This is a very disturbing nonfiction book about our judicial system, a heinous crime and a wasted life. It showed how several innocent men were convicted of murder and that in reality, one is really guilty until proven innocent rather than the other way around. It is a very sad documentary about a talented high school athlete who really ruined his life with drinking, drugs and got framed for murder, and developed mental and physical illness. It's unbelievable how these innocent men spent 12 years in prison while the appeals courts kept upholding the verdict in spite of all the bungling and lack of evidence in the first trial. The main thing I learned from it is if you ever get brought in for questioning by the police, don't answer any questions without an attorney present, even if you are innocent and have nothing to hide! The fact that this really happened makes horrific. I recommend this to anyone interested in legal thrillers, the justice system, or prison life.

I wasn't going to put this book here because, well, it's Grisham and I'm just reading it for class. Still, for those unfamiliar with the criminal justice system, who despise public defenders, or take their liberty for granted, this book is a good introduction.

Early in his book, Grisham relates a 1909 incident from the “colorful” history of the small Oklahoma town of Ada (the main setting in the book). It is striking story of vigilante action triggered by the murder of a local farmer. Four men are dragged out of jail, punished without the protections of a fair trial, and the local government reprints a picture of the lynching on a postcard. With this, Grisham then points to a modern “lynching” attempt by focusing mainly on one man, Ron Williamson, who came to suffer the injustice of being wrongfully convicted.
This book is about the conviction and exoneration of Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz (convicted as an accomplice) in a small town in the United States. In 1988, Williamson was convicted of murdering a young woman despite the astonishing lack of evidence. Williamson was a local baseball prodigy that never progressed beyond the minor leagues. Over time, this failure pushed Williamson further into alcoholism and mental illness, leading to strange behavior that did not go unnoticed by the locals of Ada. When it was time to find the murderer of a young waitress in town, many of the townspeople pointed to Williamson as the prime suspect.
From the beginning, it is clear that the title of the book, The Innocent Man, is not meant ironically. The mystery of this book is how people like Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz can be convicted of a murder where there is a such scant evidence while a more obvious suspect is left uninvestigated. The research involved, as to be expected from a writer of Grisham’s best-selling status, is not statistical or very academically thorough but anecdotal.
Grisham is not objective. Bill Peterson, the Ada District Attorney, is arrogant and shameless and the local cops are corrupt and narrow-minded. To the extent that Grisham solves the mystery, so to speak, he does briefly get into the unreliability of other police practices, such as, lie-detector tests and hair samples. Unfortunately, Grisham barely scratches the surface in explaining how such injustices can come about, even anecdotally. (He spends an inordinate amount of time recounting Williamson’s baseball “career,” for example).
This book conjures the common refrain that the basis of the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is better to let a guilty person go free than to put an innocent man in prison. The system is replete with safeguards to remove the accused from such horrors as lynching where local townspeople succumb to little more than personal prejudices, strong emotions, and violent tendencies. Grisham has written about how the system has truly failed. It is unlikely that there is a person who does not recognize the flaws of our adversarial and impersonal legal system. The criminal justice system is an institution like any other that can never escape the vagaries of human logic and prejudice. Where the injustice is so flagrant, however, as Grisham demonstrates (by both showing and, in a common literary faux pas, repeatedly telling the reader), everyone should take notice. The case of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, exonerated by the fortuitous introduction of DNA technology and an excellent team of defense lawyers, begs the question: how could this happen in the modern America? Even worse, how many others remain in prison as a result of wrongful convictions? It is unlikely that an unremarkable town like Ada, which Grisham notes is much like any small town in America, is alone in its broken criminal justice system.

This book almost brought me to tears several times. I cannot fathom the pain of these wrongfully accused men & their families. I feel disgusted it’s a true story.

i stayed up so late to finish reading this, but anyhow i’m definitely reading more books like this, by this author. i love his writing style, and although he doesnt write romance novels, this book was super super addicting.

I think this is probably the most riveting true crime and punishment tale I've ever read. The injustice is catastrophic though, and has certainly undermined my faith in our criminal justice system, at least in small towns. It's soul crushing to read about what these innocent men went through. But I highly recommend this story, Grisham's one non-fiction title, out of dozens of his books, which I've enjoyed tremendously.

This book was very irritating, in the sense that you just cannot fathom how something like this is allowed to happen. I've also watched the Netflix series, so I knew what I was getting into with the book. At first I thought the book was better, but as I made my way through it, I think that the two need to go hand in hand. The book gives a much more thorough picture of the injustice done and the severe mental illness of Ron Williamson. There is not a lot of focus on Dennis Fritz. There is almost no focus on Tommy Ward or Karl Fontenot in the book. I think all of the pieces between the book and the Netflox series probably just begin to scratch the surface of what actually happened here.

Review to follow

Man, was this a disturbing true story.
It was so depressing. I felt so bad for all the people involved in this. I was constantly thinking to myself that this could not possibly happen, but it did!
It is very hard to believe that there were no checks and balances in the system and that the people involved in this are (or were at the time it was published) still working in the system.
I know hindsight is 20/20, but even in the end, the people who caused this to happen never took responsibility or even apologized. The arrogance and egos in this small town are disgusting.
This book ended with me feeling sickened. Nothing redeeming happened here.

3,5

I legal-thriller di Grisham sono sempre affascinanti, ma il libro in questione, non è un romanzo perché l'autore abbandona la fiction e narra una storia vera, quella di Ron Williamson, intrecciandola ad altri casi di "malagiustizia" americana, se così possiamo definirla.
Sicuramente lascerà perplessi gli estimatori dell'autore perché, in questo caso, è come se mettesse su carta una sorta di cronaca, un documentario, molto interessante per carità, ma che proprio per questo aspetto, in alcuni passaggi, risulta molto lento.
Io l'ho vissuto come "libro-denuncia" sulle lacune del sistema giudiziario americano, sullo strapotere delle forze dell'ordine, sul peso che possono avere testimonianze sommarie e in alcuni casi false, sulle conseguenze che tanti avvocati poco motivati possono arrecare alla vita delle persone...anche tenere in carcere un innocente e lasciare a piede libero un mostro.
Una lettura istruttiva più che di piacere.

A tragic non-fiction story that dragged on.

This is the first non-fiction work of John Grisham. After reading this Book i feel bad about all those who are wrongly convicted and pass through the pain that Ron Williamson passed through. The question i ask myself is, if there is bad policing in developed countries what about in developing countries like mine?

More saddening and yet less engaging than Grisham's fiction. The central character is pitiful and yet not easy to empathize with. Meanwhile, Grisham villainies the law enforcement community as a whole without seeming regard for the fact that not every case was like this one.