The Innocent Man

You know the old one about a conservative being a liberal who's been mugged?  The less-frequently cited corollary is that a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.  Which was the only lead-in I could think of to the following recommendation: everyone should read John Grisham's The Innocent Man.  Grisham chronicles the true story of a series of simply stunning miscarriages of justice wreaked on the lives of four innocent men arising from a set of crimes in a small Oklahoma town.  The book is both harrowing and incredibly frustrating: frustrating not because of the writing, but because there is virtually no settling of accounts with those who perpetrated the prosecutorial crimes.  The only complaint I have is that Grisham seems unduly enamoured with the least sympathetic of the men who were wrongly convicted and, relatedly, spends comparatively little time on those caught in his wake.  That minor quibble aside, though, I strongly recommend that everyone, not just those with an interest in the criminal justice system, take the time to read the book.

Comments

[Damian P.]

In a similar vein, I strongly recommend 'No Crueler Tyrannies' by Dorothy Rabinowitz, about the disgraceful Fells Acres abuse witchhunt in Massachusetts:

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/02/21/183030.php