The Innocent Man by John Grisham (Wikipedia description here; on Amazon here) is that popular author’s only nonfiction book.
Grisham writes pulp fiction with legal characters and plots. I don’t care much for his novels, but I’ve read a couple as a break from serious reading. I can read a Grisham novel in a couple days.
He creates interesting characters (e.g., a serial killer judge), and keeps you in suspense, but his plots are implausible. I put down one of his books after a few pages because it required excessive suspension of belief.
The Innocent Man is a serious book in the true-crime genre. After reading it all the way through, it reinforced my distrust of small town cops.
It describes how overzealous authorities under public pressure to solve a baffling murder in Ada, Oklahoma, framed two innocent men. In December 1982, a young woman was raped and murdered in her apartment. Unable to solve the crime, detectives went after the town drunk and also swept up a friend of his.
Despite a fantastical police narrative, a jury convicted them, and they served years in prison before the real killer was identified by DNA methods unavailable in 1982. They eventually were freed, but their journey through Oklahoma’s criminal justice system destroyed their lives.
Grisham goes into detail about how this happened. Three things struck me: The lack of integrity among those who secured the wrongful convictions; the jury’s willingness to convict on a shockingly flimsy prosecution case; and Oklahoma courts’ extreme reluctance to set aside wrongful convictions.
The story might not be so nerve-jangling if it was isolated or rare. But all across America, since the advent of DNA evidence, hundreds of convicts have been exonerated, exposing the unreliability of our nation’s criminal justice system. The poor, who can’t afford an expensive defense, are especially vulnerable to its mistakes.
Why do these mistakes happen? Limited resources are a major reason.
Police don’t have resources to thoroughly investigate every crime, so they rely on confessions to close cases. False confessions happen more frequently than you may think. Prosecutors have an ethical duty to impartially review cases before pursuing charges, but there’s little oversight. The poor are represented by overworked public defenders who are given no resources to build a defense, so they get their clients to take plea deals.
Guilty pleas are the system’s standard medium of exchange. Prosecutors overcharge and dangle threats of severe punishment to use as bargaining chips. Judges impose harsher sentences on defendants who go to trial and lose. Once convicted, an innocent defendant will get a harsher sentence if he doesn’t admit guilt and express remorse. In our system, innocent people charged with crimes are under pressure to cut their losses by admitting guilt to get less time.
Why does the system work this way when everyone knows it convicts innocent people? Lack of resources. Trials are time-consuming and expensive. Courts, prosecutors, and defense lawyers c0uldn’t function if more than a small percentage of cases went to trial. The fact most defendants are guilty serves as a justification for running the system this way. The occasional wrongful conviction is considered acceptable collateral damage; it’s more important the system not break down from more cases than it can handle.
What does Grisham’s narrative leave us with? Where I started: Distrusting small-town police. I can’t really say whether that’s fair, but stories like this don’t make me feel better. Neither did Grisham’s foray into nonfiction storytelling. The notion that corrupt cops can ruin people’s lives is terrifying, and undercuts legitimate law enforcement by making ordinary citizens afraid of police. And fair or not, many people associate small towns with rogue policing.