Saturday, June 28, 2008

The Innocent Man


I just finished The Innocent Man by John Grisham. He applies his storytelling skills to non-fiction -- the interlocking sad stories of a couple of men who were wrongly convicted of a rape and murder and exonerated eleven years later.

Personally, I liked this better than the lawyer thrillers like The Firm -- no chase scenes, no piles of money, no beautiful babes on the beach, just the slow and flawed investigation, the thin prosecution, the incomplete defense, and the years of suffering of a mentally ill man in prison.

Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same -- bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogrant prosecutors.

p. 308.

The book is in the library (or will be, as soon as I return it): KF224.W5535 G75 2006 at Good Reads.

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