Fans of John Grisham know what to expect when his latest effort
lands on bookstore shelves. Unique plot twists, evil villains,
sympathetic heroes and a page-turning plot are the cornerstones of
Grisham's work. THE INNOCENT MAN, his newest book, has all of these
components in spades with one additional element: it is a true
story. His first work of nonfiction will fascinate and frustrate
readers as they ponder an American legal system run amuck. This is
Grisham's nineteenth book, and in some respects it may be his most
important. Fictional characters in fictional courtrooms may cause
readers to think briefly about our legal system. THE INNOCENT MAN
forces readers to take a probing look at and ask some serious
questions about a legal system that, in important criminal cases,
appears to be malfunctioning in every corner of our nation.

While THE INNOCENT MAN ostensibly is the story of Ron Williamson,
who spent 12 years on Oklahoma's death row after having been
convicted of a murder he did not commit, the book is more than
Williamson's heartrending tale. Co-defendant Dennis Fritz was
wrongfully convicted of murder but sentenced to life in prison.
Along with Williamson he was ultimately exonerated by DNA evidence.
Two other inmates, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot, whose cases were
interwoven with Williamson and Fritz, remain imprisoned in Oklahoma
serving life sentences despite substantial evidence of actual
innocence.

Ada, Oklahoma, was the venue for the outrageous events leading to
the miscarriage of justice chronicled in this book. In 1982, that
community was rocked by the brutal sexual molestation and murder of
Debra Sue Carter. From the outset, the investigation was poorly
handled by law enforcement officials, who incorrectly assumed that
two individuals were involved in the crime. Promising leads were
not investigated because police attempted to establish a case
against Williamson and Fritz instead. Grisham records in vivid and
excruciating detail how police hid evidence and ignored
constitutional safeguards in their zeal to obtain convictions in
the case. Sadly, they were ultimately joined in their effort by
prosecutors and judges.

One difference between Grisham's traditional works of fiction and
the factual accounting of THE INNOCENT MAN is his hero, Ron
Williamson, wrongfully convicted of Carter's murder. Williamson is
not the sympathetic character one finds in many of Grisham's
novels. He starred as a high school athlete in baseball and was
selected by the Oakland Athletics in the 1971 Major League draft.
His professional baseball career never achieved the promise
displayed by his youthful potential, and he returned home to lead a
life dampened by divorce, drugs, alcohol and small-time crime.
Burdened by mental illness, his attitude contributed in many
respects to his conviction. But Grisham's portrayal makes perfectly
clear that Williamson's behavior in no way justified the outrageous
actions of law enforcement, prosecutors and judges.

It is perhaps one of the ironies of the law that while lawyers and
judges failed Williamson, it would be others in those same
professions who rescued him only five days before he was scheduled
to be executed from imposition of his sentence of death. Lawyers
from the Oklahoma death penalty assistance program and a courageous
federal judge ultimately secured a new trial for Williamson. During
the course of the investigation and preparation for that trial,
Williamson underwent DNA examinations that would establish his
innocence. It was one of the first big DNA exonerations in American
courts.

THE INNOCENT MAN is not a book that Grisham planned to write.
Speaking last month to University of Virginia law students, he
described how he first came upon Williamson's story when he read an
obituary in The New York Times. The headline of the death
notice read, "Ronald Williamson, freed from death row, dies at age
of 51." That simple sentence stirred Grisham's interest: "After
reading the entire obituary, I knew it had the makings of a much
longer story." He followed up with interviews and has written a
brilliant documentation of how innocent defendants are sentenced to
prison far too often in America. His research and writing have
caused him to take a long hard look at justice in our nation: "Even
if you support the death penalty, you cannot support the death
penalty system as it stands in the U.S. My one hope is that people
realize this system we have is simply too unfair to
continue."

Two of America's greatest courtroom novelists are John Grisham and
Scott Turow, who have written about murder and death in our halls
of justice. How ironic that both have begun now to speak out about
the injustice of capital punishment. Grisham does so in a voice
loud and clear and through a book that fully explains why the
nation needs to reexamine the process by which we sentence
criminals to be executed.