In “Framed,” an advocate for the wrongly accused joins forces with John Grisham to tell stories of justice denied.
by Maurice Chammah
Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project and the author of “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.”
Oct. 15, 2024
Jim McCloskey should be a household name. Years before the Innocence Project began showing Americans that their prisons hold countless people who have committed no crime, he was quietly gumshoeing his way through hard, obscure cases. Without him, it’s hard to imagine “Serial” or “Making a Murderer” or the rest of our current wave of prosecution-skeptical nonfiction.
McCloskey left a seminary to do this work, a fascinating path he recounted in the 2020 memoir “When Truth Is All You Have.” Now he has teamed up with the legal thriller virtuoso John Grisham to deliver an anthology with a charmingly dime-store title: “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.” The two each picked five stories of men (regrettably, no women) who found their lives ripped apart by laziness, malice and tunnel vision among the police, prosecutors, jurors and judges.
I hope Grisham’s name helps these stories reach anyone who has not yet reckoned with the “fallibility of our criminal justice system,” as McCloskey diplomatically puts it. And I wish I could say Grisham fully deployed his novelistic gifts. But it’s McCloskey who, having worked the cases he writes about himself, lets his kindness and curiosity deepen his moral call to action.
Clarence Brandley was a Black high school janitor wrongly accused of raping and killing a white female student in 1980 in the East Texas town of Conroe. McCloskey ticks through the town’s history of lynchings, so it lands all the harder when a prosecutor says Brandley possessed “the bestial rage of an animal.” McCloskey came to the case later and writes movingly about how Brandley “never panicked as the clock ticked close to his date of execution,” but struggled to find his footing after he was freed, while the state refused to compensate him.
Along the way, we also meet Bill Srack, a white Republican juror who tried, unsuccessfully, to save Brandley from death row. He wasn’t a civil rights crusader, just a citizen unconvinced by the prosecution. He paid with the loss of a job offer. “In all his life he had never felt so reviled and lonely,” McCloskey writes.
In these tales of villains and victims, McCloskey has a soft spot for the gray guys in the middle. I also keep thinking about James White, a Black assistant minister who witnessed the murder of a Black man — and lied in court about what he had seen to send three innocent white men to prison. Why did he do it?
He was a Black man in Savannah, Ga., where the police had failed to solve too many murders in the Black community. The police told White they already knew which three white men were to blame. They needed his testimony to seal the deal. “They told me that if I didn’t identify them there would be race riots in the city,” White later said. His wife pleaded with him “not to lie on those boys.” But he gave in to the pressure. “It’s been torturing me for years.”
The lesson here is that even a progressive goal — equity for Black victims — can distort justice when people put politics over truth. By turning his camera in all directions, McCloskey reminds us never to be self-righteous and exonerate ourselves with easy anger when we’re all capable of shortcuts and complicity.
Grisham seems happy playing second fiddle, even as he hits a few wrong notes. He declares that we must fix “unfair laws, practices and procedures,” but seldom describes them, choosing instead to focus on bad apple police officers and prosecutors. He opens the very first chapter, about Virginia sailors railroaded for a 1997 rape and murder, with a portrait of the real killer and his family. “Omar Ballard’s mother was a Black prostitute and drug addict who worked the mean streets” and “showed little interest in things maternal.” Next to McCloskey’s disciplined humanism, such a racialized judgment, set amid the crack epidemic, jangles with cruelty.
At other moments, Grisham gives short shrift to the reporters who produced his best material. As he describes the dubious blood analysis that sent Joe Bryan to prison in the 1980s, for the murder of his wife in rural Texas, Grisham relies so heavily on Pamela Colloff’s 2018 reporting, for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, that simply mentioning her work in a note at the end does not feel adequate. (Colloff wrote of the victim, “Her pink nightgown was drawn up to the top of her thighs, and she was naked from the waist down.” Grisham’s version? “She was naked from the waist down and her pink nightgown was pulled up to her thighs.”)
These blunders aside, Grisham does a service by elevating Jim McCloskey, who can inspire all of us to use our privilege in the service of those ensnared in the moral scandal we call a criminal justice system. Freeing the innocent is just the first step.
