Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions (Unabridged)
-
-
4.1 • 48 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction since The Innocent Man, “the master of the legal thriller” (Associated Press) teams up with Jim McCloskey, “the godfather of the innocence movement” (Texas Monthly), to share ten harrowing true stories of wrongful convictions.
“Each of these stories is told with astonishing power. They are packed with human drama, with acts of shocking villainy and breathtaking courage. But these are more than just gripping true stories—they are a clarion call for reforming the tragic flaws in our criminal justice system.”—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon
John Grisham is known worldwide for his bestselling novels, but it’s his real-life passion for justice that led to his work with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, the first organization dedicated to exonerating innocent people who have been wrongly convicted. Together they offer an inside look at the many injustices in our criminal justice system.
A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty, there is very little room to prove doubt. These ten true stories shed light on Americans who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount the dramatic hard-fought battles for exoneration. They take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and corruption in the court system that can make them so hard to reverse.
Impeccably researched and told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of winning freedom when the battle already seems lost and the deck is stacked against you.
* This audiobook edition is accompanied by a downloadable PDF which includes A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments from the book.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this nonfiction book, John Grisham teams up with Centurion Ministries’ Jim McCloskey to shine much-needed light on the injustice baked into the American legal system. They run through 10 cases (out of hundreds considered) where someone innocent was sent to prison, if not death row, based on flawed evidence and coached testimony. In almost every case, the real criminal was clear and obvious—and ignored by the authorities. The whole process comes across like a warped version of Law & Order where police, prosecutors, and frequently criminals collude to lie, cheat, obscure, and suppress. Closed cases and high conviction rates are the goals, not truth and justice, and it takes years (or decades) to overturn a conviction. The number of times the rules of law are blatantly ignored by the people entrusted to uphold them is staggering. Handling the narration, Michael Beck captures the authors’ frustration at these systematic failures. Framed exposes, once again, the deep problems of American justice and offers a reminder that ignoring the issues equals complicity.
Customer Reviews
Not worth your time or money
It’s sad that Grisham is involved in this shallow work. If you like Dateline or stories meant to instill outrage, then you’ll probably enjoy this book. Simply a compilation of a few out of thousands of cases of innocent people who were done wrong by the law due to false or withheld evidence, crooked cops, prosecutors or judges and then unjustly incarcerated or worse. I had to put it down after the first half dozen stories.
Disappointing
This book is as biased as it claims the justice system is. It is very clear that the author has directed this “non-fiction” book through omission of fact, rather than a robust analysis.