The Innocent Man
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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 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. He was sentenced to Death Row (Fritz, meanwhile, was given a life sentence). Ironically, Fritz's own wife was 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 The Innocence Project, exposed several glaring lacunae in the prosecution's case and the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses. Betts v. Brady, 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 the death row, Williamson and Fritz were finally exonerated by DNA evidence, and released in 1999.
Ron Williamson suffered deep and irreversible psychological scars during his incarceration and eventual wait on death row. 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). However, the state never treated him. The State of Oklahoma never admitted its error, and even threatened to re-arrest him.
Another criminal from Ada, Glen Gore, was eventually convicted of the original crime and was Sentenced to Life in Prison without Parole.
Williamson and Fritz sued and won a large settlement in 2003 from the City of Ada. By 2004, Williamson was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, and died soon thereafter on December 4, 2004 in Broken Arrow, Tulsa County, Oklahoma, nursing home. Dennis Fritz, meanwhile, returned to Kansas City, where he lives with his daughter, Elizabeth to this day. 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 under the Oklahoma 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 Tour
Grisham is currently on a book tour trying to drum up attention for the issue of wrongful conviction.
[edit] Edition
- Doubleday, ISBN 0385517238 (hardbound)
[edit] Future film
Warner Independent Pictures and Smoke House partners, George Clooney and Grant Heslov, have optioned the book. Though specifics about the deal are still being worked out, at this stage it appears that Clooney and Heslov are the sole producers.
[edit] External links
http://www.virginiainterfaithcenter.org/media/TheInnocentMan.pdf
| John Grisham's novels (as of 2006) | |
|---|---|
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1980s: A Time to Kill |
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| Non-Fiction | |
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2000s: The Innocent Man |
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