FRAMED

Ten cases of egregious miscarriages of justice and their aftermaths.

Bestselling novelist Grisham teams up with McCloskey, the founder of an organization that works to free the wrongfully convicted, to spotlight 10 cases in which innocent people were falsely accused of a crime, went through trials marked by various sorts of bias and misconduct, and were unjustly incarcerated. Grisham and McCloskey alternate the book’s 10 chapters to show guiltless suspects being victimized by corrupt police officers and detectives, dishonest government officials, racist and/or unsympathetic jurors, untrustworthy witnesses, incompetent doctors, and underprepared lawyers. Grisham’s cases include the story of the Norfolk Four, Navy sailors browbeaten by detectives into confessing to a rape/murder in 1997, and the ordeal of three men convicted of killing a 70-year-old woman, based on the testimony of a police informant saving himself from doing time and despite all three being exonerated by DNA testing. McCloskey’s chapters profile individuals he has worked with, among them Clarence Brandley, a Black janitor convicted by an all-white jury of murdering a white 16-year-old volleyball player; and Ellen Reasonover, a witness who became a suspect in the murder of a gas station attendant when the police basically pressured two women to testify that she had confessed to them. Many of these cases were brought in front of judges based on police hunches, which they buttressed by manipulating uneducated and impressionable witnesses and defendants, suppressing evidence, and in some cases coercing confessions. The list of perpetuated wrongs is endless, and the co-authors are empathetic to the plight of people who had nothing to do with the crimes they were accused of committing. The truth eventually came out in these cases, but that does little to lessen the impact of this sobering look at what happens when we turn a blind eye to injustice.

A powerful and infuriating must-read about ineptitude and injustice in America’s legal system.