The Innocent Man by John Grisham is a page-turner, but it is not a detective story or a sci-fi; it is basically a non-fiction that has a gripping plot. Once you start reading it, you will hurry on till you come to the end of the story.

The author spent a total of 15 months researching the case after he read a report in the New York Times on the passing away of the hero of the book who was wrongly charged with a murder and put on the death row by a court in Okalahoma.

And it tells me for the first time that as much as the Untied States is addicted to the law or the rule of law, an absolutely innocent man could go through the ordeal of a mistrial, could be put behind the bars for many years, and could even have a brush with death penalty before he won his reprieve and was exonerated at the eleventh hour.

Such was the case of Ron William, a young athletic man from a small town called Ada in Oklahoma whose dream was to become a big-league baseball player. Thanks to the support of his family, his dream did come true when he signed with the Oakland A’s in 1971. He was even picked by the Yankees of New York and played some games for it. But Ron’s dream turned out to be short-lived: not long after he started to play as a pro, he injured his shoulder. Like most other players, he thought it would be all right soon. But his luck was not with him: he was soon let go.

While playing for the league, Ron developed an addiction to beer. It is hard to say whether this addiction led to his failure, or his failure lead to his addiction; but one can be sure that he returned to his hometown almost a wreck both physically and mentally. He suffered from severe depression and bi-polar disorder, sometimes very depressed and sometimes maniac. For a long time, however, he continued to believe in his sober moments that one day the bell in his home would ring and some scouting agent for a big-league team would invite him again to play. In the meantime, he spent much of his time in the bars, singing, playing the guitar – he was a pretty good guitar player, dancing with girls, and, of course, drinking tons of beer. The girls could be waitresses or strip-teasers.

And so, when Debra Sue Carter, a twenty-one-year-old cocktail waitress, was raped and murdered in her three-room apartment, Ron became a ready suspect along with a friend of his, named Dennis Fritz: the murderers had left some words on the wall hinting that it was two, not one, that had committed the crime.

The local police did an haphazard job of investigation, the lab technicians made use of junk science, and the prosecution, represented by the now Oklahoma attorney general Priest, trusted the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts – for instance, what a convict who happened to sleep next-door to Ron said that he had heard him talk in his dream about how he had raped and murdered Debra – and on top of that, the judge who presided over the case was careless in his work. And that’s enough for Ron to be imprisoned for 14 years, transported from one prison to another, altogether 13 or 14 of them, in the meantime being subjected to all manner of insults, ridicules, tortures along with incredibly bad and insufficient food, which caused his early death at the age of 53 (?).

Being a Chinese, I believe that many of the policemen, the detectives, and the prosecutor involved in the case of Ron and Dennis, who was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment, employed all the wrong methods and tools in order to have the jury reach the verdict of guilty and hand down death sentence. Their methods and tools are all too familiar with those of us Chinese who experienced the Cultural Revolution in 1966-76, when lots and lots of people, especially intellectuals were persecuted to death. They included notably obtaining confessions by extortion and establishing them as evidence （逼供信）. Conspicuously, what the prosecutor Priest did was first to reach the conclusion and then try to find evidence to support it.and poor job of the police, the insolent attitude of the prosecutor and his arbitrary decision, and the perfunctory and sloppy work of the judge.

To be frank, I didn’t think that was possible in the United States, but now I have to realize that even in this great country, a nightmarish mistrial can happen on account of the “lazy” ^[1]

According to the author, the many glaring discrepancies in the testimonies at the court, all arranged by the prosecutor, could have been readily detected, especially by those district and federal judges whose job was to review the case when Ron appealed the sentence, including the death sentence. (All death sentences in the US are automatically appealed.) Twice the case reached the Supreme Court, but somehow, twice the appeal was dismissed and the verdict maintained. (I can only assume that the Supreme Court had far too many cases to handle, and so it summarily dismissed the appeal Ron’s lawyer submitted.)

Luckily for Ron and Dennis, there was a group of federal judges who, when reviewing the case of Ron, decided to give Ron a re-trial on the ground that they had found the past verdict of death sentence not solidly supported by evidence. And in the re-trial, Ron was declared a free man. But while he proposed to drop the charges against Ron, the former prosecutor Priest did not admit he had made a mistake, nor did he say a word of apology to Ron and Dennis, whether in private or in public.

The story of Ron and Dennis became the focus of media for a time. They appeared in an interview of CBS, which reported the story in its popular program of 60 Minutes on a Sunday evening.

At the time, however, the case of murder was not yet solved because the murderer was not yet prosecuted. As a result, Ron and Dennis continued to live in fear of a nightly knock on their doors by the police: they could be arrested and put back into prison. That’s part of the reason why Ron had relapses of depression and schizophrenia again and again. I feel so sorry for him every time he was having a relapse.

Dennis, a college graduate who had been teaching biology in a high school before his arrest, was wise enough to read thousands of legal cases while in prison: there was a law library in the prison he lived in. And now, in collaboration with Ron, he brought a suit against the state of Oklahoma and many policemen, detectives, prison wardens as well as the prosecutor Priest. Usually, according to the US law, many of them are immune from prosecution. A prosecutor, for instance, cannot be prosecuted if what he does is purely prosecuting; he can be prosecuted only when he is involved in investigation by illegal means. That’s what Priest did, so it was legitimate to bring a legal case against him.

Anyway, the case was settled without going to the court: the state paid Ron and Dennis several million dollars, a number that is never announced.

But no amount of money could make amends for Ron. He had gone through far too many mental ups and downs in the fourteen years when he was kept in prison. He was a long-time psychopath and schizophrenic. Even at 48, he already looked 60 with white hair. His lawyers often couldn’t recognize him after a separation of a few years.

A few years after he was set free, he died of a liver disease.

On the jacket of the audio book that I spent 12.5 hours reading, there is this passage:

“If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this audiobook will shock you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this audiobook will infuriate you.”

How true that statement is!