The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town
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| The Innocent Man | |
|---|---|
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| Author | John Grisham |
| Country | United States |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | October 10, 2006 |
| Pages | 368 |
| ISBN | 978-0385517232 |
| OCLC Number | 70251230 |
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is the first nonfiction [1] book written by John Grisham which was released by Doubleday Publishing on October 10, 2006.
The book details the story of former minor league baseball aspirant Ronald 'Ron' Keith Williamson of Ada, Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, where he was raised in the strict Pentecostal household of his parents, Roy Williamson and Juanita (Caldwell) Williamson, along with his sisters, Annette (Williamson) Hudson, now from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Renée (Williamson) Simmons, now from Allen, Texas.
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[edit] Plot
The story begins with Ron Williamson, who has returned to his hometown after failed attempts at playing for various minor league baseball teams, including the Oakland A's and the Ft. Lauderdale Yankees. This failure leads to a bout of depression, which results in a drinking problem.
Very early in the morning of December 8, 1982, the body of Debra Sue Carter, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress at the Coachlight Club (located in Ada), and a resident of Ada, was found in the bedroom of her garage apartment. She had been beaten, raped and suffocated. After five years of false starts and shoddy police work by the Ada police, Williamson—along with his "drinking buddy", Dennis Fritz—was charged, tried and convicted of the rape and murder charges in 1987-1988. Williamson was sentenced to death. Fritz, meanwhile, was given a life sentence. Fritz's own wife had been murdered seven years earlier in 1975 and he was raising his only daughter when arrested.
Grisham's book describes the aggressive and misguided mission of the Ada police to solve Carter's murder mystery. Forced dream confessions, unreliable witnesses and flimsy evidence were used to convict Williamson and Fritz. Since a death row conviction automatically sets in motion a series of appeals, a fresh look into the details of the trial, especially by the Innocence Project and Williamson's attorney, Mark Barrett, exposed several glaring lacunae in the prosecution's case and the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses. Brady v. Maryland, a case that had been ignored until after the sentencing, was acknowledged. A retrial was ordered by Frank H. Seay, a U.S. District Court judge. After suffering through a conviction and 11 years on death row, Williamson and Fritz were finally exonerated by DNA evidence, and released on April 15, 1999. (At the time, Williamson became the 80th inmate exonerated from Death Row since 1973.[2])
Ron Williamson suffered deep and irreversible psychological scars during his incarceration and eventual wait on death row. (At one time on September 19, 1994, he was only five days away from being executed when the execution was stayed by the court.[3][4]) He was intermittently treated for manic depression, personality disorders, alcoholism and mild schizophrenia. It was later proven that he was indeed mentally ill (and hence unfit to be either tried or placed on death row in the first place). The State of Oklahoma and Ada and Pontotoc County officials never admitted any errors, even threatening to re-arrest him, though they did settle a wrongful-conviction case brought as a result of Williamson's incarceration.
Another criminal from Ada, Glen Gore, was eventually convicted of the original crime on June 24, 2003, and was sentenced to death at first, [4] but his death sentence was overturned in August 2005;[5] he was eventually convicted at his second trial in June 2006 and sentenced to life in prison without parole.[6][7]
Williamson and Fritz sued and won a large settlement ($500,000.00) in 2003 from the City of Ada, and an out of court settlement with the State of Oklahoma for an undisclosed amount. By 2004, Williamson was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, and died soon thereafter on December 4, 2004 in a Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, nursing home. Dennis Fritz, meanwhile, returned to Kansas City, where he lives with his daughter, Elizabeth as of 2006[update]. In 2006, Fritz went on to publish his own account of being wrongly convicted in his book titled Journey toward Justice, ISBN 1-931643-95-4.
The story also includes accounts (as sub plots) of the false conviction, trial and sentencing of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot in the abduction and purported murder of Denice Haraway, as well as the false conviction of Greg Wilhoit in the rape and murder of his estranged wife, Kathy. All the men were, at one point of time, incarcerated in the same death row. About two decades before Grisham's book, Ward and Fontenot's wrongful convictions were detailed in a book published in 1987 called The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer.
[edit] Book edition
- The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town by John Grisham, Doubleday Books, 2006, ISBN 0385517238, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2006048468.
[edit] References
- ^ "Grisham's New Pitch". Time. 2006-10-09. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1543958,00.html. Retrieved 2007-12-17.
- ^ "Innocence: List of Those Freed from Death Row". Death Penalty Information Center. Retrieved on January 26, 2009.
- ^ "The Innocent Man|Book Review". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved on January 26, 2009.
- ^ a b "Ronald Williamson, Freed From Death Row, Dies at 51". The New York Times. Retrieved on January 26, 2009.
- ^ 2nd trial begins for man given death sentence, NewsOK.com. Retrieved on January 26, 2009.
- ^ Offender Lookup Detail: Glen D. Gore. Retrieved on January 26, 2009.
- ^ The Other Trial, Bubbaworld. Retrieved on January 26, 2009
[edit] External links
- Random House
- The Innocence Project: Background on Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz:
- Grishams Folly: District Attorney Bill Peterson's website disputes Grisham's claims :
- The Innocent Man Study (PDF) from the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy
- Excerpt from 2003 Frontline story Burden of Innocence featuring Williamson's case
- Un-aired material from 2003 Frontline story Burden of Innocence featuring Fritz's case
| Preceded by The Broker |
John Grisham Novels 2006 |
Succeeded by Playing for Pizza |
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