Updated September 1, 2025 at 1:57 PM EDT
Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on Sept. 1, 2025. Click here for that audio.
John Grisham, author of thriller novels including “The Firm” and “The Pelican Brief,” has a new book with equally incredible stories.
But this time, the stories are true: A hardworking mom is doing late-night laundry when she’s an eyewitness to the aftermath of a murder. She comes forward to tell what she saw, and she’s convicted of murder. A man’s wife is murdered. The adoring husband is halfway across the state at a conference, but somehow he’s convicted of her murder and spends 35 years in jail.
Grisham is on the board of two organizations that work to free the wrongfully incarcerated, The Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries. The author teamed up with Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey on their new nonfiction book, “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.”
Grisham calls McCloskey and others working to free the wrongly convicted the true heroes. He also credits reporters who doggedly unearthed the 10 stories they tell together of men and women, Black and white, some eventually exonerated, some still behind bars, one executed for what Grisham says is a crime that never happened.
In one story that Grisham calls one of the greatest train wrecks in the American justice system, a man with a terrible home life and then a very violent life killed Michelle Bosco in Norfolk, Virginia, after raping her.
But outside the apartment, a bystander tells a detective they think a Navy sailor named Dan Williams did it. Williams becomes the prime suspect.
“Once they decided [Williams] was the man, they exclude all the evidence that does not support their belief he’s guilty, and they will grab any evidence that may support their hunch that he’s guilty,” Grisham says. “So it’s just classic tunnel vision.”
Book excerpt: ‘Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions’
By John Grisham and Jim McCloskey
Excerpted from “Framed” by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. Copyright © 2024 by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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