Author John Grisham is known for his legal thrillers – but he’s recently turned his attention to real-life stories of justice that are often just as gripping. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss cases of wrongful convictions, miscarriages of justice and common oversights that permeate the justice system. His book, co-written with Jim McCloskey, is “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] From the time John Grisham exploded onto the literary scene with bestseller after number one bestseller starting in the early 90s, this lawyer turned writer had a reputation for writing incredibly compelling fiction, often focused on tragic flaws in the criminal justice system. His newest book, “My Collection of Short Stories”, is very much the same sort of page turner we’ve come to expect from him, but with a twist. All these stories are as wild as anything you’d find in one of his novels. They also happen to be true. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think I’m Krys Boyd. The project was inspired by Grisham’s personal and professional interest in exonerees people who eventually have their names cleared after being accused of crimes they had nothing to do with. Not all the innocent people featured in this book have been so fortunate, but it’s impossible to read their stories without gaining a profound sense that when any American is unfairly punished, all Americans should be righteously outraged. John Grisham’s numerous bestselling novels have been translated into almost 50 different languages. His new book, written with Jim McCloskey, is called “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.” John, welcome back to Thank.
John Grisham [00:01:12] Happy to be here.
Krys Boyd [00:01:13] So before this collection of stories, I think you’d only done one nonfiction book. I mean, your ability to create these compelling tales out of thin air seems to readers, I think, almost like a supernatural ability. But you’ve said writing nonfiction is actually more challenging for you.
John Grisham [00:01:33] Yes, a lot more work. It’s a lot of research and I’m not really keen on too much research when I do fiction because you can just make it all up, you know, you’re not to research it, but it’s is there’s a lot of research and it takes time. It’s time consuming to read trial transcripts and police reports and prison reports. And, you know, files are 10,000, 20,000 pages long for each case. And and I learned that in 2006 with the innocent man, my first. A work of nonfiction. And when it was over, I said, This is my only work of nonfiction and I’m not doing this again. But that book took me into the world of wrongful convictions. And these stories are just so compelling from a storytelling point of view because they have so much drama and injustice and suffering and misery and perseverance and and sometimes a good outcome, sometimes not, but they’re just so loaded with human conflict and drama that they’re they’re great stories. And that’s why I have been wanting to tell more of them for a long time.
Krys Boyd [00:02:46] People who actually are guilty have been known to insist on their innocence long after they’ve been convicted and incarcerated. What did it take to find stories of people who had definitely been punished for crimes they did not commit?
John Grisham [00:03:00] I’m on the board of the Innocence Project in New York and have been for 15 years. I’m on the board of Centurion Ministries and have been for five years. Two of the leading innocence advocacy groups in the country. And we have we have clients, we have dozens and dozens of clients that we do litigating for right now. There’s no shortage of stories. And unfortunately, there are I’ve said this many times, there are thousands of innocent people in prison. And most people don’t believe that. But it’s true. And, you know, since I guess I think 30 years ago, we’ve had over 2000 exonerations, we’ve had dozens of of men, almost all men sent to death row who were later exonerated and found not guilty. So there’s a there’s a lot of these cases.
Krys Boyd [00:03:50] The first story in this book opens in a pretty surprising way. You start right off the bat by telling us about the man who actually committed the rape and murder of this young Navy wife in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1997. Will you give us just a basic outline of the crime as it actually occurred?
John Grisham [00:04:07] Yeah, he was a tough street guy who was from New Jersey and he went to Norfolk to live with a friend. And he had a history of violence in New Jersey that he carried with him to to Norfolk. And he was guilty of 2 or 3 sexual assaults there. And the police should have been following his trail because he was not a very sophisticated criminal. And he broke in, raped and killed this young Navy wife in July of 1997 and left behind a lot of DNA evidence at the crime scene. Very careless rapist murder. And then he went and went ahead and did another rape and murder. Rape after a rape. So there are several of them that he was guilty of in a very short period of time. And the police had no clue. Primarily because the police were too busy chasing down these innocent U.S. sailors who had nothing to do with the crime. At one point, they had seven of them locked up. The murderer finally got caught and went to prison. And from prison, he confessed to the murder of the Navy wife. And that’s how the police caught him. He confessed, and they traced his DNA back. And it was a dead match. And they had their man. After ruining seven lives of seven sailors four actually went to prison. It was just an incredible police screw up that could have been avoided if the cops had just done their job.
Krys Boyd [00:05:48] And this is really interesting. This unjust upheaval of so many lives started with a seemingly benign thing that throws off a surprisingly large amount of criminal investigations. A hunch.
John Grisham [00:06:02] You see it all the time. You’re the crimes cops or crime scene. And, you know, crime scenes are horrendous things to to to visualize once you step into one and and the police are naturally excited and eager to start tracking down the killer and you know, solve the crime and gather the evidence and and so many times not every time, but so many times a detective one with some experience can look around and almost like, you know, you see CSI, they can almost name the criminal killer at the crime scene as detectable. Look around and say, well, this this happened this way or this happened that way. I have a hunch that this is what happened. And and it happened. It was an awful for as the forensic team was gathering evidence inside the apartment and doing all the things they should have been doing properly gathering DNA samples and and photographing and doing everything together. It took hours. They spent hours inside gathering all the evidence. While they were doing that, the detectives were outside screwing up the case. They decided that this one sailor who lived next door to the victim was suspicious. And within almost a matter of minutes, they had decided this guy’s probably our man. And he was hanging around with the other neighbors watching the scene, you know, And there they go. They tracked him down. And off to the races.
Krys Boyd [00:07:35] Yeah, but then they have a problem because the DNA does not match this guy that they’re pretty convinced must have had something to do with it.
John Grisham [00:07:42] They got in a big hurry and they verbally beat a confession out of him that night after about 15 hours of interrogation. And his confession matched nothing from the crime scene. And they made him change the confession several times as they kept learning fact. It was just a total train wreck. And they got a big hurry because they didn’t wait for the DNA testing. He voluntarily gave them, you know, blood samples and urine samples or whatever, whatever they asked for. He cooperated because he was innocent and they were in such a big hurry. They charged him with the crime. And long before the DNA testing was done, they had tons of DNA evidence from the crime scene and they just gotten a huge hurry, thought they had the crime settled, solved. And then when the DNA came back and they realized it was not a match, most detectives will say, okay, the DNA doesn’t match. Perhaps we got the wrong guy. Let’s call time out here and look around and rethink this. But not these guys. These guys, these detectives said, boy, now we got another theory we need. Somebody else was involved with him, the DNA donor, the sperm donor. And so they got another sailor and they beat a confession out of him, verbally beat, not physically beat. And then that didn’t work. So they got a third guy. Then he was cleared by the they got a fourth guy. He was cleared, but they had seven sailors at one time all lined up in jail, all excluded by DNA evidence, all with no criminal records whatsoever, three U.S. sailors, young boys, dreaming of serving in the Navy, and most of them were Eagle Scouts good, good kids. And they had seven of them locked up while the real murderer was finally in prison. And so it was just an incredible train wreck of an investigation.
Krys Boyd [00:09:44] So you mentioned these two confessions that were verbally beat out, beaten out of people who were suspected of the crime initially. I think many people, John, who’ve never found themselves grilled for hours about a crime they had nothing to do with, cannot imagine anything could compel them to give a false confession. What do you know about how that happens?
John Grisham [00:10:05] Well, that’s what jurors believe. Once you confess, I don’t care how bad the confession is. Your dead. I mean, the jury is going to believe you. The appellate courts are going to believe you. Nobody’s going to give you a break if you confess, because we all believe there’s no way I would ever confess to something I didn’t do, especially a serious crime. But, you know, until you subjected to ten, 12, 15 hours of brutal police interrogation nonstop, no lawyers present, no friends present. Some people crack and some people begin to doubt themselves. And these were these were Eagle Scouts. These are boys who were trained to respect the police. And all of a sudden, the police are yelling at them and accusing and in there all sorts of dirty tricks that the police can use during interrogations. And they they still use them. They know how to, you know. They know how to confuse you. And it’s not unusual in intelligence work and criminal prosecutions to see people confess after getting just, you know, beat up physically. And when one trick they use, which is I think they used it for all the fourthey are after several hours when the when the suspect is you know really confused and desperate and wanting to get out, they say, okay, well, if you if you really maintain your innocence, we take a polygraph. And 80% of all innocent people will take a polygraph because they’re innocent and they’re eager to prove their innocence. They jump at the chance to take a polygraph and they go through the polygraph. They wire them up and bring in the polygraph expert and they administer the test and put the suspect back in the interrogation room to wait for another hour. And then the police or the detective walks in with the graph paper and flings at the guy and says, this proves you’re lying. You flunked the test. When in reality they passed the test. But the police can lie at will during interrogations and they know all the tricks. And so suddenly you’ve been caught lying and you’re thinking, well, what? You know, am I cracking up? What’s happened here? And they’ll also say your 2 or 3 buddies have already implicated you. So you’ve got guilt coming from it all, from all directions. And they say you’re facing the death penalty. And in Virginia, we have killed more people than any state except Texas. We know how to use it here. So, yes, what you know, this goes on for hours and hours so people do break. And and that’s how you have wrongful confessions.
Krys Boyd [00:12:53] I mean, one man that we now know was entirely unconnected to this crime went so far eventually as to write an apology letter to the victim’s family. What have you learned, John? Working with the Innocence Project and other groups about the psychological effects of interrogation such that innocent people actually become convinced they were somehow responsible?
John Grisham [00:13:15] Well, I can’t begin to to analyze the, you know, the psychological effects of going through that, because I you know, I’ve sort of done it. But. But we have many, many, many cases. The Innocence Project in New York has, I think now 370 DNA exonerations over the past 25 years. 370, I think, is our number of that total. 25% involve cases where false confessions were obtained by the police. 25%. That’s a big number. And it just shows you how effective the police can be in getting people so confused, disoriented and frightened in that they will start believing that they’re cracking up.
Krys Boyd [00:14:07] John, you know, people who are not any part of the criminal justice system or criminal legal system, if you prefer to watch TV shows and movies. And we see that effect that you talked about earlier in which, you know, detective show up on the scene, they take a glance around, they flash the lights, and then they gain all kinds of useful information and they find the person who did it. We in the general public, I think, are influenced by this idea that the police are really incredibly accurate at being able to assess what might have happened by examining a crime scene. Do you think that police officers are influenced in the same way by these fictional accounts of people in their profession?
John Grisham [00:14:52] Tough question. I don’t know if their influence I don’t know what influences these detectives. I do know that those TV shows have not made it easier for criminal defendants because we we tend to believe that these crime scene investigators and these sleuths and these pathologists and these these professional people who can do the science and math and DNA and all that kind of stuff, we tend to believe that they’re infallible when there’s so much junk science in the courtroom these days, courtrooms. The jury was a horrible problem involving bad forensics that are at the root of so many wrongful convictions. And I’m talking about things like hair analysis, which is totally, you know, unreliable. But Mark, analysis, bite mark analysis has almost been kicked out all over. But it’s still some of it’s still around. People are still in prison because of bite mark analysis and hair analysis, blood spatter analysis. I write one story about that. There’s just a lot of junk. And, you know, one thing we try to do with the Innocence Project is to pass some national standard of forensics to try to clean up the mess in the courtrooms, because there’s, again, just so much bad science.
Krys Boyd [00:16:20] You write about this medical examiner named Dr. Steven Hayne, who you describe as an incredible workhorse and a marvelous witness for the prosecution. You don’t mean either of those things as a compliment in this context.
John Grisham [00:16:33] No, he was outrageous. He became the de facto medical examiner for the state of Mississippi back in the 80s and 90s and did thousands of autopsies because he would he would do most pathologists wouldn’t do them. And there was no state medical examiner. And so he became the leading guy to go too far to autopsies in Mississippi. Still today, every county has a county coroner who’s elected by the people and does not have to have any medical training at all. And so and when there’s a murder, a dead body, the coroner’s have to find somebody who will do the autopsies and nobody wants to do them because it’s tough work and it doesn’t pay much. But pain. 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I guess 30 years now, volunteered to take all the autopsies. And he did a he once boasted of doing, I think, a thousand a year, which is, you know, incredible. And then he would not only do the autopsy, but he proved to be a just a reliable witness for the prosecution. He could bend his testimony to suit whatever a theory of guilt or prosecution had. So he became the real darling of all the prosecutors, because he would he would say almost anything. And he convicted. And we don’t know how many people he convicted, but a lot of his convictions have blown up in the last, I guess, ten years because he was finally exposed. He was sued numerous times. And, you know, journalists were after him. The defense lawyers really stuck together and went after him. And finally they shut him down. But the damage was done. He had convicted so many people and some went to death row. I mean, Kennedy Brewer, the guy I wrote about, was one of his victims. And Kennedy came within six days of being executed in Mississippi back in the 1990s for a crime committed by somebody else. And they finally found the real killer, not because of great police work, but because of luck. But the real killer was under their nose from the very beginning. And that may have been an investigation. But but Dr. Hayne did the autopsy and found some bite marks on the child and called in a bite mark expert a dentist, and they tag team together and did many times in Mississippi and Louisiana. We they’re still people in prison today because of Dr. Hayne and Dr. West.
Krys Boyd [00:18:59] Yeah you say bite mark expert maybe people couldn’t hear the air quotes in your voice. This was like a small town dentist to what declared himself an expert.
John Grisham [00:19:10] Yeah. He just don’t know what his motivation was, but he just decided he was bored. You know, with root canals and fillings and things like that. And he said, I’m going to be an expert witness. And he managed to. Thrust himself into some really big murder cases in Mississippi for a long time. And he and Dr. Hayne became, you know, tag team buddies, Hayne would find the strange marks on a body. And Dr. West would almost always say, yeah, those are bite marks. I can I can prove it in court. And they testified so much that they became really good at testifying and they knew how to relate to jurors, rural jurors, small town jurors with the lingo, the enough technical terms and, you know, just really some believable, believable testimony. And they were almost always successful in getting guilty verdicts. And they were they were really they were really good. And they what they did. And it’s you know, it took a long time to unwind it. I’m not sure we’ll ever know how many cases are still out there. But they they were incredibly successful in sending innocent people to prison.
Krys Boyd [00:20:28] What was the baloney sandwich case that this two teamed up on?
John Grisham [00:20:33] This lady was eating baloney sandwich for lunch. Somebody broke in and murdered her and they kind of got the cart before the horse. Dr. West looked at the baloney sandwich, the dentist, and said, I can match up those teeth marks. But like like like the person who did the murder took a moment and ate a baloney sandwich. And then Dr. Haines said, No, wait a minute. I’ve got the remains of the baloney sandwich in the deceased stock. And they really got that one botched up. But that’s how reckless they were.
Krys Boyd [00:21:10] The case that you mentioned a minute ago about the murder of a child also relied on testimony from the sister of the victim who was a small child herself. How did police use interviews with this little girl to create the evidence they wanted against their preordained suspect?
John Grisham [00:21:30] Well, when you interrogate children, especially those who have been through something traumatic as as traumatic as losing a, you know, a close sibling, it’s best left to be done by professionals who understand child psychiatry and things like that. Not to small town cops who don’t have a clue. But the small town cops did the interview and they were able to plant enough clues with this child. I think it was five years old when her sister was abducted and they convinced her she had seen a man come into the house and he was wearing an earring and that was it at the time, in 1991, in this small town, small area. The only black man who was wearing an earring was a guy named Lavon Brooks. So the cops took off after LeBron Brooks. And it wasn’t long before Dr. Hayne and Dr. West matched up some bite marks with LeBron Brooks’s teeth and he went to death row. And when he went to prison for the rest of his life. That’s how it happened. But the child, when the child started testifying or talking to the police, it should have been obvious right off the bat she had seen nothing. She was thoroughly confused with the five year old kid. She told different versions of the what happened. She had white men breaking in, black men breaking in. She had 1 version they escaped in an airplane. It was just crazy stuff that anybody should have known was not going to was not true. And the child should never have been subjected to that. Two years later, when she went and when she testified at trial, she was seven and she got just as confused at trial. And, you know, she should not have been allowed to testify. But it also goes back to the point we make in the book so many times. It’s what’s so frustrating when you’re a lawyer and you believe in fair trials. It’s so frustrating to see how the judges are just asleep and they let this bad evidence go in, the bad testimony go in when they should, they should exclude it. That happens time and time again, these wrongful conviction cases.
Krys Boyd [00:23:52] And you also in these stories have plenty of evidence of police. When someone has confessed incorrectly to a crime they didn’t commit. Police have ways of making their signed testimony that they’re responsible, matched the facts of the case even when they don’t initially have the correct facts.
John Grisham [00:24:11] Well, yeah, I mean, there you’ve you have to realize that the interrogations go on for hours. And there’s a video camera right there in the room. But that’s not used until the very end, until there’s the actual confession itself. Now, the reason it’s not used is because it’s obvious they don’t want you to see what happens during a 15 hour interrogation. There’s lot they don’t want you to see. Now, more and more police departments are using, recording all of just record all. And that’s just that’s the only fair way to record all of it. But what happens that you talk about how they match the facts, they will provide a witness with enough facts that they’ll give you. They give a witness or suspect their theory of what might have happened and suggest and suggest and suggest this is what probably happened. This is what you actually did while you were sleepwalking. And your guess is it’s a ruse. They go through and finally they’ve got the person convinced and that’s when you turn the camera on. But there’s so many tricks to the interrogations.
Krys Boyd [00:25:22] You write about another horrible story in which an elderly woman in Pennsylvania was raped and murdered in 1997. Here again, DNA evidence pointed to some unknown person committing this crime who was not the person police decided was responsible, a young man named Sam Grassi. How did the police try to account for the fact that it was not Sam Grassi’s DNA found on the victim’s body, nor that of two other men who were accused in connection with the same crime?
John Grisham [00:25:50] I don’t know how they got that far out and how they didn’t know how they assume that there was a there’s DNA all over the crime scene. There was DNA. There’s a large amount of semen in the inside the victim’s body. There was semen on the bed. There was semen on a strange coat that was left behind by the killer. There was blood. And none of that. None of the DNA matched the DNA from the three accused men. They should have been excluded right then because they had the wrong guy. In fact, the real perpetrator has never been caught. Well, I referred to him as unknown male number one. He was the number one suspect with DNA everywhere. An incredibly sloppy criminal. He left his coat behind and when he fled and the police picked out these three guys and they found him a an informant. It was a small town drug dealer in Chester, Pennsylvania, and on the street kid. And they they started leaning on him to see if he knew anything about the crime. And they leaned harder and leaned harder and finally said, Yeah, I can tell you a story. And he told this bizarre story, 4 or 5, six, eight different times in different trials of being the lookout while these three suspects broke in the woman’s house and to rob her. And it just it’s an incredible when you read it, you cannot believe this really happened. You cannot believe that any semi intelligent police officer would even believe this. But they did. And these three young men have been serving now for 25 years in Philadelphia and in Pennsylvania. They have been in prison for 25 years and they’re serving life without parole. And so we don’t know if they’re going to get out. We hope so. And they got good lawyers there. They’ve lawyered up and had lawyers for years. But it’s it’s such an uphill fight. I make the point several times in the book, it’s fairly easy to convict. An innocent person of a crime. If you get if you get a jailhouse snitch or an informant who’s being incentivized and paid, if you get witnesses who will lie, you can you can do a good job of convicting an innocent person. It’s almost impossible to get one out. And that’s what we do with these innocence groups.
Krys Boyd [00:28:29] What is the motivation to convict an innocent person? Is it about closing the case so the police are heroes and the prosecutors get reelected?
John Grisham [00:28:38] I don’t know if they I don’t know if they set out to convict innocent people. I don’t think so. I think they just go down the wrong path and back themselves into a corner where they they’ve got a suspect they really don’t believe in. The pressure to solve the crime. The crime rate is is enormous. It’s a matter of closing the file. Yeah. Sure. The the police want to close the file. They want they want a conviction. They want the guy to go away to prison and just forget about it. We saw this crime, the prosecutors, the same way. They’ve got to have convictions. They’ve got to have they’re accountable to the to the voters. And that’s not a good system. We should not elect prosecutors and judges, but we do almost everywhere. And big cities and and small rural areas. We elect, you know, judges and prosecutors. So they under the pressure of of, you know, keeping their jobs and closing the files. And then what’s so frustrating is in this work is once we. Once we come in and we start proving that there’s a wrongful conviction. Even with DNA testing, the pushback is just enormous. The work to protect a wrongful conviction. It’s a matter of humiliation. It’s a matter of saving face. It’s about all that to to protect a bad conviction, they will work even harder. And that’s where the real fight comes in. Innocence work.
Krys Boyd [00:30:09] I’m not justifying it, but I get it. I can understand how easy it is to get defensive when someone calls your work into question. Does anything work to help people sort of let go of that defensiveness and actually take an honest second look at a case they got wrong?
John Grisham [00:30:25] It’s pretty rare. You know, I guess you see that occasionally, but not very often. Not very often. It’s almost always the the exact defensive mechanism when you question. You see that the stakes are so big, the stakes are so huge because you have people in prison. You have people on death row. Look at look at the stakes involved here. For anyone to say, hey, we were wrong. So that’s why it doesn’t happen.
Krys Boyd [00:30:56] John, how did what you call the indict first investigate later strategy used by some police departments work against a Texas teacher accused of killing his wife in 1986.
John Grisham [00:31:09] Well, they they the police, the Texas Rangers came in to investigate the murder. And as often happens in Texas, when the Rangers come in, are the local law enforcement people get out away? You know, these guys are trained. They’re elite detectives. And so they and the other guys kind of take a backseat to the ranger. And the ranger is expected to solve the case, just like on television. You know, just like the real deal the TV show is supposed to take just a matter of hours before he’s got the case solved. And so they often get in a hurry and they often jump conclusions. And they did in the Joe Bryan case after six days of investigation. They decided that Joe had killed his wife. He was two hours away in a hotel when she was murdered and he could prove it. And there was no motive. He he adored his wife. They were very close. They’re both professional educators. Joe was principal of the high school and they were very popular in town. There was no it made no sense to accuse Joe of killing his wife. He had there was no motive, no reason. They were very happy together. And when the ranger drove out to the house to arrest Joe, he was he couldn’t believe it. He was stunned. He said, Where’s your proof? What are you talking about? They didn’t have any. They didn’t have any. And there were so many leads that they. Did not follow once they had their suspect. Once the ranger had his man. Case was over and they then started trying to find witnesses or putting it together. It was a you know, but there was too late then to to do much detective work. They had their man and and they, you know, they went to trial and they managed to get a conviction. That’s the way that’s the way it works in a lot of jurisdictions, not just small town Texas. Some of the worst cases come out of the big cities and in certain precincts in New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx and, you know, Chicago, some of the worst cases of wrongful convictions happened in the big cities. They happen everywhere. No, no, no area is immune from wrongful convictions.
Krys Boyd [00:33:40] Among the tragic ironies in Joe Bryan’s case was that he himself maintained faith in the system for a long time. Right. He was so sure that like, once the evidence was all out there, he couldn’t possibly be punished. And you remind us that even if juries are instructed to presume innocence, there’s a phenomenon at work in our culture that’s more like a presumption of guilt. How does that work?
John Grisham [00:34:03] Well, you know, to take take a look at your own example, if you if you if there’s a horrible murder down the street, we’re all terrified. Okay. Where you live. And is somebody you know or somebody you knew of and you want that murder solved. You you can’t believe it happened. And and then suddenly there’s a rumor they’ve called somebody. They’ve found somebody. They’ve arrested somebody. You see that person on the news and you immediately say, Thank God they got him. Thank God they saw it. You know, thank God that he’s locked up. There’s no presumption of innocence at all. It’s human nature. We trust our police and trust our prosecutors. And you and you say, okay, well, you know, let’s get him convicted now and put him away. He’s presumed to be innocent, but that never works. Joe slowly realized at trial that he was not presumed to be innocent. He knew he was innocent, but he he really wanted to get to the trial to get it over with. He was not looking forward to a trial, but he was. That was the big step to his freedom. And he knew that once he got to trial and then he would be found not guilty because he wasn’t guilty and he would be set free and I guess exonerated and be able to say, you know, let’s go find the real killer. But as he sat through the trial and and began realizing that, you know, he was the accused and he would look at the jurors and he could tell that they were becoming more and more suspicious of him as the trial went on. And he said by the end of the trial, he was he knew that he was in tough shape with the jury. And they presented some. Again, back to junk science. They presented some bad forensics by an unqualified expert who convinced the jury that that there was some blood spatter, back spatter from the murder, from the gun, from the from the wounds that had landed on a flashlight that belonged to Joe, and that, therefore, the flashlight was at the murder scene. You know, here we go. The bad science. No, that was true. And the expert, many, many years later, far too late for Joe. But the expert in a court hearing filed an affidavit saying he was wrong. It’s 30 years later, 25 years later. But it was another another case of bad forensics.
Krys Boyd [00:36:46] The last case you take up here is one that people may have heard of. It certainly made national headlines. Do you think it resulted not only in false conviction, but wrongful execution? How did Cameron Todd Willingham’s daughters die?
John Grisham [00:37:00] The house caught on fire as they were napping on a Saturday morning. He was babysitting. He fell asleep. And it was a little, little, you know, cheap rental house on the edge of town was a wooden house burned easily. And the experts much later, much after he after he’d been executed. No, I’m sorry. Even before he was executed, the experts said this was not arson. Okay? This was not arson. This was a fire is a tragedy. It was a real fire. It almost burned him. He barely got out. And then when he got out, he turned around to see the house and he saw flames and tried to go back in. But it was the much too hot, much too fast. He couldn’t he couldn’t save his daughters. And that’s how they died. And there was a great deal of sympathy, you know, for the parents in the town, Corsicana, Texas, And they had no money. So the neighbors pool their money and buried the little girls. And it was just horrible. And again, a great deal of sympathy for this family until a fire marshal came to town and with the local assistant fire chief in Corsicana and began examining the house. And it wasn’t long before they started using the word arson. And they decided there were three different points of origin for the fire, which means arson. And they got in a hurry and really had no problem accusing Cameron Todd Willingham of burning up his daughter’s. Probably the worst crime you could ever imagine. And then once they made the accusation again, you know, you want to trust your police, you want to trust your authorities. He was toast. The whole town turned against him and he was convicted and sent to death row in 2004, stayed there for ten years, was executed in 2014, and by the time he was executed, there was some some real experts who had thoroughly debunked the original findings. I mean, trained scientific experts who who understood arson. They had totally discredited the original work and and proven to their satisfaction that it was not arson. And that information was on the governor’s desk a day or two before the execution. So the governor had that information from other experts, but he would not delay the execution.
Krys Boyd [00:39:53] There was also essential testimony in Willingham’s trial provided by a so-called jailhouse snitch. How does it work when police and prosecutors find someone in jail who might be willing to offer damning allegations against a suspect?
John Grisham [00:40:09] It’s an old game that gets played all the time. Every jail’s got some druggie facing more prison time. A career criminal who’s got caught again and going back to prison. And these guys know the system. They some snitches look for crimes to to testify to. And the police know them. They know the police. They know who’s in jail for what they know you know who’s who’s accused of murder. And so oftentimes the police will go to the snitch and say, hey, we’re going to put you in the cell with this guy, the suspect, and let’s see if he talks about the crime. Occasionally the snitch is savvy enough to go to the police and say, Hey, this guy’s in my cell. He’s a suspect. I think he knows something. So anyway, they cut a deal. And the snitch is how much time you knock off of my sentence. What’s what’s the deal here? What’s the deal? And there’s always a deal. And they in Williams case, I think the snitch went to see the D.A. on 2 or 3 different occasions talking about the deal. What’s my deal? He was facing a robbery charge, career criminal. And they finally cut a deal that they will always deny. And the snitch was put in the cell with the suspect. And after a day or two, he pops out and says, man, this guy confessed everything this guy is. He’s proud he killed his daughters. He’s you know, he’s bragging about it was all fictitious testimony. And then he, you know, the snitch goes away or goes home. And six months later, there’s a trial and he shows up at trial, you know, with a haircut and a coat and tie down. And see, America, American jurors do not believe we’re so intimidated by the courtroom setting. If we get to serve on a jury, you know, that’s not what you want to do often, but it’s also an honor. You’ve chosen to be there for a big case. You don’t believe that a person will enter a courtroom, put a hand on the Bible, swear to tell the truth and take the stand and then start lying and spinning a fictitious story. We just don’t believe that’s going to happen. We don’t believe it happens. And so jurors in small towns and big cities, sophisticated or not sophisticated, will believe what a jailhouse snitch says about the guy confessing. If the snitch doesn’t know the details of the crime, the police are happy to provide that for him before trial. And that’s how snitches operate. And we we do a terrible job in this country of controlling snitch testimony. They’re still use all the time and the police know they’re lying. The prosecutors know they’re lying. The judge often knows they’re lying. It’s against the law to suborn perjury, to to to get someone to lie in court. But no one’s ever, you know, accused of that.
Krys Boyd [00:43:23] I mean, there is so much to be sad about in this book, John. Innocent people punished, but also the fact that, like the people who are actually responsible for crimes might never be identified, might be doing other bad things. Do you think that we as potential jurors or simply as community members have a responsibility to push back on this phenomenon that is the presumption of guilt? And would that make a difference?
John Grisham [00:43:47] I don’t know if it’d make a difference. I do know that each year in this country, there are fewer death verdicts. There are fewer executions. And we like to think that’s because we’ve had 30 years of these high profile DNA exonerations and stories about the abuse of bad police and the prosecutorial misconduct. We’ve heard those stories, all the horrible things that happen to bring about a wrongful conviction. We think jurors are slower to believe everything they’re told in in court and they’re more cynical and they question more. We hope that’s happening. It probably probably has to happen because of just been so many of these these outrageous cases that have been, you know, really publicized. So I don’t know how you ever get around the presumption of guilt. We just don’t think that way. We even even when you’re in court, even if you’re if you’re a pretend, you feel if you’re on a jury and and the judge instructs you that you have the presumption of innocence. Okay. You have to presume this man sitting right here is innocent. Okay. Well, that is hard to do because you’re you’re in court to judge him. He’s sitting there with, you know, with his he’s he’s indicted. He’s accused. He’s whatever he he’s guilty. Okay. He’s probably guilty or he’s done something wrong. You know, he’s not completely innocent. It’s I think it’s almost impossible to overcome the presumption of guilt.
Krys Boyd [00:45:25] John Grisham’s numerous bestselling novels have been translated into almost 50 different languages. His new work of nonfiction, written with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, is called “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.” John, thank you for making time to talk about this.
John Grisham [00:45:41] Thank you. My pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:45:43] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast for free wherever you get podcasts, just search for KERA Think. Our website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
