“Framed: The Surprising True Story of a Wrongful Conviction” by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey (Doubleday) and “The Sing Sing File: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men” by Dan Slepian. 20 Years of Fighting for Justice” (Celadon)
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It is painful to read the stories of people who were wrongly convicted, forgotten, gradually abandoned, and victims of an overreaching criminal justice system.
“Framed” is Grisham’s second foray into nonfiction, and his storytelling skills are on full display here. Mr. McCloskey is the founder of Centurion Ministries, which works to free the wrongfully convicted. “The Sing Sing Files” focuses on six men incarcerated in a notorious New York prison.
Both books detail in detail the process that led to the conviction and imprisonment of each of the men they focus on. While Framed is more clinical and carefully constructs the stories of people who have been wrongfully imprisoned, Slepian’s book is a more compelling and emotionally moving work than the other two. It vividly highlights the unimaginable suffering of people and their families.
He describes one prisoner as follows: “The frustration and anger seemed to radiate off of him like heat.”
Grisham and McCloskey present 10 unrelated cases from around the country. Slepian focuses on how the pursuit of one wrongful conviction led to an examination of five others.
Slepian cited figures suggesting that of the approximately 2 million people locked up in American jails and jails, there remain an additional 100,000 innocent people. America leads the world in the number of people incarcerated.
As the authors explain, a combination of factors led us to this unfortunate situation. These include pressure to close cases, neglect by police and prosecutors, outright fabrication of evidence, confirmation bias, and a tendency to ignore information that doesn’t fit our new theories. Fake “experts” swayed jurors. The jurors succumbed to pressure from other jurors. The judge refused a new trial. The Innocence Project, cited in Slepian’s book, estimates that prosecutors’ reliance on prison informants is factored into one in five wrongful convictions. We the people, he writes, have not summoned the “collective will to hold those in power accountable.”
All three authors are credited with illustrating these judicial system failures, but readers are left wondering if some of the police, prosecutors, and judges depicted here are the real villains. you will notice.
But most of the blame for a failed system must lie with us, Grisham writes. “Virtually all wrongful convictions could be avoided if we, as a society, had the political courage to change unfair laws, practices and procedures.”
Well, maybe.
So far, those who have emerged as heroes are defense attorneys who work for free, sometimes for years, to secure justice for people who lack the resources to hire a lawyer to advance their cases. Tachida. In the cases described in these two books, the authors themselves deserve great credit for persevering in their quest to free innocent people.
It is disheartening that this topic is not the subject of a presidential campaign, and clearly is not a big deal to my fellow Americans. But for Slepian, investigating wrongful imprisonment cases is central to his job as an NBC News producer. He wrote that the sheer number of such cases is part of the “tragic consequences of America’s system of mass incarceration.”
And for him personally, he writes, pursuing these cases is more than a journalistic pursuit, it’s part of his “duty as a human being.”
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