The age of Innocence: “One thing this book taught me,” John Grisham said of his upcoming work of nonfiction, “there are a lot of innocent people in prison.”
Like a defense attorney well practiced at making a closing argument, John Grisham promised to speak with “no notes” when, last Thursday, he addressed several hundred UVA law students on the sorry matter of the death penalty. To be specific, he was talking about his latest book, The Innocent Man, due out next month. Though it is his 19th book, it is his first work of nonfiction. The Innocent Man concerns the tragic case of Ronald Williamson, a onetime professional baseball player from small-town Oklahoma who was innocently jailed and condemned to death in a capital murder and rape case until DNA evidence exonerated him. Despite his reprieve, Williamson died a heartbreaking death at the age of 51. The cause was cirrhosis of the liver. The boozing, womanizing life on the road had caught up with him, it seems, accelerated by the trauma of two decades on death row and a lifetime of severe mental illness.
Grisham practiced law for 10 years in Mississippi before the success of his second novel, The Firm, freed him financially from his law practice. But it was clear from his talk that the courtroom is still very much alive in him. “Ron was a dead man,” he said. “My hope for this book: people read it and realize this [death penalty] system we have is too unfair to continue.”
Summarizing Willliamson’s story, Grisham recounted all the usual Grishamian elements—a disabled defendant; a past-his-prime defense attorney, who, proving that truth is stranger than fiction, happens to be blind; a couple of jailhouse snitches; and a suspect who is left unquestioned because of his illicit ties to local police.
Thanks to the heroics of a federal judge, Williamson was exonerated and the real killer was put behind bars. In the course of his research, Grisham met that man. And what was he like to meet, wondered one student during the question period following Grisham’s presentation. Not that different from the rest of us, Grisham revealed, at least in one respect: The killer requested that the famous author have a picture taken with him. Though it meant posing with a plane of Plexiglas between them, Grisham assented. The killer, apparently, keeps the photo in his death row cell, a reminder of his brief brush with celebrity.
