John Grisham is best known for his fiction--The Firm, The Client, The Pelican Brief, and A Time to Kill being among my favorites. The Innocent Man, Grisham's first published nonfiction, is in my view one of his finest books. Grisham relates the tragedy of Ron Williamson, a baseball hero from a small town in Oklahoma who winds up a dissolute, mentally unstable Major League washout railroaded onto death row for a hometown rape and murder he did not commit. Williams is ultimately exonerated, though almost too late. Even so, Williams was never the same.
Grisham could have titled this book The Innocent Men because as readers learn Ron Williamson was only one among a handful of men wrongly convicted by a zealous small town prosecutor and unscrupulous detectives who were not above forcing fabricated confessions from suspects. Being a lawyer, I can think of no more noble endeavor than to convict a man guilty of a heinous crime. A close second would be defending and exonerating a man wrongly accused and convicted of the same.
Tremendous book. Well worth reading.
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