San Marcos Public Library

Framed

by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey

Publishers Weekly Bestseller Grisham (The Exchange) teams up with Centurion Ministries founder McCloskey (When the Truth Is All You Have), whose nonprofit works to exonerate wrongly accused individuals, to tell 10 such stories in this gripping account. In alternating chapters, Grisham and McCloskey cover cases with a variety of stakes and backgrounds—some involve forced confessions, others faulty forensics. Most chilling is the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man convicted of killing his three daughters by setting fire to their house, who was executed in 2004, just before a new forensics report went public, confirming that the lethal fire wasn’t arson. Not all the stories are so bleak: Grisham opens with a detailed account of the “Norfolk Four,” Navy sailors who were given nearly $5 million by the Virginia government in 2017 after their wrongful convictions for a rape and murder. Elsewhere, McCloskey traces the decades-long saga of soldier Mark Jones and his friends, who were exonerated of a murder that took place on the night of Jones’s 1992 bachelor party. Grisham’s narrative gifts come in handy—his chapters are slightly more propulsive than Jones’s—but both men deliver a series of thoroughly researched spellbinders. The results are equal parts fascinating and infuriating. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Co. (Oct.)

Kirkus 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. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list Framed, which looks at ten miscarriages of justice involving a total of 21 defendants, is cowritten by Grisham and Jim McCloskey, the founder of Centurion, which since the early 1980s has been dedicated to freeing people who have been wrongly convicted. The authors relate stories that utterly boggle the mind. In the book’s first essay, the police, lacking hard evidence, keep adding suspects until they’re claiming seven men (some of whom don’t know each other) committed the crime together. The authors spend little time on the processes that eventually freed the wrongly convicted people; they focus instead on the processes by which the police railroaded the defendants—lying to them, coercing confessions, manufacturing proof of guilt where none actually existed. For regular readers of crime nonfiction, the book confirms what the reader already knows: people are sometimes deliberately put behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. Readers unfamiliar with the genre—those, perhaps, picking up the book because Grisham’s name is on the cover—will be shocked and outraged, which is precisely the response the authors were looking for.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Legal-thriller star Grisham is the hook, but the true-crime topic will also be a big draw.

Back