Best-selling author John Grisham wrote legal thrillers for decades, but never considered the issue of wrongful conviction until he read the obituary of an Oklahoma man who spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit.
Grisham spent 18 months researching the man’s story, which became his only work of nonfiction to date, The Innocent Man. That research inspired him to become an advocate for laws to protect the innocent from imprisonment and for organizations that work to free wrongfully convicted inmates from prison.
In a panel discussion yesterday at Wake Forest University, Grisham said he believes that the United States should put an end to the death penalty, require police to record interrogations and level the field between prosecutors and court-appointed defense attorneys.
“This is not a liberal or conservative issue,” he said. “It’s to the benefit of the criminal-justice system.”
About 2,000 people, including Darryl Hunt, a Winston-Salem man who spent 18 years in prison for murder before being exonerated in 2004, attended Grisham’s discussion at Wait Chapel.
Grisham’s visit came during a key time in innocence work in North Carolina:
• A recent review of the State Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab in Raleigh found problems in how blood evidence was handled in 230 cases over 16 years.
• The General Assembly enacted the Racial Justice Act last year, which allows defendants sentenced to the death penalty to present evidence and statistics to show that racial discrimination could have played a part in their sentencing.
• This summer, the state made permanent the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission, the only state-run agency in the country dedicated to verifying claims of innocence from convicted felons.
Grisham called the North Carolina commission “almost a dream.”
“Every state should have one,” he said.
Also participating in the panel were Blake Morant, the dean of Wake Forest’s law school; Carol Turowski, a co-director of the school’s Innocence and Justice Clinic; and two third-year law students, Jessica Hollenbach and Mimi Kendrick.
Hollenbach and Kendrick asked Grisham about their futures in the law — Hollenbach intends to become a prosecutor, Kendrick a district attorney.
Grisham said that public trust in the criminal justice system has been shaken by the number of people cleared through DNA evidence.
“Whatever case you take, especially a serious case, especially a death-penalty case, your job is to fight tooth and nail to get that client a fair trial,” he said.
Grisham said that high-dollar judgments in civil lawsuits against governments could bring change.
“You start letting these cities and counties and states start getting hit with big lawsuits — that’s how people pay attention,” he said.
“When property taxes start going up to pay for some of these lawsuits, that’s when people will pay attention.”
lgraff@wsjournal.com
727-7279
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement