By Ann W. Parks

Attorney and best-selling author John Grisham speaks in Georgetown Law’s Hart Auditorium February 23

Grisham being interviewed by Dean Aleinikoff for On Point @ Georgetown Law.

When attorney and best-selling author John Grisham happened to pick up the New York Times one morning in December 2004, he found a story as compelling as any of the 18 novels he’d written at the time. It was the obituary of a man who, in 1988, had been convicted of a brutal murder he didn’t commit — and who had come within five days of being executed for the crime.

“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,’” Grisham recalled. To make things even more intriguing, Williamson had been a baseball star in his youth, a kid who made it to the minor leagues and was supposed to be the next Mickey Mantle. “I said, this is a story, this is my next book.”

Grisham spoke to a packed house in Georgetown Law’s Hart Auditorium on February 23, explaining the story behind his only nonfiction book, The Innocent Man. He appeared at the Law Center as part of the school’s Criminal Justice Reform Month programs, thanks to Rachel Cohen (L’10) and the Georgetown Law chapter of the Innocence Project, a national litigation and policy organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted through DNA testing and investigation work. Grisham is a member of the national Innocence Project’s board of directors.

The Innocent Man, published in 2006, describes Williamson’s conviction for the 1982 murder of a young woman in Ada, Oklahoma — and his 11 years on death row for the crime. Williamson and co-defendant Dennis Fritz were exonerated and released from prison in April 1999, after Fritz contacted the Innocence Project’s founders, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufield, for help.

Fritz, Grisham noted, has been one of the lucky few who has been able to survive a wrongful conviction and exoneration. (Fritz has written his own book, Journey Toward Justice, and will speak February 26 at the Law Center in a discussion on the upcoming Supreme Court case District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne.)

Williamson, however, was unable to recover psychologically and died five years after his release of cirrhosis of the liver. During his stay on death row, he came so close to being executed that he was asked by prison authorities what he wanted done with his body once he was dead, Grisham said.

Cohen, who serves as a co-president of Georgetown Law’s Innocence Project, said after the event that the school was very fortunate to have a man of Grisham’s reputation and background speak about such an important and misunderstood issue.

“The Innocent Man … brought the reality of wrongful convictions into the average person’s consciousness,” she said. Even in Grisham’s own work practicing criminal law in America, Cohen noted, he never had to confront the kinds of problems that lead to wrongful convictions, such as false confessions and other forms of unreliable evidence.

“Hearing the story of how his work on The Innocent Man changed his perspective on the criminal justice system is an eye-opening experience for lawyers and future lawyers as well as the general community,” Cohen said.

 

Stranger than fiction

Other writers in Grisham’s shoes, if there are any, might have turned Williamson’s extraordinary story into a best-selling novel, rather than fiction. But, in answer to a student’s question, Grisham said he never considered writing The Innocent Man that way.

“There are so many different layers to the book, and so many unbelievable characters, there’s no way I could create that,” he said. “If I did, no one would believe it.”

Still, at the event and in an earlier interview with the Law Center Dean Alex Aleinikoff, Grisham — who has now published 21 novels — said that he does try to raise awareness of subjects like the death penalty and homelessness in some of his fiction.

“I love the law; I love to study, I love to read about it, I love to follow it, I love to be frustrated by it,” he said, adding that if he can weave a good legal issue through a novel that keeps people up late at night, makes them call in sick from work or skip lunch to read, then that’s a good thing. “When it’s over, they’ve been entertained, but they also, for the first time, start to think about an issue.”

 

The Webcast of this Criminal Justice Reform Month event, which was also sponsored by Goodwin Procter, can be seen at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/webcast/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=708. John Grisham’s interview with Dean Aleinikoff is available at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/onPoint/