Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Spring/Summer 2009 - Online Volume 1
Lectures and Events
Author John Grisham on The Innocent Man
Legal bard John Grisham appeared at the Law Center on February 23 as a guest of Georgetown Law’s Innocence Project to discuss his first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man. Grisham, who writes a book a year and has produced 21 novels (all of them bestsellers) since his first, A Time to Kill, was published in 1988, told students how he was inspired to write the book in 2004 after reading an obituary in the New York Times about a man freed from death row five years earlier.
“There was a picture of a man my age, standing in a courtroom in a small town in Oklahoma, and the headline read, ‘Ron Williamson, freed from death row, dies at 51,’” he said, explaining that Williamson, a former small-town baseball star who dreamed of playing in the major leagues, came within five days of being executed for a crime he didn’t commit. “I said, this is a story, this is my next book.”
And it was. The Innocent Man tells the true story of Williamson’s conviction and sentence for the 1982 rape and murder of a young woman in Oklahoma, his life on death row and his eventual exoneration. Williamson was aided by the Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people. Grisham is a member of the organization’s board of directors.
There are currently 235 million Grisham books in print, and they have been translated into 29 languages. Nine of his books have been turned into films, including The Pelican Brief, portions of which were shot in the Georgetown Law Library in 1993.
Grisham, who once dreamed of being a pro athlete himself, clearly enjoyed fielding questions from Georgetown Law students — on everything from the reaction to The Innocent Man to his initial plan to study tax law to the day he sat down with a legal pad to write a book about a rape trial he had seen. The book would eventually become A Time to Kill.
Regarding his fiction, Grisham said he likes to take an issue such as homelessness or the death penalty and “weave a novel around it” — because he is, after all, a lawyer as well as a writer. “[To] craft that book in such a way that it’s still entertaining and people stay up all night to read it, and the pages turn,” he said. “And in doing so, get people to think about an issue — wrongful convictions or judicial elections — for the first time, maybe.”
The Grisham event, sponsored by
Goodwin Procter, was part of Criminal
Justice Reform Month, a series of programs
aimed at educating students about criminal
justice issues and addressing challenges in
the criminal justice system.
Read a Web story about Grisham’s visit.
