particularly effective job in giving a voice to Ron Williamson's frustration and outright anger about the situation in which he found himself.

Fans of John Grisham's novels, in which the action seldom seems to stop, might find the pace of this one to be a little slow. But Grisham had an important story to tell and he told it well.

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