The Innocent Man is about a miscarriage
of justice in Ada, Oklahoma, wherein several
innocent men who were sent to death row,
where they spent 11 years until freed by DNA
evidence. With the number of people being
freed in recent years due to DNA evidence, it
becomes clear that all too often, people are
convicted and sentenced to death more
because they have lost the game than because
they are actually guilty. The police are
under pressure to make a quick arrest, the
DA is under pressure to get a conviction, the
judge is under pressure to be hard on
crime—and so on.
In Grisham's view, Williamson is a mentally
disturbed pro-baseball wash-out who
becomes a subject of interest after the
actual killer suggests to police that the victim was
scared of Ron and asked him for protection.
Dennis Fritz, a middle school science
teacher, attracts the attention of the
police simply by virtue of being Ron's friend. Despite
the lack of eyewitnesses or physical
evidence, the two men are convicted.
When it came to pinning the rape and murder
on someone, Williamson was certainly an
easy target. Ron's drinking problem began in
high school and, when his baseball career
unraveled, alcohol, drugs, and struggles
with depression made it impossible for him to
hold a job or to move on with his life. So
when the baffled investigators and prosecutors
in Ada decided that the crime was so brutal
that it had to involve two people, Ron and
his running buddy Dennis Fritz were "chosen"
as the crime's most logical perpetrators.
Now all they needed was the evidence to
convict the two innocent men and cover
themselves in glory as great crime fighters.
There was no evidence to be found,
however, something that did very little to
slow down the police investigators or the local
prosecutor who had already decided that
Fritz and Williamson were guilty. A
combination of creatively coerced
"confessions," testimony from local lowlifes (one who
was later to be convicted of the very crime
in question), sloppy testimony from experts, a
judge who proved his own incompetence, and
lies suggested to, and regurgitated by,
jailhouse snitches, managed to convict both
the men.
Williamson was intermittently treated for
manic depression, personality disorders,
alcoholism and mild schizophrenia. It was
later proven that he was indeed mentally ill
(and hence unfit to be either tried or
placed on death row in the first place).
Many of us at NAMI are proponents of social
justice. Some of us have family members
in the legal system. I personally found that
this book hits close to home especially with
the attitudes of some prosecutors always
feeling they are right despite overwhelming
evidence to the contrary. I recommend
reading this book. It is well-written and will make
you angry about the injustice in the legal
system, especially the ones that pertain to the
mentally ill.
