A true tale told in the John Grisham manner

AS a novelist, John Grisham had an advantage in turning his hand to nonfiction for the first time in “The Innocent Man.” He knows how to tell a story swiftly and cleanly; he knows that we want to read about people’s lives, not just about the ills of the U.S. justice system. So he keeps his focus tightly on the two men, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, who were convicted of raping and killing a 21-year-old cocktail waitress, Debra Sue Carter, in Ada, Okla., in 1982.

In Grisham’s telling, Williamson was hardly a model citizen. A former high school baseball star who never got over his failure to make the major leagues, he had been acquitted of two previous rape charges. He was a moocher and a noisy drunk who couldn’t hold a job and displayed symptoms of manic depression and schizophrenia. He had become, in short, a likely suspect. In Ada, pop. 16,000, only members of Williamson’s family saw much amiss when he was found guilty in 1988 and sentenced to death.

Nor did Oklahoma’s appellate courts find anything wrong with his trial, though the prosecution’s case, as Grisham describes it, was a flimsy assemblage of junk science (including microscopic comparisons of hairs that Williamson’s attorney, a blind man, was unable to challenge), testimony by jailhouse snitches and a coerced confession in which a dream of the defendant’s was presented as his actual memory of the crime.

Williamson spent a decade on Oklahoma’s death row in McAlester, Okla., first in a crumbling old building with vile food and no heating or air conditioning, later in a “modern” underground facility with cramped cells and no natural light or fresh air. Already mentally unstable, he became psychotic and suicidal yet received little treatment because authorities reckoned he would be dying soon anyway.

In 1994, Williamson came within five days of death by lethal injection before he was granted a stay of execution.

As for Fritz, the evidence against him was even slimmer. He received a life sentence, Grisham says, simply because he was an acquaintance of Williamson’s and had a similar record of petty crime. Detectives theorized that Carter’s injuries and the damage to her apartment pointed to two assailants, not one: “They needed another suspect. Fritz was their man.”

In 1999, DNA evidence finally cleared Williamson and Fritz and pointed to the real killer, whom police had inexplicably ignored, although he was the last person seen with the victim. Before that, a hard-nosed but fair-minded federal judge, Frank H. Seay, had spotted the problems the state courts missed and ordered a new trial. A shattered man, Williamson was released without apology or compensation and died five years later at 51.

Researching this book, Grisham says, “exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions, something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in the country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same -- bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.”

But isn’t there more to it than that? From a nonfiction book, we expect a diagnosis as well as a story. If wrongful convictions in the United States are common -- and the new tool of DNA testing indicates they haven’t been rare -- then why is this so, and what should we do about it? Grisham is critical of individuals like the trial judge, the prosecutor and the Ada police, about whom all that can be said is that they railroaded Williamson and Fritz but didn’t frame them: They sincerely believed the two were guilty. But Grisham skimps on historical context.

Grisham does observe how eager Oklahoma was to implement the death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court re-legalized it in 1976, but he doesn’t point to the tough-on-crime rhetoric triggered by the race riots of the 1960s, the drug scourges of the 1970s and 1980s, punitive trends in penology and the popularity of rule-bending cop heroes like Dirty Harry or “24’s” Jack Bauer. Congress recently approved a bill denying habeas corpus rights to terror suspects -- and it was a habeas corpus petition by Williamson’s lawyers, read by members of Judge Seay’s staff, that gave him his first real chance at justice. If due process is under siege in America, it isn’t just in small towns.

No, Grisham is still a novelist at heart, and what we take from “The Innocent Man” is the story and the people -- the functionaries here and there in the legal system who spoke up just in time; the other innocent convicts whose cases appear on the periphery; Williamson’s sisters, Annette Hudson and Renee Simmons, who never stopped supporting him even after he had gone crazy; and Williamson himself, emerging from his ordeal gray and toothless, unable to avoid bars and strip clubs, stay on his medication or live by himself, but clinging to a stubborn, twilit dignity.

Michael Harris is a book critic and the author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon.”