John Grisham
In John Grisham's latest novel, The Guardians, a lawyer-turned-priest travels the country working to expose faulty forensics and exonerate the wrongfully convicted until he takes a case in Florida where things — as they tend to do in Florida and in Grisham's legal thrillers — take a dramatic turn.
The book is out now and it's a timely subject matter given the event that is bringing Grisham to Nashville next week. The former lawyer and international bestselling author — a longtime crusader for the wrongfully convicted who sits on the Innocence Project's board of directors — is a featured guest at a fundraiser for the Tennessee Innocence Project, which was founded earlier this year. The sold-out event, which will be emceed by former Tennessee Titans running back Eddie George, is being held at Montgomery Bell Academy on Wednesday, Oct. 23.
Grisham spoke to the Scene by phone from New York, where he was launching the new book.
When you were growing up were there formative stories or cases that sparked your interest in or awareness of some of the criminal justice issues that you ended up pursuing with the rest of your life?
You know it’s really weird, in fact, the answer is no. I was a lawyer for 10 years in Mississippi and I did a lot of criminal cases. I had two murder trials within two years of finishing law school. I volunteered for all kinds of court-appointed criminal cases because I needed the work and I wanted to spend time in the courtroom. That was my goal as a very young lawyer. But I never was even remotely aware of wrongful convictions because where I practiced law, like in most jurisdictions, you could trust the police, you could trust the prosecutors, the judges ran a tight ship and I never had a client who I thought was wrongfully convicted or mistreated by the system. Looking back, I was lucky I guess.
I didn’t think about it until much, much later in life. In fact, it was in 2004, 15 years ago, when I discovered this case in Oklahoma, I later wrote The Innocent Man, my only nonfiction book. And it really opened my eyes to the world of wrongful convictions and made me realize how many innocent people are serving time. The great awakening for me was with that book and that case in 2004.
I was going to ask you about that book because I wonder what it’s been like for you to see the true crime genre explode, whether it’s podcasts, Netflix series or documentaries.
It’s fascinating to watch it unfold. It’s gratifying to see this much attention directed to the wrongfully convicted, the injustices and the problems within the system. Problems that could be fixed if we’d just fix them. It’s gratifying to see, nowadays, juries are much more skeptical of what the police and prosecutors say. It’s all evolving. It’s gratifying to see a lot of states these days enact laws that are designed to prevent wrongful convictions, enact laws that provide compensation for those who are wrongfully convicted and later exonerated.
We refer to it as the innocence movement and it’s really a movement that started about 25 years ago with the advent of DNA testing. That’s what got it all started and it’s still a movement. We’ve got a long way to go because there are so many innocent people in prison. That’s why I’m coming to Nashville to raise a few bucks for the new innocence project there.
You mention DNA testing. In the past few years there’s been some great reporting, unsettling reporting, about some of the forensics that are used in the courts and how in a lot of cases we’re learning about junk science that we’ve relied on.
My current book, The Guardians, that I’m promoting right now, it’s about junk science. It’s about the unbelievable amount of crap that has been used in courtrooms for the past several decades. So-called experts who will tell the juries anything and get paid for it. We have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted with bogus science. Bogus experts and forensic testimony that has no scientific basis. It’s a huge problem. We’re correcting some of it now with DNA, but even with DNA testing it’s still extremely difficult to get someone exonerated because the cops and prosecutors always resist DNA testing, so you have to fight.
One of the things I struggle with as a writer but also just as a consumer of true crime stories is the balance between the entertainment and the humanity. As a writer how do you try to navigate that? You obviously want to write these thrilling, gripping novels, but I know that you care about these issues in real life, too.
The subject matter is so fascinating. Every wrongful conviction case could be a fantastic book from a storytelling point of view because you have unbelievable human suffering. Any time you have great suffering, you have great fiction or you have great story. But you have the injustice of it all, the unfairness of it all, the waste of life, the waste of time, the waste of money that all goes into a wrongful conviction and hopefully at the end an exoneration.
I wish I had time — I’ve thought about just collecting my top 10 innocence stories. I’ve written one, and that took me a year-and-a-half with a lot of research. I’m not a journalist and I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t really enjoy doing a lot of research for 18 months. I’d rather create fiction. But any wrongful conviction story is going to require a ton of research and I just don’t have the time for it.
But the stories are so gripping and frustrating and compelling and maddening that you want to scream, so you want to tell the story. You want to expose what’s happened here. So I catch myself angry all the time. I correspond with half-a-dozen men in prison right now in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia, people who I know are innocent. We’re pen pals. I send them letters and try to keep their spirits up. I still care about this stuff and I’m working to get them out.
So, you have this new book. Am I right that it’s set in Florida?
It is set primarily in Florida, yeah.
I’m from Florida so that caught my eye. There’s always good fodder for this type of stuff in Florida, for better or worse.
Yeah, it’s a very colorful state.
OK, so give us the tease. You already mentioned it involves some junk science and wrongful convictions.
Well, our hero is an Episcopal priest who used to be a lawyer. He’s based on a real person, the inspiration is a real person. He takes a few innocence cases and works hard to exonerate his clients. He kind of roams the country looking for clues and investigating the crimes and getting people out.
When we meet him he’s been doing it for, I think, 12 years and he has like 12 exonerations. He finally takes a case in Florida and he gets more than he bargained for. It’s a wrongful conviction in a murder case and the real murderer is still very much out there. And the real killer prefers that the wrongfully convicted guy remain in prison. So our hero gets caught in a situation where he’s not sure who’s after him, but the real killer wants him to stop what he’s doing.
