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Best-selling author John Grisham, and John McCloskey, a pioneer in the Innocence Movement, relate 10 painful to-read stories of wrongly convicted Americans and their fights for exoneration.
Each author selected five stories of people who found their lives ripped apart by lies, misconduct, coerced confessions, and other unscrupulous tactics of corrupt police officers, unprepared prosecutors, bigoted jurors, and dishonest judges. These stories are about men who were innocent but found guilty, causing shattered relationships with family and friends for decades while the guilty went free.
I found the incidents deeply disturbing as the authors described the dark side of the U.S. justice system. The authors explain how easily police officers, attorneys, and judges can tilt the outcome of court cases. Many court proceedings are brought in front of judges based solely on police hunches, which the officers bolster by employing naive witnesses, suppressing evidence, and, in some cases, brutally coercing confessions from innocent victims. As the stories unfold, the writers reveal a legal system more invested in seeking convictions than the truth.
For example, David Milgaard was in prison for 20 years for a crime he did not commit. His conviction was based on the questionable testimony of a witness, not on solid evidence. The chapter captures David’s legal battles but also the suffering he endured as his life was taken away from him. It provides readers with a personal look at the astonishing impact of wrongful imprisonment caused by the "fallibility of our criminal justice system."
In another case, a visiting player went missing from a high school girls' volleyball tournament in Conroe, Texas, two janitors found her strangled body in a storage loft above the school auditorium. Police quickly decided that the janitors—one White, one Black--were the perpetrators of the crime. "One of you two is gonna hang for this," a White officer warned them. Turning to the Black janitor, Clarence Brandley, the police officer added, "Since you are the [racial slur], you're elected."
The prosecutor defames Brandley in the courtroom by calling him one possessed by "the bestial rage of an animal." Using racism and denigration, the prosecutor convinces the court of Brandley’s guilt. The author writes movingly how the janitor "never panicked as the clock ticked close to the date of execution." After 10 years on death row, Brandley was exonerated when previously suppressed evidence was uncovered, indicating his innocence and a new suspect. Once freed, he struggled to put his life back together because Texas refused to compensate him for its unjust incarceration. All 10 stories illustrate authorities' efforts to avoid admitting mistakes, including embarrassment, politics, financial settlements, and executions of innocent people.
Since becoming broadly available in the 1980s, DNA testing has resulted in several hundred exonerations. Abuses uncovered in the reinvestigations have increased calls for reforms, including putting restrictions on testimony from prison informants and shady forensic experts, as well as forcing the police to record their complete interrogations of suspects.
One of the most troubling questions raised by the incidents of wrongful convictions involves the future of the death penalty and the probability of error. On September 24, 2024, Marcellus Williams, a Black man from Missouri, was executed for the killing of newspaper reporter Felicia Gayle in 2001. The State destroyed or corrupted the evidence that could prove his innocence. The available DNA and other crime-scene evidence did not match him, and several of his accusers had dubious motives. Yet Williams was executed at the Correctional Center at Bonne Terre.
Grisham and McCloskey thoroughly researched cases of egregious miscarriages of justice are both sobering and riling. They purposely decided to cover five White men and five Black men in their book, to curb any perception that being framed occurs to only one race. The book portrays the wrongfully convicted as resilient survivors rather than mere victims. While the lives of these individuals were crushed by injustice, their resolve to regain their freedom and dignity personifies the power of the human spirit.
If your preferred genre is true crime, these are must-read stories. They are spellbinding and illustrate each citizen’s responsibility to seek and protect justice. The cases demonstrate how important it is to remain impartial, investigate the sources of evidence, and work to preserve and defend a just legal system.
Doubleday is the publisher of this 346-page book, which includes a folio of photographs depicting many of the wrongly imprisoned but exonerated men.
About the authors: Grisham is the author of numerous bestsellers translated into nearly 50 languages. Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted.
McCloskey founded Centurion Ministries, an organization whose mission is to free the wrongly convicted. Since its establishment 40 years ago, Centurion has freed 70 individuals, all of whom have spent decades in prison serving life or death sentences for crimes committed by others. McCloskey has a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary.
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