Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions

This is an anthology of 10 stories of people who were wrongly convicted of crimes. Some of them eventually got out of jail, while some of them are still there.

The book is a collaboration between famed legal writer John Grisham and another guy who runs a ministry which tries to exonerate people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit.

It’s…mentally exhausting. From the first chapter, you’re presented with what appears to be gross, flagrant, and – frankly – criminal police misconduct. The detectives, prosecutors, and judges seem to operate with near impunity and cannot possibly believe in the stories they’re weaving.

The first story kind of blew my mind. A woman was raped and murdered by a single man. The police railroaded a guy into a confession, but DNA excluded him. So the police decided that there were two men, and the second one left the DNA. They got a confession out of someone else, who DNA also excluded, so now the police decided there were three men.

And this went on and on, until – I kid you not – seven men were in jail, and the police were looking for an eighth man who finally matched the DNA. Meanwhile, the guy who actually committed the crime and eventually confessed to it (rather matter-of-factly, with no coercion or manipulation) was out free. When he was finally arrested, he expressed amazement that all those other men confessed and that the police made it all happen.

The book illustrated again and again that the police will grasp at the barest thread of “evidence” and get tunnel vision around it. Additionally, the ability of people to lie and get you thrown in prison is terrifying. Eyewitness testimony goes a long way during an investigation, and if the wrong person doesn’t like you or needs to earn favor from law enforcement, they can destroy your world far more easily than you think.

What was missing for me, however, was some look into why the police, prosecutors, and judges would do this. Has anyone ever gone back and gotten people to say why they did it? Some of the stories were so incredible, that I just wonder what was going through the heads of the people involved. I doubt anyone would admit to anything since there would likely be criminal consequences, but I was desperate for someone to talk about the mental gymnastics they were going through.

I’d also be interested in hearing the other side, when the other side still genuinely believes in someone’s guilt. I wish each chapter had a rebuttal from some detectives explaining why they still think the person is guilty. I worry that I just got an inflammatory view from one side (there is a lot of dramatic writing; adjectives and adverbs galore…).

I finally had to quit the book. I read six of the ten stories, but as I started the seventh, I just got this feeling of impending doom. Like, I couldn’t get immersed in another story like this. The seventh story was about a seemingly loving couple. The wife is murdered while the husband is out of town. It suddenly became obvious that they were going to frame the husband for it, and… I just couldn’t sit through another one. It was too emotionally taxing.

So, it’s an interesting book, but a hard read, and it feels incomplete. Like I said before, I need some understanding of what was going on in the heads of the “other” side to really feel like I understand why this happens. The book doesn’t offer that.

Book Info

Here are some notes I took on the acquisition of this book:

Nigel gave it to me for Christmas 2024.