Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions

by John Grisham, Jim McCloskey

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Using his knack for page-turning suspense, John Grisham teams up with Jim McCloskey to deliver a stark indictment of the flaws in our justice system, centering on a collection of true stories of wrongly convicted individuals and their battles for freedom.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction since The Innocent Man, “the master of the legal thriller” (Associated Press) teams up with Jim McCloskey, “the godfather of the innocence movement” (Texas Monthly), to share ten harrowing true stories of wrongful convictions.

“Each of these stories is told with astonishing power. They are packed with human drama, with acts of shocking villainy and breathtaking courage. But these are more than just gripping true stories—they are a clarion call for reforming the tragic flaws in our criminal justice system.”—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon

John Grisham is known worldwide for his bestselling novels, but it’s his real-life passion for justice that led to his work with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, the first organization dedicated to exonerating innocent people who have been wrongly convicted. Together they offer an inside look at the many injustices in our criminal justice system.

A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty, there is very little room to prove doubt. These ten true stories shed light on Americans who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount the dramatic hard-fought battles for exoneration. They take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and corruption in the court system that can make them so hard to reverse.

Impeccably researched and told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of winning freedom when the battle already seems lost and the deck is stacked against you.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385550444
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/15/2024
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	64
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

John Grisham is the author of fifty consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include Camino Ghosts, The Exchange: After the Firm, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series.

Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.

When he’s not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system.

Grisham lives on a farm in central Virginia.

Jim McCloskey founded Centurion Ministries, the first organization in the world devoted to freeing the wrongly convicted. Since its establishment forty years ago, Centurion has freed seventy individuals, all of whom spent decades in prison serving life or death sentences for the crimes of others. McCloskey has a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. His memoir, When Truth Is All You Have, was published by Doubleday in 2020.

Hometown:

Oxford, Mississippi, and Albemarle County, Virginia

Date of Birth:

February 8, 1955

Place of Birth:

Jonesboro, Arkansas

Education:

B.S., Mississippi State, 1977; J.D., University of Mississippi, 1981

Website:

http://www.jgrisham.com

Read an Excerpt

Preface
 
John Grisham
 
In 2006, I published The Innocent Man, a true story about the wrongful conviction and near execution of Ron Williamson. Before then, I had never considered nonfiction—I was having too much fun with the novels—but Ron’s story captivated me. From a pure storytelling point of view, it was irresistible. Filled with tragedy, suffering, corruption, loss, near death, a measure of redemption, and an ending that could not be considered happy but could have been much worse, the story was just waiting for an author. I soon learned that every wrongful conviction deserves its own book.
 
Since then I’ve met many exonerees, along with their families, lawyers, advocates, and old cellmates. As a group, they are amazing because they somehow survived nightmares that the rest of us cannot begin to comprehend. Most enjoy telling their stories. All are determined to change a broken judicial system and prevent more wrongful convictions. Dozens have written about their ordeals. More than a few have asked me to do the writing.
 
For a long time I’ve thought about a collection of some of the best stories, but the research got in the way. It is daunting. Thousands of pages of trial transcripts, police reports, witness statements that always seem to vary from one stage to the next, prison records, forensic tests, and petitions, motions, pleadings, and orders written by lawyers and judges and filed, seemingly, by the pound. Novelists can be lazy because we simply make up stuff. Nonfiction is brutal because the research has to be meticulous. You can’t afford to make mistakes.
 
I met Jim McCloskey about fifteen years ago when he asked me to speak at a Centurion Ministries annual gala at Princeton. Within ten minutes of first shaking hands we were telling war stories of the wrongfully convicted. Jim’s stories are always better, because he lived them. He is part of them. He made the exonerations happen by pounding the streets from coast to coast in search of the truth. Centurion has been involved in about seventy exonerations, and Jim was usually there, outside the prisons, when his innocent clients walked out and into the arms of their loved ones. He was there when they tasted freedom, and he was the reason for it.
 
At some point a few years back, we began talking about this collection. The idea was simple. I would select five of my favorite stories, and so would Jim. The first challenge was to pick only ten, because there are so many. The second challenge was to limit each story to about 10,000 words. Since each story could fill a library, we knew the task would be formidable. We agreed that each would do his own writing with limited input from the other.
 
And so we wrote.
 
Our goal with this book is to raise awareness of wrongful convictions and in some small way help to prevent more of them. It is an effort to shine light on some of the terrible and abusive tactics used by the authorities to convict innocent people.
 
If we as a society had the political gumption to change unfair laws, practices, and procedures, we could avoid virtually all wrongful convictions.

Jim McCloskey

As John points out, our association and friendship go back fifteen years. We were drawn together by our mutual concern and compassion for those men and women across America who fell victim to a deeply flawed criminal justice system and were falsely convicted and sentenced to a life sentence or to death. John generously volunteered to write the foreword to my memoir, When Truth Is All You Have, published by Doubleday in 2020. That book recounts the forty-year history of Centurion Ministries’ encounters with our nation’s judicial system on behalf of the convicted innocent as well as the personal journey that led me into this work.
 
Naturally, I was honored when John invited me to cowrite Framed with him. We quickly agreed that each of us would write five stories of real-life cases in which innocent defendants, much to their shock and disbelief, were found guilty of crimes they had absolutely nothing to do with. The five written by me are cases I personally worked on as case manager and lead investigator. Selecting these five from among the seventy or so individuals Centurion successfully freed was a challenge worthy of Solomon. I was fortunate in writing to be able to draw upon Centurion’s voluminous in-house archival records collected during the many years of work on each case. These source materials include, but are not limited to, trial transcripts, police reports, legal briefs, judicial opinions, court records, and Centurion investigative reports.
 
The subtitle of Framed is Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions. I can assure readers, no matter what their background, that their response after reading each of these stories will be, “Did this really happen?” To which we the authors answer, “Yes, it did, and it happens far more often than you can imagine.” It is our intention and hope that these stories are not only a compelling read but at the same time serve as a microcosm of what is occurring throughout our nation’s halls of justice. It is our attempt to bring to light systemic flaws in the justice system’s infrastructure that cause untold tens of thousands of innocent souls to interminably languish in prison.
 
The twenty-three defendants caught in the web of these ten wrongful convictions needlessly spent decades in prison until the truth of their innocence finally emerged and set them free. Four landed on death row, two of whom came within days of execution, while one was tragically executed. Perhaps it will surprise readers that the racial makeup of the twenty-three is almost evenly split, ten white and thirteen black, demonstrating that this kind of injustice easily occurs across racial lines.
 
Often the real killers were under the nose of the police from the outset of the crime, and in two cases they were the star witnesses for the prosecution. DNA played an important role in several cases but not in most. Perjury by police and civilian witnesses was pervasive in these stories. These convictions were not caused by unintentional mistakes by local law enforcement or misidentification by well-meaning eyewitnesses or honest but erroneous forensic analysis.
 
No, they were rooted in law enforcement misconduct and chicanery, men and women hell-bent on clearing cases or gaining a conviction through a wide variety of illicit means—subornation of perjury, secret deals with criminals in exchange for their fabricated testimony, coercing witnesses into false testimony or suspects to falsely confess, use of discredited or inept forensic analysts, suppression of exculpatory evidence from the defense, or other acts that obstructed justice and resulted in the ruination of innocent lives to the relief of the actual perpetrators.
 
Each of the stories takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride, most of which end with truth and justice ultimately prevailing, although at great and unimaginable personal cost to the exonerees and their loved ones. Once freed, the released face the formidable challenge of starting life all over again. It is a testament to the human spirit that so many of them have the will and capability to do so, unburdened with the anger and hate of years past, now filled with a forgiving heart, an enhanced appreciation for the everyday things of life that most of us take for granted, and a desire for a peaceful and quiet existence.
 
Our hope is that you find this book to be both interesting and informative, and that it provides you with a new perspective on the fallibility of our criminal justice system—a perspective that perhaps you didn’t have prior to reading Framed.

Editorial Reviews

09/02/2024

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.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2024-08-15
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.

Kirkus Reviews

The flaws and lethal errors that condemn innocent people in the American legal system have caused too many for too long to needlessly suffer. Jim McCloskey and John Grisham are towering figures in law and literature shining an urgent, compelling, and critically important light on the heartbreaking wrongful convictions that compromise our legal system and remain a national tragedy.”—Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy

“Framed should come with a warning label: Be prepared never to look at the justice system the same way again. In this collection of ten shocking wrongful-conviction cases, each stranger than fiction, you’ll come away outraged by how easily so many prosecutions can and do run off the rails: investigative tunnel vision, coached witnesses, compromised jailhouse snitches, junk science, cultural bias, crooked prosecutors, and even biased judges. How grateful we all should be to John Grisham and Jim McCloskey—for raising the alarm and crusading for true justice.”—Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road

“In this essential collaboration, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey vividly demonstrate the need to run just as fast, if not faster, to exonerate the innocent as to punish the guilty. In ten shocking true stories, they not only convey the devastating impact of wrongful convictions on each affected person but also sound the alarm for all of us—there but for the grace of God, go I. These are remarkable stories of injustice that need to be told. And retold.”—Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney and New York Times bestselling author of Doing Justice

“These ten stories—bitter, gritty, and heartbreaking—will astound you, will inspire you, will bring your blood up to a roiling boil. Here are crimes of egregious malfeasance, perpetrated by cops, prosecutors, and jurists, that often seem more sinister than the original crimes these authorities were supposed to impartially resolve. Grisham and McCloskey, writing in crisp, propulsive prose, remind us how much hard and thoughtful work we still have to do to make America’s legal system equitable, transparent, and fair.”—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea

“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.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Gripping . . . Both men deliver a series of thoroughly researched spellbinders. The results are equal parts fascinating and infuriating.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher