Grisham and Jim McCloskey tell 10 gripping and galling tales of the wrongly convicted
Review by Mark Whitaker
October 17, 2024 at 4:23 p.m. EDT
Twenty years ago, John Grisham had already written more than a dozen best-selling legal thrillers when he came across a newspaper obituary that he thought had the stuff of a novel. Ron Williamson was a high school baseball star from rural Oklahoma who, after failing a minor league tryout with the Oakland Athletics, returned home to live with his mother and was convicted of murdering a local waitress. Williamson was sentenced to death row and came within five days of being executed before a stay opened the way to DNA testing of evidence taken from the victim’s body that proved he wasn’t the killer. Grisham spent several years researching and writing a book about the case, “The Innocent Man” (2006), which was later developed into a Netflix series. Grisham then returned to his routine of publishing crowd-pleasing fiction at a clip of a book per year.
Grisham’s first foray into nonfiction, however, caught the eye of a pioneer in a growing movement devoted to appealing wrongful convictions. Jim McCloskey, a former U.S. naval officer and corporate management consultant, had given up that career to earn a divinity degree and found an organization called Centurion Ministries, which sought to win freedom for the unjustly imprisoned. In 2009, McCloskey invited Grisham to deliver a speech at a Centurion gala, leading to a friendship and to a novel, “The Guardians,” with a hero modeled after McCloskey. Grisham, embracing his new sideline as an exoneration activist, also joined the board of the Innocence Project, founded by crusading attorneys Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck.
Now Grisham and McCloskey have teamed up to bring us “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.” There are 10 stories in all, half appearing under each author’s byline. Grisham’s five are characteristically page-turning retellings of cases previously reported by newspaper and magazine journalists, all of whom he credits. McCloskey’s stories are all ones in which Centurion Ministries got involved, and what they lack, by comparison, in narrative drive, they make up for with inside detail and nuance. Yet what makes this book important reading isn’t the shock value advertised in the title. It’s the exposure of the infuriating, recurrent factors involved in so many unrighteous convictions.
Systematic racial bias is only one of them. When a visiting player went missing from a high school girls’ volleyball tournament in Conroe, Tex., in 1980, two janitors found her naked, strangled body stuffed in a storage loft above the school auditorium. Police quickly made up their minds that the janitors themselves — one White, one Black — were the culprits. “One of you two is gonna hang for this,” a White officer warned them. Turning to the Black janitor, Clarence Brandley, the cop added, “Since you’re the [racial slur], you’re elected.”
A county prosecutor named Jim Keeshan took charge of the case and began coercing testimony and spinning evidence to portray the crime as the “act of a beast,” as he put it to an all-White jury, which took only 45 minutes to sentence Brandley to death. The execution was delayed, however, when Texas journalists began reporting on Keeshan’s alleged misconduct, giving Brandley’s brother time to seek help from McCloskey after he saw him on the “Today” show. Centurion Ministries provided investigative and financial assistance that led to Brandley’s exoneration, after 10 years on death row. Previously suppressed evidence pointed to his innocence and to a new suspect.
An even more common denominator is the role of unscrupulous cops and prosecutors often driven to prove early hunches at any cost. In the infamous case of the Norfolk Four, retold by Grisham, the bad guy was a police detective named Glenn Ford, and his targets were White. After a White woman named Michelle Bosko was raped and killed in an apartment building near the U.S. naval base at Norfolk in 1995, Ford became convinced that a group of sailors had committed the crime. In a series of long, hectoring interrogations, he got four of the sleep-deprived suspects to confess.
Meanwhile, Ford neglected to pursue a local Black drifter named Omar Ballard to whom Bosko and her husband had given shelter, without knowing that Ballard had attacked another White woman in the area. Even once Ballard’s DNA was eventually linked to Bosko’s and he confessed to the murder, Ford continued to spin conspiracies in which Ballard had acted in concert with the sailors. “Detective Ford is scum,” Ballard told a television producer once the case became national news. “He puts words in people’s mouths and won’t stop until you agree. And that’s what those four white guys are guilty of, ‘agreeing.’’’ For all the evidence that Ballard acted alone, it would take almost two decades and the combined efforts of pro bono lawyers, editorial writers and supportive former state attorneys general before Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe finally granted the four convicted sailors full pardons in 2017.
Other stories dramatize the role that shady expert witnesses and jailhouse snitches often play in wrongful convictions. In one heartbreaking case earlier reported by David Grann for the New Yorker, Grisham tells the story of a Texas father named Todd Willingham who was executed by lethal injection in 2004 after being convicted of arson and the murder of his three young daughters. The case turned on testimony from a prison informant who got a leniency deal, and a thinly credentialed fire investigator who built a theory of arson around a blaze that later experts deemed accidental.
All 10 stories also illustrate the extraordinary lengths to which authorities will go to avoid admitting error, either out of embarrassment or determination to avoid financial settlements. In a particularly galling example, McCloskey tells the story of Kerry Max Cook, an unlucky visitor to Tyler, Tex., in 1977 who was convicted of the murder and mutilation of a librarian named Linda Jo Edwards. In the decades that followed, as evidence mounted that Edwards was killed by a volatile married boss with whom she had an affair, authorities persisted in trying to prove Cook’s guilt and pressured him to plead to lesser charges.
Since becoming widely available in the 1980s, DNA testing has resulted in several hundred exonerations, including of dozens of prisoners on death row. Abuses uncovered in the reinvestigations have increased calls for reforms such as the ones Grisham advocated in an op-ed for The Washington Post in 2021 — including putting restrictions on testimony from jailhouse informants and forensic experts, as well as forcing the police to record their interrogations of suspects from start to finish.
The most troubling question raised by the lengthening trail of wrongful convictions involves the future of the death penalty, as a matter not only of conscience but of probability of error. Just last month, Marcellus Williams, a Black man from Missouri, was executed in the killing of a newspaper reporter named Felicia Gayle in 2001, despite the fact that his DNA didn’t match physical evidence gathered at the crime scene and several of his accusers had suspect motives.
Yet at this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, previous calls for abolishing the death penalty were scrubbed from the party’s platform. As this compelling book illustrates, documenting cases of wrongful conviction that would support such a stand is a long and complicated process. While groups such as Centurion Ministries and the Innocence Project continue that noble work, Democrats are in no mood to make the death penalty a central issue in an election year rife with the kind of knee-jerk judgments and ugly tactics that have led to so many of these miscarriages of justice in the first place.
Mark Whitaker is a former editor of Newsweek. His next book, “The Afterlife of Malcolm X,” to be published in 2025, is about its subject’s far-reaching cultural legacy and includes the story of the long road to exoneration for two men wrongfully convicted of his assassination.
