John Grisham on his new book about the wrongfully convicted and how he himself has been falsely accused

Bestselling novelist and former lawyer John Grisham made his name writing tense courtroom thrillers, where the drama turns on legal intrigue and protagonists determined to get to the truth. These themes run through his new non-fiction book, “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.”
Grisham, former Democratic member of the House of Representatives for Mississippi, wrote “Framed” with Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey-based non-profit that works to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners serving life sentences or facing the death penalty.
The authors each wrote five case-study-based chapters for “Framed.” It’s hard to comprehend how thoroughly the justice system messed with the 22 men and one woman profiled, all wrongfully accused and convicted before finally being released. Not everyone was compensated for lost years. Some of the cases are still unsolved.
McCloskey and Grisham describe cases in which police with tunnel vision fixated on the wrong person and found ways to make the evidence fit. There are coerced confessions, jailhouse informants rewarded for lying with reduced sentences, and bogus experts who testified to suit a prosecution’s agenda.
Grisham said for him, these true accounts are just as compelling as fiction.
“With the amount of suffering, drama, injustice, pain, loss, but also perseverance and redemption and sometimes a happy ending, they’re just great stories,” Grisham told the Star from his home in Virginia. “Anytime you have great suffering, you have great stories, sad as they are, fiction or non-fiction, and so the material is just there.”
Grisham, author of “The Firm,” “The Runaway Jury” and more than 50 other books, has written one other non-fiction title, “The Innocent Man.” Published in 2006, it’s the story of one-time minor-league baseball player Ron Williamson, who was wrongfully convicted of murder.
The author said “The Innocent Man” took him into the world of wrongful convictions, and he’s still there, sitting on the boards of Centurion Ministries and the Innocence Project.
Known for being able to write a bestseller in about a year, Grisham initially swore off non-fiction after the laborious, 18-month process of research and writing “The Innocent Man.”
“I held to that for a long time. But these stories kept piling up and I had the idea for a long time about writing more innocence stories in a much shorter format,” Grisham said. He asked McCloskey to join the project and write about Centurion Ministries cases.
Grisham is halfway through his next novel, an as-yet-untitled “old-fashioned murder mystery with a courtroom setting.” In typical Grisham fashion, it’s due out next year.
As a former member of the House, what do you think the election of Donald Trump brings from a legal standpoint?
It’s just so hard to predict what might happen because you’re dealing with unpredictable people — and certainly the commander in chief and God knows what he’s going to try…. What distresses me is the work to reform the criminal justice system that I care about is going to be shoved aside because the commander in chief doesn’t care, and his attorney general won’t have any sympathy for reform. They’re gonna try to kill all the guys on federal death row. They did last time. And that’s probably getting cranked up pretty soon. It’s going to be a new sensational issue or fight every week.
Did you come up against wrongful convictions when you were practising law?
I never thought about wrongful convictions until I stopped practising in 1990 after 10 years, and I got excited about “The Innocent Man” 14 years later. I just found this one story. It was a true story, and I could not get to sleep at night and so I took off to Oklahoma and did the research for 18 months and that’s how it got started.
Do you still have faith in the justice system?
Yeah, but the faith has been diminished. I had faith when I was a lawyer trying cases in courtrooms in front of juries. I thought the juries almost always got it right. I’m not so sure now. There are just too many wrongful convictions. And you read these cases, and you see what the police and prosecutors do and how they hoodwink the jurors. A lot of jurors are not that sophisticated. They’re easy to fool and so you get bad verdicts. In all the exonerations that we’ve had — over 3,000 in the past 30 years — virtually every one of them started with a jury, with a guilty verdict and a person off to prison. Then it takes years to unwind it. It’s very difficult.
Several convictions in the book involve a false confession. Why do innocent people confess?
People don’t believe you would confess to a horrible crime. But people have not been subjected to 15 hours of abusive interrogation tactics by the police, and they can break down anybody — especially if you’re young, you’re not that well educated. Maybe you’re a minority and you’re facing this system. People confess to things that they didn’t do, and in almost every case, they recant the next morning. It never works.
Once you confess and they’ve got you on camera in the police station, it’s going to be shown to the jury. Judges do not have the backbone to suppress that. It goes to the jury and the jury always believes it. The appellate courts always believe it. There’s never any relief in the appellate courts once you confess falsely to a crime.
In many of these stories, the accused waives the right to a lawyer during police questioning. Why?
It’s a human phenomenon. Eighty per cent of innocent people waive their rights because they are so eager to help the police prove they are innocent. They have no idea where the police are coming from.
You write about people like pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, the Cadaver King, characters who seem like fictional figures.
The Cadaver King roamed the courtrooms of Mississippi for about 25 years in the late ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s. He became very well known amongst lawyers. He was a slick operator. He had a big vocabulary; he had a nice suit, and he was a professional testifier. He would tell the jury whatever the prosecutor wanted him to tell the jury to support the prosecution’s theory of guilt. We don’t know how many innocent people they put away. They sent several to death row. Almost all of them were exonerated or pulled off death row. 
Do people find it hard to believe this went on?
It’s fascinating. When Jim and I were writing the book, he wrote his five and I wrote my five, and we didn’t interfere with each other’s writing. We would finish the story and send it off to our editor in New York and every time the reaction was the same: “You got to be kidding.”
You say in the source notes that while Jim McClosky lived these stories, you relied on the work of others to write yours. Some reports think you took too liberally from published sources. Are you concerned?
It concerns me if people make those allegations. When you write non-fiction, especially investigative non-fiction, you have to rely on the work of others. All these cases are famous. We thanked and credited and sourced and acknowledged all the people. And now someone’s made an allegation we got too close to their work, and I was accused of poaching their work. Well, you know, I’m not guilty. I’m not liable. But see for yourself. Both stories have been published.
This interview has been edited and condensed.