This was very interesting and more than a little disturbing. I have also watched the limited series on Netflix and would highly recommend either or both.

The best Grisham novel in years. As a criminal defense lawyer myself, I am interested in reading of miscarriages of justice. My father in-law on the other hand, is a retired police officer and he simply found the book to be distasteful. In my practice I have found that most people do not believe that people can be wrongfully convicted or that crown attorneys (district attorneys in the us) or police officers may press matters through the system for reasons that are not related to justice. This work is certainly worth a read as it rings with truth.

I will give it 3.5 stars because I thought it's a made up story the whole time. I just realized it's a non-fiction when I read the author's note at the end of the story. It's a slow pace reading through.

It is obvious from the title of the book whose side the author is on here. And it is hard not to be on the side of the wrongly convicted. I just wish that the author had taken the approach of presenting both sides of the story rather turning it into a soapbox against the wrongdoers - i.e. the Prosecutors, Police and Prison Staff. It would have brought better balance and made the book more respectable in telling this very important story.

In the early '80's in Oklahoma a young woman is raped and murdered in her own home. Though there is quite a bit of physical evidence, the list of suspects become a challenge to the local authorities. Out of backlog, presumption and frustration, the local authorities begin to find a way to build a case against two local men whom they feel circumstantially fit the bill. After years of anger and suspicion the men are finally arrested, tried and convicted. One is sent to Death Row and the other for Life.

This is not a story of getting into the mind of a killer. Though it could have been - very little was spent on that topic oddly enough. I guess the point was to show how it is to be in the mind of the wrongly convicted. And even though Grisham did not have the ability to interview his subject due to his death, he did build a sad tale from the wealth of information provided from this man's family, friends and legal team. What struck me even more than the injustice from a criminal standpoint was the broken mental health system in this country. I scratched my head consistently wondering what on earth this man had to do or where he had to be in order to get treatment. He never really did. And to me that was the saddest part about it.

Grisham lays out all of the facts and how they were overlooked, ignored or created from fiction. But his lack of personal interviews with those at fault mean that he had to presume their motivation, sentiments and character. And that is where the credibility begins to weaken for me in this piece of non-fiction. There are always two sides to every story, and I believe that Grisham wanted to portray them - I just wish I could have heard from both directly. I want to know how the Prosecutor could be so blind, so arrogant, so horrifying. I want to know how he got to the position of power that he holds and what motivated him. I want to see for myself the man he is outside of his job and how this murder effected his personal life. I don't want Grisham to tell me what to think - I want to come to that conclusion myself. I guess what I want is In Cold Blood. That's a tough standard for comparison.

I should first say that this was my first John Grisham novel. I should also say that one of the main reasons, if not the reason, I decided on picking this up was that Craig Wasson was the narrator. I know, not a great reason, but who’s asking?

I would love to go into the whole in-depth details, but I can honestly say I can’t without leaving a chunk out. The story of Ron Williamson was a bitter sweet one, a story of an underdog(s) – a man who has made mistakes, but not the one he was tried and convicted, and sentenced to death row for, awaiting execution. I have never been into the legal dramas but I apparently have been missing out. The story is covered in what felt like a documentary style of storytelling. I became very quickly intrigued with this story about a guy who essentially goes out partying one night with a friend, had a couple of drinks, hit on some women to no avail, and spent the rest of the night in a drunken stupor. Debra Sue Carter was at the same bar as Ron that night, she was confronted by some guys for dances and what-not, but she never gave in to them. She left her friends behind, and went home - for the last time.

Later in the night, someone breaks in to her apartment and begins to harass her, she then gets hold of the telephone and calls her best friend who is still out for the night. The conversation was brief, ‘hellos’ were exchanged and Debra Sue Carter told her friend in an uneasy fashion that someone was at her house and they were making her feel ‘nervous’. Naturally her friend became very worried for her, and started getting ready to pay Debra a visit. This friend knew that she was putting her life on the line for Carter, but she just couldn't sleep easy knowing her friend was in potential danger. Minutes later the friend receives another call from Debra Sue, her voice much calmer now telling her that everything was fine, and not to worry about coming over – do not come over! This friend was even more scared for her girlfriend now. She made her way to Carter’s apartment and immediately noticed there was a break in. The window was busted in the front door, the house was in disarray, red blotches were strewn across the walls in what looked like blood, and there were massages written on the walls with what was later revealed as ketchup. One of the messages was, “don’t come looking for us”. At the age of 21, Debra Sue Carter was followed home on a cold December evening, harassed, beaten, strangled, and raped left to die alone in her apartment. It was a massacre.

This was a very incredible story of the injustice that affected two innocent men who were blamed for the death of a girl, and were mere moments away from being put to death for something they didn't do. I began listening to this because of the narrator, Craig Wasson, and ended up loving every minute of this heart breaking, bitter-sweet tale of how the legal system and police departments can very seriously accuse and convict a person without having an iota of proof. I can honestly say that John Grisham is a new favorite of mine now. He has a very simple but elegant way of telling a story, and I am very happy that this non-fiction novel was my first of many of his.

John Grisham set aside his usual fiction and wrote this nonfiction novel (2006) about Ron Williamson, a former baseball player who returned to his home town of Ada, Oklahoma. Already stigmatized as the town "burnout," once Williamson was accused of murder there seemed to be no getting out of it, though the evidence for the crime was sketchy at best. While this book lacks the homeric intensity of Grisham's best novels, it has a lot to say about how law enforcement can be used -- and misused -- to indict and persecute those whose chief sin seems to have been an ability to serve as a convenient scapegoat. Those of us who have seen documentaries and news reports about Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, in central Wisconsin will see the same sorry process at work in small-town Oklahoma. What, if anything, can be done about it?

This isn't the first time little Ada, Oklahoma has attracted notoriety. If this topic and locale interest you, consider The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer (1987), which tells very much the same story.

John Grisham is known for his legal thrillers, but here he writes his first non-fiction novel about the injustices found in Ada, Oklahoma when two men were wrongly accused of a rape and murder of a local woman. In 1982 Debra Sue Carter was killed by a man whom she was last seen with, yet inexplicably two men Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were accused and sent to jail. It wasn't until years later until a legal team from the Innocence Project proved the two were innocent with concrete proof that another man was the killer. Another Ada murder in 1984 of a young woman, Denice Haraway, sent another two men to jail with insufficient evidence of their guilt, with one of the men accused still in jail today. Grisham did extensive research on these cases, and it is shocking to see the glaring inconsistencies in each case that the police and later juries ignored, and how the cases were railroaded through the legal system. A Netflix documentary was made a few years ago based on this book and I plan to watch it.

If you're going to read this, don't stop there. Go online and read Bill Petersen's account as well. It's only fair. And after all, "fair" is what this book is all about, right?http://www.billpetersondistrictattorn...

The Innocent Man alternates between a compelling account of a murder investigation and a tedious account of a man's stupidity/petty criminal activity/insanity.

I had great respect for John Grisham until I read both this book and responses to the book by Ada prosecutor Bill Petersen, who has legal documents to back up his claims that Grisham ignored key facts in the case. I assume he did this to make his book more compelling, but I felt he was dishonest in his portrayal of the "facts", and because of that this book isn't entirely "non-fiction".

I still respect Grisham's writing ability, and will continue to enjoy his crime/law novels, but I honestly feel he unjustifiably did a great disservice to Petersen and the other investigators on the case in order to strengthen his argument that Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were railroaded by corrupt officials. Despite Grisham's claims in the novel, and while there was indeed an injustice done to Williamson and Fritz, the facts in the case show that they were not viciously prosecuted by officials who refused to see the truth. It's just not true.

Very moving account of the real life murder of a young woman in Ada, Oklahoma in 1982 and the subsequent wrongful conviction of two men who weren't exonerated with DNA evidence until 1999.

A Kafaesque real story that will shake your belief in the justice system. The first half is narration of facts and events, astounding you with how the justice system ruthlessly traps innocent men to is web and pins crime on them. Slow reading at this stage but the second half picks up remarkably with the intervention and perseverance of a few persons committed to free the condemned from the Kafaesque clique pervading the judicial system.

A chilling tale of injustice and the troubles faced by a wrongfully accused man. It also highlights the problems faced by a mentally ill man who society is unable to deal with or help.

The pull of this story is the fact that it is not fiction. The book was tagged as something every American should read…..but this is not happening only across the USA. It is a very sad fact that applies globally. After I’ve read this, I am left with a couple of thoughts about law enforcement personnel who would go to extreme measures to solve a case even at the expense of prosecuting the non-guilty – can they really be that bad to the core, or are they just so much in a hurry to resolve a case, that even a half-baked investigation will do? These questions I ask are not only for the ones doing the investigation; it transcends to the prosecution, to the highest court, and even to the defense lawyers as well – it’s the whole system. In the end, Ron got to really rest, and I pray that he was really able to do just that...For Dennis Fritz, I am glad that he was able to bounce back.