Ellington

(Unabridged interview)

Since publication of "The Innocent Man" in 2006, author John Grisham has become a strong advocate for the Innocence Project, lending his name and voice to help establish the organization's Mississippi office in Oxford. "The Innocent Man" was Grisham's first—and very likely his only—foray into the world of non-fiction. A man who has always had strong opinions about the legal system, he is even more adamant today about why it's broken and how to fix it. I spoke with him via telephone in mid-November 2007, and below is the full text of that interview.

By way of background, you talk a lot about Ron Williamson's obituary in the New York Times. What was it about that obit that drew your undivided attention?
Well, I'm always looking for stories. I find them all over the place. You know, writers steal everything. It had all the elements of a novel: the small town Southern feel to it; the small town sport hero going off to make his mark in the major leagues and failed; a grizzly murder; a wrongful conviction; a trip to death row; insanity; a near execution; exoneration; the eventual conviction of the real killer; a law suit to recover damages…

You couldn't make that up, could you?
I could not make that up, and if I did make it up, nobody would believe it. It's too rich to pass up. And then the poor guy, in a period of about five years, basically drank himself to death and died at the young age of 51. I mean, there's no way to make up stuff like that. I can't.

Draw the connection for me, if you would, between the Williamson/Fritz cases and the Innocence Project. How did you get involved?
One step followed another; nothing was planned. After I wrote the book ("The Innocent Man"), and that took 18 months, I became good friends with Dennis Fritz who helped a lot with the book. Gradually, I became aware of the huge problem we have in this country of wrongful convictions. I met other wrongfully convicted people, some have been out of prison, some are still in prison. It doesn't take too many conversations with men who are imprisoned and will probably never get out, who are innocent, to kind of flip you, to make you suddenly aware of this problem. That's what happened to me.

I know that you were actually instrumental in setting up the innocence project in Miss. Is that correct?
I was one of the players. There are other folks who got involved: Jimmy Robertson, who's a lawyer in Jackson; George Cochran who's a law professor at Ole Miss. They have been active for several years with the Innocence Project in New Orleans, which has been trying to help out in Mississippi for a number of years. There was Innocence activity, some of it going on already. We just all came together at one time with some other attorneys who were willing to write checks. The law school at Ole Miss got on board quickly; the University got behind it. (Ole Miss Chancellor) Khayat got behind it. We had our first big meeting in January of this year (2007) and we've come a long way since then.

In Mississippi specifically, are there laws or circumstances that prevent the exoneration of innocent people after they've been convicted?
I'm not sure I can answer that about specific laws. We don't have a lot of laws that other states have enacted to help prevent wrongful convictions or to help inmates who have claims of actual innocence, or to help actual exonerees once they walk out. For example, there are seven states in this country still, where a criminal defendant does not have access to DNA testing. Mississippi is one of them. That's the first piece of legislation we're going to try to enact. It's so common now throughout the country, and police, good cops, are using DNA to solve crimes and exclude potential defendants. It's just a routine practice now in so many areas. If a criminal defendant in a DNA case is screaming that he's innocent—which believe me, does not always happen—in most cases, I think the cops get the right guy. The defendant knows it. He's got a lawyer; they cut a deal, they plea bargain and goes off to prison or pays his penalty, whatever it is. That's what happens in virtually all the cases. But when you've got a defendant who is adamantly claiming that he is innocent and he can prove it with DNA, we ought to be able to run the test and pay for it and make sure. But we don't have that in Mississippi right now and we need to get that.

Are you familiar with the Public Records Act?
Vaguely.

I don't want to ask you anything that you're vague about. The other part of the puzzle, I think, may the evidence preservation.
Right.

I know that there's a serious problem as well with that.
It's a huge problem and there are a lot of people… there are a lot of guys at Parchman right now who have been there for many years who have claims of innocence that should be pursued, but the evidence is not there. There may have been DNA cases 20 years ago, but the evidence is gone. Those are hopeless cases. And it's not just in Mississippi, that's everywhere.

You were a legislator, right? As a legislator, how can the people of Mississippi get there voice heard? What would be the best way for a citizen who learns about this problem … what do we do now?
You've got to start with the legislature. You've got to have someone like the Innocence Project as an advocate for change. And that's what we are trying to become. It's now the middle of November, and I'm not sure we're going to get a lot of legislation put together by the January session, so we're looking down the road to maybe '09 to present a package of legislation that can help stop wrongful convictions. That has to do with certain aspects of police procedure and things like that, presentation of evidence at trial, DNA testing, obviously—there are several elements to that package, and a lot of those have been enacted by the states—but also to help process post-conviction claims, inmates who are claiming innocence. As a last resort, once we are able to exonerate these men, almost always men, some type of compensation package to get them back on their feet. These guys are cast out with almost nothing. And there has been very little innocence activity in Mississippi compared to other states. It's something new. It's something we're trying to raise awareness of right now and build an Innocence Project that can receive the letters from Parchman and act on them. It just hasn't happened.

I believe Cedric Willis is the only one in Mississippi who's been able to get an exoneration.
I don't know that he's the only one, but there have not been many. I'm afraid what's going to have to happen, if you ask about public opinion, it's a very hard sell in a lot of jurisdictions.

Why do you think that is?
Just resistance to change. A lot of it is race based. I mean, the white community does not believe it's a problem. That's true in a lot of states, not just Mississippi. If you go into the black community, they know. They know someone who's been pushed around, abused or wrongfully convicted. I have a lot of white friends and relatives—I guess all my relatives are white, [chuckles] the ones I know of—I talk to these people and they just don't think it's that much of a problem. What we've got to do first is convince the people that there's a problem with the system. There's a problem with having hundreds of innocent people at Parchman right now. There's a problem with the system and the way cases are investigated and tried. What's happens, though, in many jurisdictions is that change comes so slowly. And this has found resistance all over the country—again, it's not just the deep South. People don't acknowledge the fact that we do convict innocent people. What happens is that first you have the exonerations—and they're high profile. Then you have the lawsuits, like Cedric's. Then you have the settlements, and they can be huge. And then the taxpayers pick up the bill for that. Finally, when people get tired of all the lawsuits and the embarrassment from so many wrongful convictions, then you might bring about change. I hope that's not what it's going to take in Mississippi, but that's been the case in many states.

It sounds like a long, painful process.
It is. It's very difficult to change public opinion. Again, you have to start with a very active Innocence Project because nobody else is going to do it. Every case is resisted by the prosecutor, by the cops, even by the judge. The system does not want to deal with wrongful convictions, so you have to have a very aggressive Innocence Project to work the cases up and begin to slowly getting the Cedrics of the world out of prison. That's what it takes.

One of the things that people are talking right now is the death penalty—there's a case in front of the Supreme Court about lethal injection. People are saying we ought to put a moratorium on executions until we fix the system, then reinstate them after we figure out how to kill them and do it without undue pain. What's your position on that?
I'm morally opposed to the death penalty under any system. I tell my friends who support it, "We've had 130 men, inmates, sent to death row to be executed who have later been exonerated." That shows you right there that the system is horribly broken. What I would do is say, "OK, if you want a death penalty system, then here's how you fix it." There are certain steps you can take to make sure that the defendant has a fair trial. It all goes back to basic constitutional rights to a fair trial. These are not fair trials; the field is not level by any means. You take it away from the local prosecutor. You have the crime screened by a non-partisan, state-wide commission that is comprised of former judges, lawyers and law professors—people who know what's going on. If it appears to be a true capital case—and most of them are, most of them are—then you set up for trial someplace far away from where the crime happened, and you have a team of professional criminal defense lawyers and a team of professional prosecutors show up, each with the same budget, and have a fair trial. And still, I think in Mississippi, probably seven times out of ten, you're still going to have a guilty verdict—probably have a death verdict—but you guaranteed that it was a fair trial. You cut down on 20 years of appeals and you save millions of dollars. That system right there saves the taxpayers millions of dollars and virtually guarantees no wrongful convictions. It's that simple, but it would be very difficult to get that approved.

What about the judges? Do you think the fact that we elect our judges in Mississippi has an influence on how these cases are turning out? Do you think that's an issue?
Well, my next book that comes out in January and it's about elected judges in Mississippi, so…

I'm psychic.
That's a real hot-button right now for me. If you're going to have judicial elections, you've got to take the private money out, because it becomes corrupt, for lack of a better term. There's just so much money that goes into these races, trying to buy seats on the Supreme Court. And the local judges are subject to political pressure if they're elected. When there's a horrendous murder in Vicksburg, Miss., the judge is going to be very careful about bending over backwards to make sure the defendant has equal rights. That's just human nature. I don't like elected judges, anywhere. There's a much better system of screening them and appointing them and, no—a long winded answer to your question—I don't believe in elected judges.

Is there something that judges can do in these cases to make the field a little more level?
Oh my gosh… there's dozens of things they can do. I mean, the judge is supposed to be the impartial referee that insures a fair trial. To do that, he should first of all guarantee that the defendant has a good lawyer. They're not always easy to find when you're defending indigent people. You can't always find a lot of good defense lawyers to take the cases because there's no money. So you start off with the lawyer who's maybe not that experienced and not that well paid. A lot of judges refuse to give the defendants access to certain experts. The state may have a fingerprint expert, but the defendant can't get one—he certainly can't afford one. The state has the authority to give him one, but it costs a lot of money, so often times that's denied. And even at trial, there's so much junk science testimony that is allowed.

For example?
Hair analysis. Autopsy reports by county coroners who will bend and shape the evidence to suit whatever the prosecutor wants and testify way outside the scope of their expertise, and that testimony is allowed. The judges should know better.

Eye-witness testimony, for example is notoriously unreliable. Juries lean to believe that, correct?
They are. By the time you get to trial, if you have a rape victim and she sits there and points a finger at the guy and says, "He raped me," that's very, very powerful stuff. And that's right about half the time. Frankly, especially if it's a black on white rape, the victim is so traumatized—and most of them happen at night—it's very difficult to make a positive I.D.

Do you think judges should give that instruction, should tell juries, inform them that they're notoriously unreliable?
You've got to fix it before you get to the trial. The identification, the lineup process that the police use is often manipulated. You've got to have a fair lineup system and that goes back to good police work vs. bad police work. Those problems have got to be worked out long before you get to trial.

In our system right now, there's no remedy if there's willful misconduct on the part of police or prosecutors. Should we be able to sue those people?
Well, that's going to start happening. Once we have the exonerations you're going to see the lawsuits. A lot of these are civil rights lawsuits. The litigation is coming. Litigation follows exonerations. Look at Cedric's case. It's inevitable. They're very, very difficult lawsuits to maintain, but some of the settlements are going to be lucrative, so you'll have lawyers taking these cases. Certainly, for willful misconduct— I mentioned the figure of 130 exonerees on death row who walked off? 80 percent of those cases, and they've done studies, 80 percent of those cases involved willful misconduct by police or prosecutors. So these aren't just good-faith mistakes made by cops. These are horrible examples of willful misconduct. If you spent 10, 15, 20 years in prison because a cop hid evidence, or fabricated evidence, you're going to want to sue, you're going to want to be compensated. And they should be able to.

Speaking of lawsuits, you're in a libel suit (over "The Innocent Man").
Yeah. My latest lawsuit. It's certainly not the first, and it won't be the last.

I'm not going to ask you to say anything specific about the suit, but the (Ada, Okla.) prosecutor, Peterson, do you think that he honestly believes he's still in the right, or do you think he's just grand-standing at this point?
Tough to say, and I really can't comment on it. The lawyers have finally shut me up about commenting on the lawsuit, so I better not say anything.

Got it, OK. I know George Clooney bought the rights to "The Innocent Man" last year.
Bought the rights to "The Innocent Man," and the screenwriter was working hard until he went on strike, so I have no idea where that project is. The thing about the moves—I learned this the hard way—you don't ever get excited until you see the movie in the theater, because there's so many things that can go wrong.

You've already told me about your new book. Can't wait to see it.
It's called "The Appeal." It comes out on Jan. 29. It's a lot of Mississippi politics and legal intrigue. It takes place in Mississippi, yeah, it was a lot of fun to write.

I saw an interview on Amazon where you said that non-fiction was too hard.
(laughing) Too much work! You've got to do research, you have to be accurate, which is not one of my strong points. I'd rather make stuff up and just create, you know? Non-fiction is brutal. I had to hire a full-time research assistant just to plow through all the documents and keep everything straight. I knew that litigation was likely, so I was extremely careful. That's why I'm not concerned now, but it's a lot of work. I'm just too lazy to write non-fiction.

So nothing in that future for you, huh?
I can't imagine another non-fiction book in my future. I have way too much fun with the novels.

One of the things we do here at the Free Press is give opportunities to young writers. We have a number of interns either in school or just out of school. I'd love it if you could give me a little bit of advice that I could pass on to them.
You know, it's very, very simple. If you want to write a book as opposed to magazine stories, or whatever, if you want to write a book, until you are writing at least one page a day in this book, you're never going to get anywhere. A page a day and in one year you've finished the book. It's that simple. That's the only advice I ever give to anybody.

That simple and that tough, right?
That simple and that tough. Yeah.

Anything else you want to add?
You know, the only thing I can possibly think of is that there's a direct correlation between the amount of money raised and spent with an Innocence Project and the number of people you can get out of prison. We need financial support from all those folks who are so inclined.

Alrighty…
If you have any more questions, zip 'em along in e-mail and I'll answer them.

OK. Thank you so much.
See 'ya!

Previous Comments

ID

82167

Comment

Very good job, Ronni. The Innocent Man is the only book of John Grisham that I have taken the time to read although I have 9 or 10 of his books. It's quite appalling what happened to the 2 main characters (Willams and Fritz). The situations show what a depraved, dishonest and win-at-all-cost prosecutor is capable of. It takes courage, determination, imagination, creativity, great debating skills and inventiveness as well as some mastery of the law to handle these kinds of cases. And even when you succeed you have to bear the community hate from lots of people. Upon being asked how do I deal with the community fallout or hatred. I simply say I'm a black man in America and likely will be talked about anyway no matter what I do. So instead of being seen as weaak or worthless or cavalierly written off or counted out, I figure it's a better idea to give my haters something else to talk about and to provide a very needed service to mankind at the same time. As far as I'm concerned, I'm doing the Lord's work by trying to save lives. Anti-death penalty work is not an easy gig by any stretch and somebody able has to do it. If the prosecutors are to succeed at killing a person they shouldn't be able to do it without first surviving a scorch the earth or knock down and drag out fight.

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2008-01-11T14:16:14-06:00

ID

82168

Comment

Starting Monday, January 14, 2008, in the circuit court of Lauderdale County, Mississippi, our nerves, abilities, survival instincts and creativity will again be tested with a defendant charged with killing 2 police officers form Wiggins, Mississippi. As is usually the case, we wil be outgunned and outnumbered. Yet we will courageously pick up our sticks and rocks and go to battle against the giant and weapons of mass destruction without pause. If the giant stumbles, looks off or isn't ready for battle, we will throw our rocks and sticks and hopefully hit it between the eyes and survive another day. But please don't cry for us, Argentina!

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2008-01-11T15:03:18-06:00

ID

82169

Comment

WOW! Great job Ronni and good luck Ray as you embark on your fight with the elephant. Just remember that all it takes is one tinny, tiny rat to run up his trunk.

Author

justjess

Date

2008-01-14T13:51:32-06:00

ID

82170

Comment

WOW! Great job Ronni and good luck Ray as you embark on your fight with the elephant. Just remember that all it takes is one tinny, tiny rat to run up his trunk.

Author

justjess

Date

2008-01-14T13:51:33-06:00