FRAMED – Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by Bill McCluskey and John Grisham

Well, the title says it. It is a non-fiction book that narrates ten carefully researched and selected stories about people who committed no crime and were either put on life with no possibility of parole or on death row. Were the attorney generals and state lawyers aware of this? Yes. Instead of the presumed innocent until proven guilty situation, we have a justice system establishing their own theory of the crime and finding a presupposed guilty party to fit that theory. Never mind that it is illogical, outrageous and absurd, and only fit for the ungifted fiction writer. And yet, judges accept this without even considering suspicious individuals with strong motives who are right under their nose.

Why do that? For political reasons, which is to please an impatient electorate that wants a nation to be safer (when absurdly it gets only more dangerous); sometimes to feed their own egos for fear of public judgement. They sacrifice the innocents for this, bury their conscience and indirectly become murderers themselves.

I had my mouth open from outrage and astonishment as I read about a thoroughly corrupt system, and people like you and me doing time, 16 years, 25 years, or being executed. Indeed it is a hard read that may not be your favorite entertainment during this Christmas season, and you may want to wait until next year until you open the book.

But thanks to the prose of Jim McCluskey and Grisham’s masterful one, it is gripping and astounding. You tell yourself it’s time to read something else, but it haunts you and you come back. And it should. Whoever thinks capital punishment is fair must go through every line of FRAMED and realize that innocents are killed by a judicial system with no conscience, and that killers go free. Framed will probably become a reference in law school. For my part I am not a law student, but it is not difficult to realize that this is an important book, and I hope that it will lead to the cleansing of our justice system.

December 16, 2024

Reading it now, and so far it’s fairly entertaining. I like John Grisham work.

A must read! Eye opening true stories of unbelievable corruption in our legal systems. Juries that are misled by false witnesses and testimonies of unqualified so called experts. Fabricated evidence and police officers who often go by gut feelings instead of following the trail of true evidence. I was completely shocked and brought to tears reading of the cruelty and suffering of the accused and their families by this travesty. Thank God for the people involved in the innocent projects who tirelessly fight for the wrongly convicted although as fantastic as they are it can never erase what happened to the innocent victims. Our legal systems need to be held accountable and changes must be made! Awareness is the first step!

Disturbing stories of police and prosecutor corruption and incompetence.

The real theme of this book is highlighting the work of Citadel Ministries, which Mr. McCloskey heads. It is like the Innocent Project helping wrongfully convicted inmates get the evidence and legal expertise needed to get a reversal.

These stories do a good job of describing how prosecutions can go wrong when incompetent or biased or lazy police, prosecutors and judges are in charge. But I didn't like that they use these cases to accuse the whole system of corruption in need of reform. The problem is the people, not the process. The police, prosecutors and judges are a reflection of their communities. After all, the police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors and judges are all elected or appointed by elected officials. How else should we pick them?

Why were these specific cases chosen? One case involves racism. Unfortunately that is not surprising that officials in rural Texas would be biased and ready to charge and convict someone because he is black. For years it was difficult for a black defendant to get a fair trial in many parts of the nation and probably still is. Others involved police and prosecutors suffering from severe cases of tunnel vision. For whatever reason, they get mentally locked into prosecuting one suspect and can't or will not consider other evidence.

The system is designed to avoid errors and is criticized as much for being too lax. Erroneous acquittals, often based on "technicalities," are as outrageous as framed convictions of innocent people. To help ensure justice, convictions must pass at least five levels of investigation and review. First is police investigate. Then a prosecutor has to review the evidence and decide whether to charge a crime. Then a prosecutor must convince a judge or grand jury in a preliminary hearing that there is enough evidence to show probable cause that a crime was committed by the defendant. Then a full trial must convince a judge or jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed a crime. Then appellate courts have to review the trial record to determine that it was conducted appropriately. A lawyer must be appointed to represent any defendant that wants one. Suspects can refuse to talk and be interrogated and testify, and no negative inference can be drawn from that. That goes further than just about any other nation to slant the process in favor of innocence and is often criticized as too favorable to suspects while ignoring the rights of victims.

The stories in the book show how police and prosecutors are not necessarily looking for the truth when they investigate. They are considering whether there is enough evidence to convince a judge or jury that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The police often don't do an exhaustive search of every possible defendant. They don't have the resources to do that in many cases even if they wanted to. The problems happened in these ten cases when the police, prosecutors and judges were lazy or didn't want to consider the possibility they were wrong. That is when they ignore other possibilities and hide exculpatory evidence even though they are required by the constitution to divulge all evidence to the defense. The line between focusing their efforts and getting tunnel vision can be thin. And some police and prosecutors are just not diligent, reasonable and free of bias. That is the problem this book describes.

The question this book does not address let alone answer is what more can be done about bad people in the system and still have an effective way to identify and prosecute crimes. It is certainly important to understand where problems occur, which these cases do well. But it is equally important to recognize the importance of having a criminal justice system to deal with crimes and the efforts to ensure fairness. That is entirely missing in this book. In reality most cases are handled fairly. The backlash to decriminalization movements happening in many cities now highlights the public's intolerance for crimes and criminals.

The book at times claims to be an indictment of the whole system and a need for systemic reform. That is unfair and tunnel vision in itself. No other nation has gone as far as we have to avoid convicting innocent people, and that is criticized as much or more than wrong convictions. The book would be much better if it presented these cases to explain how investigations involve evaluating evidence rather than seeking pure truth and mistakes can be made by lazy and biased officials and even by diligent police and prosecutors. The system is not perfect but perfection is impossible. This book would be much better if it said that.

I'm a lawyer but I don't do criminal cases. Still I remember an old maxim from law school that hard cases make bad law. These are all hard cases that need to be put into perspective relative to the whole system.

Filled with Contradiction. On one hand, the book is incredibly well written and informative. Every American should read this. On the other hand, one of the most aggravating books I have read recently.

10 cases where the justice system completely failed to provide justice. Innocent individuals imprisoned years or executed for crimes they didn’t commit. Any one of these cases would have made a great Grisham novel about an obsessed idealistic lawyer seeking justice for his innocent client. But, the straight forward, nuts and bolts presentation of the facts make each these stories hard to read, let alone 10 of them in a row. Cops with hunches. Obsessed prosecutors, so convinced they are right that they: knowingly use poorly trained or incompetent experts, purposely ignore evidence, hide evidence or testimony from the defence, using witnesses with poor memories and jail house snitches. Politicians seeking to enhance their hard on Crime reputation. Add a higher court system that protects the system, not the accused. In 25 percent of the DNA exonerations to date, jailhouse snitches were used at trial to obtain the wrongful conviction. Estimates of people wrongly convicted generally range between 4% to 15.4%. The Innocence Project estimates 4% of people in prison for Capital Crimes are innocent. The University of Michigan of Law tracks exonerations. There were 153 exonerations in 2023 alone, bringing the total number of exonerations in the United States since 1989 to 3,478. And these are only the cases where the convicted had someone competent to fight for them.

I pre-order very few books, and begin the day they arrive. That is exactly what I did with "Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions" by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. I will never forget "An Innocent Man", also by Grisham, and the impact that book had on my belief in the death penalty. "Framed" was 10 of those same types of stories to further perpetuate my disbelief in the death penalty which I was at one point in my life very much in favor of. At the same time, it unfortunately makes me look at some aspects of our law enforcement and judicial system differently. There are bad seeds in every profession, to be sure. In life, death, and justice though, it is heartbreaking.

The reason my review is only 4 stars instead of 5 is only due to the writing itself, and I don't want to pinpoint who because it wasn't that. There are a lot of names in this book. There are the victims, defendants, prosecutors, investigators, judges, experts, snitches (excuse me, informants), and a host of other people. At times the person would be noted with their first name, and at other times their last name. More confusingly, their first name is in one part of the paragraph, and their last name is in the latter part of the paragraph. This was unsettling and dropped my rating because of how many times I had to go back and figure out who was who.

Please don't let that deter you! Just be prepared for it and you'll be fine. You'll still be as disgusted at what happened to the people in these pages, both sets of victims.

This as you know is nonfiction. These accounts of false imprisonment are told by two different men. The storylines are true but in multiple cases are scary as to how our judicial system works. In many cases and situations as reported, the system needs reform and is broken and needs to be fixed. Qualified Immunity for officers in many cases is a huge problem, plus the supreme court has ruled that policemen can lie and make up false claims to entrap innocent people that have gone to prison or been put to death.....

You won't be able to put it down once you start reading. These are heart breaking stories to say the least.

Un libro muy interesante de leer

Très déçu par ce livre très différent des autres ouvrages de John Grisham que j'avais beaucoup appréciés.

Celui-ci raconte avec de très nombreux détails (suporifiques !) des histoires vraies d'américains accusés et condamnés à tort pour des crimes qu'ils n'ont pas commis. J'ai abandonné la lecture à la moitié du livre.

Anlatımı ve hikaye cok sürükleyici.

Excelente