The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is a 2006 true crime book by John Grisham, his first nonfiction title. The book tells the story of Ronald 'Ron' Keith Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, a former minor league baseball player who was wrongly convicted in 1988 of the rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter in Ada and was sentenced to death. After serving 11 years on death row, he was exonerated by DNA evidence and other material introduced by the Innocence Project and was released in 1999.
Netflix released The Innocent Man, a six-part documentary series based on the book, in December 2018.[1]
Plot
Ron Keith Williamson has returned to his hometown of Ada, Oklahoma, after multiple failed attempts to play for various minor league baseball teams affiliated with the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees. Lasting pain from a shoulder injury incurred during his career leaves him unable to find steady employment. His failures only serve to aggravate his depression, and he quickly slips into alcoholism.[2]
Early in the morning of December 8, 1982, the body of Debra Sue Carter, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress, was found in the bedroom of her garage apartment in Ada. She had been beaten, raped, and suffocated. After five years of false starts due to shoddy investigative work by the small and underfunded Ada police force, Williamson, along with his "drinking buddy", Dennis Fritz, was charged, tried, and convicted of the rape and murder charges in 1988. On conviction, he was sentenced to death, while Fritz was given a life sentence. Fritz's wife had been murdered seven years earlier and he was raising their only daughter when he was arrested.
Grisham's book describes the aggressive and misguided mission of the police and Pontotoc County District Attorney Bill Peterson to solve the mystery of Carter's murder. Police and prosecutors use forced "dream" confessions, unreliable witnesses, and flimsy evidence to convict Williamson and Fritz to the crime. Since a death penalty conviction automatically sets in motion a series of appeals, the Innocence Project aided Williamson's attorney, Mark Barrett, in exposing several glaring holes in the prosecution's case and the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses. Frank H. Seay, a U.S. District Court judge, ordered a retrial.
After eleven years on death row, Williamson and Fritz were exonerated by DNA evidence and released on April 15, 1999. Williamson was the 78th inmate released from death row since 1973.[3][4][5]
Williamson suffered deep and irreversible psychological damage during his incarceration and lengthy stay on death row. For example, on September 22, 1994, he was five days away from being executed when his execution was stayed following the filing of a habeas corpus petition.[6][7][8]
He was intermittently treated for manic depression, personality disorders, alcoholism, and mild schizophrenia. It was later proven that he was mentally ill and therefore was unfit to have been tried or sentenced to death in the first place. The State of Oklahoma, the city of Ada, and Pontotoc County officials never admitted any errors and threatened to re-arrest him.
Another man from Ada, Glen Gore, was eventually convicted of the crime on June 24, 2003. He was sentenced to death,[7] but his sentence was overturned in August 2005.[9] He was convicted at a second trial on June 21, 2006, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. This was required by law due to a jury deadlock on sentencing.[10][11]
Williamson and Fritz sued and won a settlement of $500,000 in 2003 for wrongful conviction from the City of Ada, and an out-of-court settlement with the State of Oklahoma for an undisclosed amount. Williamson was later diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver due to decades of alcohol abuse. He died on December 4, 2004, in a Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, nursing home. Fritz returned to Kansas City, where he reunited with his daughter, Elizabeth as of 2006[update]. In 2006, Fritz published his own account of being wrongly convicted in his book titled Journey Toward Justice.[12]
Further highlighting the failures and abuses perpetrated by the police and district attorney's office during that time period, The Innocent Man includes accounts (as subplots) of the false conviction, trial, and sentencing of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot in the abduction, rape, and purported murder of Denice Haraway, as well as the false conviction of Greg Wilhoit in the rape and murder of his estranged wife, Kathy. At one time, all the men were incarcerated on the same death row. About two decades before Grisham's book, Ward and Fontenot's wrongful convictions were detailed in the book The Dreams of Ada (1987) by Robert Mayer.[13]
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and other forms of post-conviction relief, as well as advocate for criminal justice reform to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when an unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.
Darryl Hunt was an African-American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who, in 1984, was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and the murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white newspaper copy editor. After being convicted in that case, Hunt was tried in 1987 for the 1983 murder of Arthur Wilson, a 57-year-old black man of Winston-Salem. Both convictions were overturned on appeal in 1989. Hunt was tried again in the Wilson case in 1990; he was acquitted by an all-white jury. He was tried again on the Sykes charges in 1991; he was convicted.
Anthony Porter was a Chicago resident known for having been exonerated in 1999 of the murder in 1982 of two teenagers on the South Side of the city. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1983, and served 17 years on death row. He was exonerated following introduction of new evidence by Northwestern University professors and students from the Medill School of Journalism as part of their investigation for the school's Innocence Project. Porter's appeals had been repeatedly rejected, including by the US Supreme Court, and he was once 50 hours away from execution.
Kirk Noble Bloodsworth is a former Maryland waterman and the first American sentenced to death to be exonerated post-conviction by DNA testing.
Kerry Max Cook is an American former death row inmate who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of 21-year-old Linda Jo Edwards in 1977. On June 19, 2024, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals determined that he was actually innocent, citing a litany of prosecutorial misconduct and errors.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Opponents of capital punishment often cite cases of wrongful execution as arguments, while proponents argue that innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system. Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011.
Ronald Keith Williamson was a former minor league baseball catcher/pitcher who was one of two men wrongly convicted in 1988 in Oklahoma for the rape and murder of Debra Sue "Debbie" Carter. His former friend Dennis Fritz was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Williamson was sentenced to death. Both were released 11 years later when DNA evidence proved their innocence. Their story became the subject of bestselling author John Grisham's first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (2006), and the adapted Netflix docu-series of the same name.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Earl Washington Jr. is a former Virginia death-row inmate, who was fully exonerated of murder charges against him in 2000. He had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 for the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lyn Williams in Culpeper, Virginia. Washington has an IQ estimated at 69, which classifies him as intellectually disabled. He was coerced into confessing to the crime when arrested on an unrelated charge a year later. He narrowly escaped being executed in 1985 and 1994.
The Confession is a 2010 legal thriller novel by John Grisham, the second of two novels published in 2010. The novel is about the murder of a high school cheerleader and an innocent man's arrest for the crime. It was Grisham's first novel to be released simultaneously in digital and hardcover format.
Delbert Lee Tibbs was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape in 1974 in Florida and sentenced to death. Later exonerated, Tibbs became a writer and anti-death penalty activist.
Centurion is a non-profit organization located in Princeton, New Jersey, with a mission to exonerate innocent individuals who have been wrongly convicted and sentenced to life sentences or death.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.
The Illinois Innocence Project, a member of the national Innocence Project network, is a non-profit legal organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
Nicholas James Yarris is an American writer and storyteller who spent 22 years on death row in Pennsylvania after being wrongfully convicted of rape and murder.
The Innocent Man is an American true crime documentary television series based on John Grisham's 2006 book The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town. The six-episode first season debuted on Netflix on December 14, 2018.
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