Ghost of the Innocent Man

Ghost of the Innocent Man
Author: Benjamin Rachlin
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-08-21
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 9780316311502

One of the Best Books of 2017: National Public Radio, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness "Remarkable . . . Captivating . . . Rachlin is a skilled storyteller." --New York Times Book Review "A gripping legal-thriller mystery . . . Profoundly elevates good-cause advocacy to greater heights--to where innocent lives are saved." --USA Today "A crisply written page turner." --NPR A gripping account of one man's long road to freedom that will forever change how we understand our criminal justice system During the last three decades, more than two thousand American citizens have been wrongfully convicted. Ghost of the Innocent Man brings us one of the most dramatic of those cases and provides the clearest picture yet of the national scourge of wrongful conviction and of the opportunity for meaningful reform. When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his innocence and the identity of the true perpetrator. These were spearheaded by his relentless champion, Christine Mumma, a cofounder of North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission. That commission--unprecedented at its inception in 2006--remains a model organization unlike any other in the country, and one now responsible for a growing number of exonerations. With meticulous, prismatic research and pulse-quickening prose, Benjamin Rachlin presents one man's tragedy and triumph. The jarring and unsettling truth is that the story of Willie J. Grimes, for all its outrage, dignity, and grace, is not a unique travesty. But through the harrowing and suspenseful account of one life, told from the inside, we experience the full horror of wrongful conviction on a national scale. Ghost of the Innocent Man is both rare and essential, a masterwork of empathy. The book offers a profound reckoning not only with the shortcomings of our criminal justice system but also with its possibilities for redemption.

Convicting the Innocent

Convicting the Innocent
Author: Brandon L. Garrett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2011-08-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0674060989

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

Redemption of the Innocent

Redemption of the Innocent
Author: B.J. Nicol
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2016-03-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1478760966

Eliza Davies is plagued by a horrible suspicion that Joey Kinkaide is being abused in her home. She has no proof; nevertheless Eliza is compelled to help the young girl. Plunging herself into a mission to rescue Joey, Eliza is stunned to find herself in need of saving, as devastating nightmares from the past emerge from her subconscious. Confronted with the now exposed truth of her own childhood experiences, Eliza must decide if she can ever forgive those who abused her. Struggling to cope with new and devastating revelations, Eliza’s world spins out of control and for the first time in her life, she begins to lose hope. However, though her own life is tilted and uncertain, she cannot give up on Joey. She must find a way to help the young girl, for in some way it seems that in rescuing Joey, she may be able to save herself. Through her own personal struggle and the one she carries on for Joey, she discovers that no matter how dark the circumstance, there is hope in forgiveness, and redemption for the innocent.

The Innocent

The Innocent
Author: David Baldacci
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0446573000

America's best hitman was hired to kill--but when a D.C. government operation goes horribly wrong, he must rescue a teenage runaway and investigate her parents' murders in this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller. It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn't seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to pull the trigger. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and is on the run. Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn't an ordinary runaway--her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can't walk away. He needs to help her. Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he's convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents' deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power. Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl's life...and perhaps his own.

Picking Cotton

Picking Cotton
Author: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2010-01-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781429962155

The New York Times best selling true story of an unlikely friendship forged between a woman and the man she incorrectly identified as her rapist and sent to prison for 11 years. Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives. With Picking Cotton, Jennifer and Ronald tell in their own words the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.

The Innocent Man

The Innocent Man
Author: John Grisham
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2010-03-16
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0307576019

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LOOK FOR THE NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES • “Both an American tragedy and [Grisham’s] strongest legal thriller yet, all the more gripping because it happens to be true.”—Entertainment Weekly John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction: a true crime masterpiece that tells the story of small town justice gone terribly awry. In the Major League draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the state of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A’s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa. In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row. If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you. Don’t miss Framed, John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction since The Innocent Man, co-authored with Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey.

Reading for Redemption

Reading for Redemption
Author: Christian R. Davis
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2011-02-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498273459

The goal of this book is to define and explain the archetypal pattern of redemption that underlies our whole notion of resolution in literature and to demonstrate, through multiple examples, that successful literature--poems and stories that have shown endurance or popularity--uses this pattern in specific ways. This theory should help readers to interpret both particular works of literature and the general notion of literature. The pattern of redemption employed here, in its ideal form, involves the sacrifice of an innocent redeemer to save something that has been lost. Because this pattern of redemption is typically associated with Christianity, this book can be taken as proposing a Christian theory of criticism. Current textbooks on literary criticism and theory cover a range of perspectives, such as Marxism, feminism, multiculturalism, reader response, and queer theory, but they invariably ignore the field of Christian criticism. Therefore, this book may be most useful as a supplementary text for courses in literary criticism that might include a Christian perspective. At the same time, however, the terms and methodology proposed here are not exclusive to or dependant on Christian beliefs, so readers of all types may find this approach useful. The greatest strength of this book is its application of the theory to numerous examples from a wide range of genres and periods of literature, testing the theory on classical and Shakespearean works such as the Iliad and Odyssey, Hamlet and Coriolanus; best sellers such as The Lord of the Rings, Le Petit Prince, Valley of the Dolls, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; horror stories such as Frankenstein; postcolonial novels such as Things Fall Apart and The Kite Runner; and lyric poems. Consequently, even readers who are skeptical of the assumptions used here should find the many concrete examples thought-provoking.

Innocent Blood

Innocent Blood
Author: John Ensor
Publisher: Cruciform Press
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2011-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1936760312

The gospel of Christ is the gospel of life, and the Christian's defining reality. Yet the shedding of innocent blood, primarily through abortion, has now marked an entire generation. Innocent Blood explores a series of questions so as to reveal vital connections between the gospel and the call to defend the unborn. These questions include: What does the Bible mean when it says that "life is in the blood"? What does the Bible say about blood-guilt? How is it that we are all stained by it and accountable for it even though few of us have taken a human life? What remedy does God provide for the guilt of shedding innocent blood? What are we to do when confronted with the shedding of innocent blood, and where does our courage to take action come from? What is the link between protecting the innocent and proclaiming good news to the guilty? Not a book on social issues per se, nor a book on missions, Innocent Blood integrates the two and calls us to courageously challenge the powers of death with the gospel of life.

The Innocent Libertine (Heirs of Acadia Book #2)

The Innocent Libertine (Heirs of Acadia Book #2)
Author: T. Davis Bunn
Publisher: Bethany House
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2004-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1585585688

Davis and his wife, Isabella, are continuing the historical saga of a pivotal time in America's past with descendants of those courageous Acadians. In The Innocent Libertine, the impulsive young American Abigail Aldridge becomes increasingly outraged by the chasm between her Christian ideals and the plight of the poor. A well-intentioned social outreach puts her right in the middle of disaster, which turns into a scandal, and soon she is on a ship headed back to America. The broad expanse of the American landscape and an encounter with a brilliant young scholar open Abbie's heart to a new understanding of her divine destiny. The sequel to the bestselling The Solitary Envoy.

Innocent Monster

Innocent Monster
Author: Reed Farrel Coleman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1440531021

When his estranged daughter Sarah comes to him with a request he cannot refuse, Moe Prager takes a deep breath and plunges back into the icy, opaque waters of secrets and lies.