John Grisham and Jim McCloskey’s Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions is non-fiction, but its subjects will be familiar to Grisham’s readers. His co-author, Jim McCloskey, founded the Centurion organisation, which has helped secure the release of 70 falsely convicted men and women across the US. Divided between the two authors, Framed’s essays examine 10 of these cases. Grisham’s entries unsurprisingly show a novelist’s skills, but McCloskey’s first-hand involvement and plain-spokenness make his contributions stand out.
Framed carefully avoids the sensationalism that distorted these prosecutions, favouring a spare clarity. This suits the cases: the injustices are transparent, but they’re enmeshed in a Byzantine web of egregious lies, shocking luck and “law enforcement misconduct and chicanery”, all of which would be overwhelming in less certain hands. Throughout, the authors have sharp eyes for all the enraging details, and Grisham in particular can be concisely disparaging, like when he describes a “newly certified expert” witness “Using some of the scientific words he had just learned”.
Inevitably, patterns emerge. Cops and prosecutors keep seizing on any difference – rumours one defendant might be gay, the “satanic-type” leanings they saw in another’s Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin posters – as evidence of guilt. Grisham and McCloskey pointedly linger on the arrogant stupidity of the many charlatans allowed to pose as authorities, including the would-be psychiatrist whose degree “was in education and personnel administration”, and the “local cop who had once hosted a kids’ show on television”, which somehow qualified him to interview a traumatised child. Though it all really happened, a novel would get binned for the levels of coincidence at work, like cases where “the real killers” serve as “star witnesses” against innocent parties.
These are powerful, well-told accounts, and smartly divided into essays. The events are grim enough that Framed would be hard to read in one sitting. Even when convictions are overturned, everyone’s suffered so grievously there’s little you’d call resolution. Grisham and McCloskey show how these losses rippled across whole communities, with acts of violence compounded by acts of injustice, then by eventual recognition that blinkered authorities let the guilty get away. One prosecutor’s victim distilled such tangled events well: “Everybody that told the truth done time. Everybody that lied went home.”
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