Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey
John Grisham has teamed with Jim McCloskey, a long-time activist with the Centurion Ministries organisation working to exonerate innocent prisoners, to produce Framed, ‘astonishing true stories of wrongful convictions’. They each present five stories, told alternately, all of them horrendous travesties of justice.
They are accounts of police bullying and forced confessions, where the suspect is so badgered that he just wants to confess in order to end the ordeal. Police can lie, they can tell the suspect his friends have implicated him, or that his lie detector test showed him guilty, or that they have evidence putting him at the scene of the crime, anything to make the suspect cave in and confess. Most appalling is where so-called experts are called in to provide the necessary evidence required to impress a jury, bamboozling them with pseudo-science. One particular team of forensic ‘experts’ made a substantial business out of showcasing incriminating evidence for a fee.
These are all American cases, where the police decide to follow their own particular hunch, discarding or hiding evidence that doesn’t support their theory, in the drive to get their man. Racism plays a part, and class prejudice, but the selected stories present a variety of cases, where the convicted are black, and white, and the occasional woman. All serve lengthy sentences, wasting away their lives in prison, before there is any chance of exoneration.
The cases are told in a factual unembellished style drawn from police reports, witness statements and trial proceedings. In some cases the police framing is so ridiculous it would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly serious, the consequences for the accused so soul destroying. It can be hard to keep reading the stories. But they serve a necessary purpose, shining a light on miscarriages of justice. They would be important reading for anyone considering police or legal work, a warning to not make the same failures of judgement, the same blinkered decisions, but to keep an open mind, remembering that people’s lives are in the balance.
Whilst the stories are all American, the lessons are relevant to other jurisdictions. LexisNexis recently published an infographic highlighting 6 famous Australian cases where the failures of forensic science has led to wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice. See the Appeal site for similar cases in the UK. Centurion Ministries continues its work in the United States.
Themes: Crime, Wrongful convictions, Police corruption, Fabrication of evidence, Persecution, Racism.
Helen Eddy