'The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town,' by John Grisham - Review - Books (original) (raw)

Books of the Times

Grisham Takes On the Mystery of Reality

Oct. 9, 2006

John Grisham’s new book is about a momentous occurrence in the history of small, sleepy, apparently justice-averse Ada, Okla. Here’s what the big event was: Mr. Grisham came to town.

He arrived to do research for his first nonfiction book, “The Innocent Man.” He had been drawn to Ada by the Dec. 9, 2004, obituary of Ronald Keith Williamson. Mr. Williamson had been tried for murder, wrongly convicted and later exonerated. Dennis Fritz, a friend of Mr. Williamson’s, had also been tried, convicted and exonerated for the same killing of a 21-year-old woman.

By amazing coincidence, the identical fishy and (as a judge would eventually rule) indefensible legal tactics, including reliance on dreams in place of concrete evidence and giving credence to the testimony of jailhouse snitches, had also figured in a separate murder investigation. This one involved another young female victim and two more men, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot. Both were convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where they remain.

Ada is known for growing pecans and then cracking and crushing even the toughest nuts into small pieces. That’s a fine metaphor for the way its legal system works, but it is not Mr. Grisham’s. Its source is “The Dreams of Ada,” a gripping 1987 nonfiction book about the Ward-Fontenot case by Robert Mayer. Mr. Grisham draws heavily on that book and acknowledges an obvious debt. A new edition of “The Dreams of Ada” will be published this month with a hefty, helpful Grisham blurb on its front cover.

Here is the difference between these two authors: Mr. Mayer presents a quietly persuasive portrait of the prosecutorial atmosphere that he calls (in a new coda about the Williamson-Fritz case) “Kafka in Oklahoma.” Mr. Grisham has a more Olympian ability to hurl thunderbolts. His book inflicts a plague of vipers upon the head of Bill Peterson, the Ada district attorney who led both these investigations and is still in office. Let’s just say it will be no fun to be Mr. Peterson starting tomorrow, when “The Innocent Man” goes on sale.

But Mr. Grisham’s clout in Ada has more to do with his celebrity than with his nonfiction writing style. Compared with other works in its genre, “The Innocent Man” is less spectacular than sturdy. It is a reminder not only of how propulsively Mr. Grisham’s fiction is constructed but of how difficult it is to make messy reality behave in clear, streamlined fashion.

So “The Innocent Man” begins by describing the disappearance of Mr. Williamson’s and Mr. Fritz’s supposed victim from the parking lot of the nightclub where she worked. (She was later found dead at her home.) By the time he has written 13 pages, Mr. Grisham has introduced 22 witnesses, relatives, law officers and forensic experts, with many more to come.

If it takes a while for Ron Williamson to appear, the reason is clear in Mr. Grisham’s mind: Mr. Williamson had no direct connection to the crime. The book describes the tortured process by which Mr. Williamson, with a reputation for being drunk, moody and troublesome, eventually caught the interest of the police.

Although this process amounts to a litany of legal outrages, its effect is primarily very sad. Mr. Williamson was an aspiring baseball star whose career was ruined by the time he was 24. “Man, you’re gonna die in the minors,” he was once nastily told by his hero, Reggie Jackson. That was Mr. Williamson’s closest brush with baseball stardom.

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John GrishamCredit...Lynne Brubaker

The book provides much evidence of Mr. Williamson’s mental deterioration. His behavior becomes wildly erratic. His substance abuse heightens. His habits turn increasingly peculiar. (At one point he refuses to discuss anything unrelated to presidents of the United States.) Meanwhile Mr. Grisham brings his extensive legal expertise to the job of being dumbfounded by what he describes as the law’s systematic flouting of Mr. Williamson’s rights and by the sadistic manipulation of his paranoia.

In the face of such flagrant abuse of a suspect, Mr. Grisham has a hard time keeping sarcasm at bay. Of the terrible circumstances surrounding the death of Mr. Williamson’s mother, and that he was kept shackled even at her funeral, the author writes: “Such precautions were obviously needed for a felon who forged a $300 check.” (At that point the murder charge had not been brought against him.)

Far worse than her son’s humiliation is that Mr. Williamson’s mother died thinking that she had proved to the police that her son was home watching videos with her on the night of Debbie Carter’s murder. Though her lawyer said he watched her make this statement to a police detective, a video camera apparently failed to record what she said. No evidence of it surfaced in the legal proceedings that followed.

“The Innocent Man” is plural, despite its title. It is about “four men, four average white guys from good families, all chewed up and abused by the system and locked away for a combined total of 33 years.” This is a lot for a nonfiction narrative to juggle, and this book sometimes strains under the burden of so much grim, frustrating data. Mr. Grisham’s report on the construction of an underground, completely daylight-deprived prison provides the most egregious chamber of horrors in a book that is figuratively full of them.

Every now and then “The Innocent Man” provides a tangible reminder of Mr. Grisham’s novels. Take Barney Ward, Mr. Williamson’s court-appointed lawyer, who sounds as if he walked right out of Grisham fiction. This is Mr. Ward’s first death penalty case. He is a wildly colorful character. He is also blind; and just as the case pivots on forensic evidence that requires visual examination, his assistant leaves him in the lurch. Mr. Ward’s relationship with Mr. Williamson is so edgy that Mr. Ward’s son is poised to tackle the client physically should trouble arise.

If this were fiction, Mr. Ward would triumph. And he’d do it in style. But he neglected to use crucial evidence that could have helped his client. Mr. Williamson was eventually assigned a different lawyer. His vindication was bittersweet at best. The process that finally brought him justice could not bring him peace.

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