In his first work of nonfiction, author John Grisham tells the story of Ron Williamson, an Oklahoma man who was wrongfully accused of murder and sent to death row for a crime which he did not commit. Williamson's co-defendant in the case, a long-time friend of his named Dennis Fritz, was also cleared of wrongdoing after a similar ordeal. Their liberation came with the advent of DNA testing in the early Nineties; the two were finally exonerated in 1999, after twelve years in prison when DNA tests on crime scene evidence excluded them as possible suspects.
Williamson's tragic story begins in 1971, when he graduated high school. After a meteoric rise to local fame as a high-school baseball player, he was drafted by the Oakland A's, and left his hometown of Ada Oklahoma with his sights set on a career in the Major Leagues. Unfortunately, the career that he envisioned for himself was not to be. By 1977, after nearly six years of working his way up in the minors, he injured his pitching arm, and was forced to abandon his hopes of playing professionally.
He then returned to Ada feeling defeated and severely depressed. Once he was home again, his mood grew steadily worse, and his behavior more and more erratic. He began to exhibit signs of mental illness, and was eventually diagnosed as both bipolar and schizophrenic. His family later realized that he had been exhibiting signs of mental illness since childhood, but they had failed to recognize them as such, because they had not been educated about the symptoms and signs of mental illness. He sought treatment for a brief time, but as is common with these type of mental conditions, he would stop once stabilized, not realizing that continuous treatment was needed to maintain stability.
The combination of his mental condition, coupled with the depression over his lost career completely destroyed his self-esteem, sending him into a downward spiral of booze, drugs, and casual sex. His behavior led him to be arrested several times for public drunkenness and DUI. During this time, he was also convicted of forgery, when he phonied the signature on a check to support his habits. He received a two year sentence, of which he served ten months. After being released he was unable to hold a job, so he moved back in with his mother, and his mood continued to deteriorate until he was barely able to function, and would often sleep for eighteen to twenty hours a day. His every waking hour was spent in front of the television.
With the exception of brief periods during which he sought treatment and was properly medicated, this was his existence for the next few years. Then in December of 1982, a local girl named Debbie Carter was raped and murdered. After a year of trying to solve the case with little to show for their efforts, police were desperate. With his prior arrest record, and given the fact that his often erratic behavior had earned him a reputation as a “loose cannon” of sorts, Williamson had become well-known to police; they considered him a trouble maker. They began looking for any connection, no matter how seemingly insignificant, that would tie him to the murder. Along the way, they compiled a case based mostly on circumstantial evidence, junk science, and the testimony of jailhouse snitches.
From the beginning, Williamson maintained his innocence, even producing a diary entry from his mother's own journals which proved that he was at home with her on the night of the murder. But the police were undeterred. The more that Williamson resisted, the more damning evidence they invented to trap him into a confession. Long story short, he was arrested and eventually convicted, and all of this based on the flimsiest threads of “evidence.”
I can't really say much more without giving away the entire story, but suffice to say that Grisham's book is an eye-opener. It will surely shake one's faith in the legal system to say the least. The glaring examples of injustice are shocking; the abuse of power by law enforcement, the torture-like tactics used to obtain confession, the mishandling and manipulation of evidence, and the inept ignorance on the part of prosecutors will leave you with your jaw agape in stunned disbelief that anything this appalling could happen in America. If you truly believe that there are no innocent people in prison, you'd better think again, because this outrageous miscarriage of justice certainly proves otherwise!
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