John Grisham on “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well now our next guest sits on the board of two organizations dedicated to the helping people like Yusef Salaam who were wrongly incarcerated. The Innocence Project and the Centurion Ministries. John Grisham is a bestselling author and a household name around the world. And he channels his real-life passion for justice through his legal thrillers. For his next book, he teamed up with Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey. The result is framed astonishing true stories of wrongful convictions. He joins Walter Isaacson to talk about the concept of a fair trial, the death penalty, and the flaws of interrogation.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. And, John Grisham, welcome to the show.

JOHN GRISHAM, CO-AUTHOR, “FRAMED: ASTONISHING TRUE STORIES OF WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS: Hello, Walter. How you doing? Good seeing you again.

ISAACSON: Pretty good. Pretty good. 50 number one bestselling novels you’ve written, all fiction. But about 20 some odd years ago, you wrote a piece of nonfiction called “The Innocent Man.” It’s about a baseball player wrongly convicted. And now, you’ve gone back to this again, gone back to doing a nonfiction book about people wrongly convicted. Why?

GRISHAM: Why, why, why? Same reason as the novels. It’s a great story. They’re all great stories. Every wrongful conviction is a — from a pure storytelling point of view, they’re just incredible stories because of the human suffering. Anytime you have great human suffering, you have great stories and great fiction, great nonfiction. Because of the injustice, the perseverance, the redemption, maybe a happy ending, all the elements are there, the loss, the sense of loss that these men have after spending 20 and 30 years in prison, and it was just, the stories are just — I’m drawn to the stories.

ISAACSON: Are they connected to your fiction? Because your fiction has a lot of wonderful crime tales like that, and redemption is a theme in some of them.

GRISHAM: You — I mean, that’s where I come from. That’s what I’m reading these days. I’m on the board of the Innocence Project. I have been for a long time. And now, Centurion Ministries and Princeton, two great innocence advocacies. And so, I deal with these cases. I read about these cases all the time. As Innocence advocates, we deal — we take on these cases and we all — we have cases going on all the time that we work on for years and I get familiar with the cases. If I’m lucky, I’ll then meet the exonerees once they get out, and that’s the fun part, is to talk to these guys once they survived the nightmares that most of us cannot begin to comprehend. They’re just incredible people, incredible stories.

ISAACSON: You know, there’s some news this week, which is you testified in a Texas case, along with, I think Dr. Phil McGraw. I think it was Robert Robertson, the case. And you actually have been able to get it so that he wasn’t executed.

GRISHAM: I didn’t do anything. I may have brought some attention to the case. He was scheduled to die last Thursday at 6:00 p.m. October 17th. We’ve known that for months. And as the clock counted down, and I got to know the lawyers who were involved, and there was a tremendous flurry of activity to stop the execution. It was not going to be stopped. We thought the governor may do it. He wasn’t going to do it. The A.G. wasn’t going to help. The courts weren’t going to help. And at the last minute, this this House Committee on criminal jurisprudence pulled a fast one, bipartisan committee. Was so outraged at the Roberson case and the fact that Texas had not stopped the execution that they were having hearings Wednesday and Thursday, and they issued a subpoena for Roberson, who’s been on death row for 20 years to appear before their subcommittee, October 21, but he was supposed to be executed on October 17. So, they — it was a very clever move on their part, and it was a Hail Mary, but it worked. And so, these Texas lawmakers are absolute heroes. They saved a man’s life last Thursday night. And now, the execution now is at least 90 days away and the lawyers are scrambling to get back in court. Just a fascinating story. And then, one more reason to argue that there’s no room for the death penalty in this country, the way it is applied, the way it’s used. It’s so unfair. And it ensnares innocent people.

ISAACSON: Yes, but you’ve talked about some people who ended up having committed the crimes others were accused of. Some of them horrendous. You’ve just said there’s no room for the death penalty the way it’s been applied in this country. But do you think there is some rationale for the death penalty at all?

GRISHAM: Well, no, I think from a moral point of view I’m not in favor of the death penalty. I don’t say — well, if we can all agree that killing is wrong, why do we allow the state to kill? I don’t think there’s any room in our society for killing people. But I’m in a minority in this country and I didn’t grow up with that feeling, a belief, and I tell people, my friends who are — who still favor capital punishment, you can’t favor this system. But if you wanted to do it, if you want to have a truly fair capital punished system there’s a way to design one that ensures that all the trials are fair. The Robertson case in Texas is a perfect example of a trial that was grossly unfair. He never had a chance, OK, but you can provide for fair trials. And as Americans, we always still — we at least pay lip service to the notion of fair trials. When I was a young lawyer, I always thought we had a fair trial. I lost most of my trials. But I was — you know, I was fighting for something and fighting for a fair trial. And if we could ensure fair trials, we would not see so many wrongful convictions. So, I’m opposed to it, but I respect the opinions of those people who still are in favor of it, I don’t agree with them, but, you know, there’s a way to do it better.

ISAACSON: Tell me about Jim McCloskey, your co-author. He does Centurion Ministries. How did you hook up with him and how did you all divide up the role in this book?

GRISHAM: I met him about 15 years ago. Jim founded Centurion 40 years ago. It’s not really a ministry, he was a divinity student at Princeton when he got into this work. And he named it Centurion Ministries, but it’s strictly an innocence advocacy litigation group. And in 40 years, Jim and Centurion have walked out 71 innocent people, 71. And they combined — they spent over 1,500 years in prison. He’s a true American hero. He asked me to come to Princeton for their annual family weekend when all their inmates, all their exonerees come back to town to celebrate. They bring their families and their mothers and wives and all that. And these men are there to celebrate freedom. And it’s very emotional times, very moving. It’s a great weekend. And Jim asked me 15 years ago to go to Princeton, come to Princeton that weekend and speak and hang out. And I was there with Brian Dennehy, the actor. We had a great time together that weekend. And that’s how I got to meet Jim. He’s just a wonderful human being, and one of my heroes in life.

ISAACSON: The first story you tell in the book is that of the murder of Michelle Bosko. And you write of the case that it, quote, “ranks as one of the greatest train wrecks in the history of American criminal justice.” What happened?

GRISHAM: Well, she was raped and murdered in her apartment in Norfolk, Virginia. Her husband was a sailor. It’s — all these young sailors lived in the same community in Norfolk. And the rapist murderer was a man the police should have been on to. He was guilty of other sexual assaults in the same area, but just right before this one, and right after this one, he never stopped. And he was under their nose. And while the while the police were actually at the crime scene gathering evidence and doing the proper job with, you know, the technicians and all that, the crime scene investigators, while they were doing their work in the apartment for hours, they stayed there for hours, and they did a great job and they decided right then it was — there was a soul perpetrator, only one person did this, there was semen, there was blood, there was, you know, a lot of crime scene evidence. While they were doing that, the detectives outside the apartment were already screwing up the case. They zeroed in on a neighbor, another sailor who they thought was acting suspicious, and they thought maybe he should be the killer. So, they asked him to come down to the police station for interrogation. They kept him about 15 hours and verbally — and they broke him down. And he finally gave this incredible confession that matched with none of the physical evidence. Classic case of a false confession. That was just the beginning. They went on and on and on. And when the DNA came back from the original — from the perpetrator, they ignored that. At one time — by the time they finally caught the real killer, there were seven U.S. sailors locked up, charged with capital murder, all of whom had been excluded by DNA, none of whom had criminal records other than one DUI charge. Most of them were Boy Scouts or Eagle Scouts. These are young 20-year-old sailors serving their country, and they’re in jail in Norfolk, Virginia charge with capital murder. It was just a gargantuan train wreck caused solely by the police.

ISAACSON: And it was caused by interrogation. I mean, this is one of the themes in this book, which you say interrogation is often the lazy cop’s way of solving a case. Why do they get so many false confessions?

GRISHAM: Well, because people can be vulnerable. Not everybody is as strong as you or me, you know, and we all — we everybody says, well, I would never confess to something that terrible. But one of the Norfolk four sailors told me years later, once the boys were out of prison and we, you know, got him exonerated, I was hanging out with him and one of them said during that interrogation that went on for 15 hours with no friend inside, no lawyer, no nothing. He said, I would have confessed to killing my mother just to get out of the room. It was so horrible. And that’s what these police do, not many, but some police. They know how to verbally break down suspects over a long period of time. All in one night, all without the benefit of the video camera being on, they break them down and they use all these dirty tricks. They’ll say, yes, your two buddies, your two co-defendants have already confessed and they’re blaming you, which is no lie. Cops can lie at will. They could lie excessively. They can do all the lies they want to lie during an intense interrogation. That’s the law in this country. Our Supreme Court has said they can do that, and they do it all the time.

ISAACSON: A lot of the Innocence Project dealt with DNA evidence coming in, but much of this book and much of what Mr. McCloskey does uses other types of evidence. Tell me about that.

GRISHAM: Well, there’s very few murders actually have DNA. Most murders do not have DNA. Most do not involve a sexual assault. So, you don’t have blood, semen or skin or something, you know, some kind of body fluid left behind, saliva. So, you don’t have DNA. So, what Jim McCloskey did 40 years ago was go back to the scene of the crime. He’d get the police reports, the trial transcripts, immerse himself into the case so he knew everything that was presented in court, and he would look at the police reports and start finding discrepancies in what witnesses said. He would then go knock on doors in some of the worst neighborhoods in America and say, hey, I’m so and so. 15 years ago, you testified against this guy in prison and I don’t — I mean, can we talk about your testimony? And he would start building trust with these witnesses, many of whom had lied years ago, and he would slowly put together a case. It was remarkable work. It took him years. Jim told me the average case, once he took the case, and Centurion turn — has to turn down most of them, but it would take from three to five years to investigate whether or not they would even take the case. And then, once they took the case, it would take 10 more years to win the case, to exonerate, and spend about $300,000 of money they didn’t have. They had to go raise the money. So, it’s very difficult to get somebody out of prison once they’re in. It’s fairly easy to convict somebody if you — if the police want to put together a case involving, you know, jailhouse snitches who are lying and bogus science and things like that, you can get a conviction. It’s almost impossible to get somebody out. But Jim did it the hard way without DNA. He did it with just knocking on doors and building trust.

ISAACSON: There’s all the physical evidence that sometimes gets used. I think in the Kennedy Brewer case, you write about bite marks. How good is that as a type of physical evidence and do we have standards for that?

GRISHAM: It’s terribly inaccurate. When you deal with bite mark analysis, which has been almost outlawed in almost every jurisdiction, or hair analysis, or boot mark analysis, or blood spatter analysis, these are all very dubious types of science, it’s not really science, but not based in science, but they’ve been used for years, like the shaken baby syndrome, used aggressively by U.S. prosecutors for decades. And that’s why we have so many innocent people in prison. There’s been this blood of bad science in our courtrooms. One of the goals of the Innocence Project and also Centurion is to pass a national standard of forensic science to clean up the courtrooms, to require that experts be based in science, expert opinions be based in science before they can be shown to the jury. We do a lousy job of screening that ahead of time. And you pay the price for wrongful convictions. In Mississippi involving bogus bite mark testimony that was proven to be conclusively wrong.

ISAACSON: And what should we all learn from these stories in this book?

GRISHAM: Well, for one thing, if you’re — if you ever suspect that the police suspect you have a crime, call a lawyer immediately. Don’t talk to them. That’s the golden rule right there. If you think you’re going to be interrogated or suspected, go see a lawyer, call a lawyer. Beyond that is practical advice, but also, we hope that people can read these stories and realize that there are a lot of innocent people in prison, that it can happen to anybody. These are not just, you know, street kids who got in trouble. Joe Bryan spent 35 years in prison in Texas, and he was a high school principal with two college degrees. So, it can happen to a lot of people. We hope that people read these stories and realize that you need to be suspicious of what we’re told by the police and prosecutors. You know, let’s question the authorities. Let’s don’t just accept what they say, OK? It’s OK to be skeptical. And, you know, beyond that, it’s just — it’s not entertainment, but it’s — hopefully, it raises awareness.

ISAACSON: And what changes do you think in the criminal justice system there should be?

GRISHAM: We have a package of legislation that the Innocence Project files every year in all 50 states. We make slow, slow progress. It’s very slow. For example, the huge problem of jailhouse snitches, paid informants, incentivized informants. There’s a way to handle those people that most other countries handle better with separate hearings, investigation into their testimony, but they’re a huge curse on the criminal justice system in America. Junk science, we could improve our forensic standards. We could require police to video interrogations. The video cameras are right there in the room. They use them the last 15 minutes when the person finally breaks down. Video, if you don’t want people to see it, we should prevent police from lying and will to suspects during interrogations. The lies are incredible. We should tighten up the eyewitness identification is a huge, huge problem in wrongful convictions. And there are ways to improve that. And we’ve got a whole package of ways to improve the system. And I mean, we’re slowly making progress.

ISAACSON: John Grisham, thank you so much for joining us.

GRISHAM: Thank you, Walter. My pleasure. Good seeing you again.