Nonfiction Review: Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey

Title: Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions

Author: John Grisham and Jim McCloskey

Year published: 2024

Category: Adult nonfiction

Pages: 368 pages

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Location: (my 2024 Google Reading map): USA (VA, MS, PA, MO, LA, TX, GA)

Summary: John Grisham is known worldwide for his bestselling novels, but it’s his real-life passion for justice that led to his work with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, the first organization dedicated to exonerating innocent people who have been wrongly convicted. Together they offer an inside look at the many injustices in our criminal justice system.

A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty, there is very little room to prove doubt. These ten true stories shed light on Americans who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount the dramatic hard-fought battles for exoneration. They take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and corruption in the court system that can make them so hard to reverse.

Impeccably researched and told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of winning freedom when the battle already seems lost and the deck is stacked against you.

Review: I really didn't read enough nonfiction this year so I thought one more would be good before we finish 2024. I enjoy John Grisham's fiction and wanted to see how he did with this interesting nonfiction topic. And social justice is an interest of mine.

This is the sort of book that makes the reader angry. At homicide detectives. At prosecutors. At judges. At juries and at the judicial system in general that supports incompetence. So many innocent people are thrown in jail based on coercion, withheld evidence, and outright lies. What a waste of time, money, and innocent people's lives.

I like that this book covers ten different stores so that the reader gets a sense of the broad swath that is this problem. Rather than just hearing one story where we can say "oh, that's an anomaly," there are ten. And where there are ten, there are more. This book establishes a pattern of law enforcement wanting/needing to quickly close cases (and I do understand that) so they focus in on the first obvious suspect and become blind to the evidence presented that should take them in a different direction.

I know that there are many good detectives, judges, etc out there who care about their work, and want to find the correct perpetrators. However, there are far too many who rush to judgement with devastating consequences for the victim's families, the innocent and their families.

Challenges for which this counts:

• Nonfiction--True Crime and published in 2024