Resumo de The Innocent Man: Murder And Injustice In A Small Town

In his first book of non-fiction (2006), Grisham writes of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, who were convicted of murdering twenty-one-year-old Debbie Carter at her apartment in Ada, Oklahoma.Williamson had been a high school baseball star who played unsuccessfully in the minor leagues, married and divorced, drifted from job to job, and drank. After his acquittals in Tulsa on two charges of rape, he moved back to his mother?s home in Ada, where, suffering from bipolar disorder, he slept long hours.Unlike Williamson, Fritz, from the Kansas City area, had a college education. He also had a daughter, who had been left motherless when Fritz?s wife was murdered in Durant, Oklahoma, in 1975. Several years later, he moved with his child to Ada, into the same neighborhood in which Williamson lived and to which Carter would move. Befriending Williamson in November 1981, Fritz sometimes went drinking with him, although by then Fritz was teaching and coaching in Noble, Oklahoma.Soon after Carter?s murder, which occurred before dawn on December 8, 1982, Dennis Smith of the Ada Police Department and Gary Rogers of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) decided that two or more men had committed the crime. Because of Williamson?s notoriety and the nearness of his home to Carter?s, he became a suspect by March 1983, and Fritz, because of his friendship with Williamson, became another suspect. Both submitted fingerprints and samples of their hair and saliva, and the investigation continued.Meanwhile, in 1983, Fritz lost his job in Noble when Smith told the school administration of a conviction ten years earlier in Durant for growing marijuana, a fact that Fritz had hidden when he had applied for the job. Later in 1983, Williamson added to his own troubles by committing forgery, and, after pleading guilty early in 1984, was sentenced to prison. Upon his mother?s death in 1985, he attended the funeral under guard and in chains.In the spring of 1987, District Attorney Bill Peterson had Carter?s body exhumed so that the OSBI could re-examine a palm to see whether it matched a bloody print on the wall at the crime scene. Although Agent Jerry Peters had reported in 1983 that the print belonged to neither Williamson nor Fritz nor Carter, upon his re-examination of the body he reported it was Carter?s print after all, not that of some unknown murderer. On May 8, police in Ada and Kansas City arrested Williamson and Fritz, respectively.As indigents, they received court-appointed attorneys. Williamson?s lawyer was Barney Ward, who, although experienced at criminal defense, had never before represented a client in a capital case. Blinded as a teenager, Ward possessed courtroom skill; he did not, however, want the low-paying job of defending Williamson and, bizarrely, did not raise the issue of Williamson?s mental competency. For his part, Fritz had Greg Saunders, one of Ward?s admirers, as his attorney. Neither lawyer could convince the state to pay for experts to counter those whom the prosecution would call to testify.Fritz?s trial began on April 6, 1988, before Judge Ronald Jones in the Pontotoc County Courthouse. The prosecution?s argument depended heavily on the link between Fritz and Williamson and on the scientific vocabulary that Melvin Hett, the OSBI?s hair expert, used in his testimony. Upon deliberation, the jury, including a former police chief, found Fritz guilty. The sentence was life in prison.In Williamson?s trial, which began on April 21, the prosecution first called Glen Gore as a witness, as it had in Fritz?s trial. This time, though, Gore, serving a forty-year sentence in a state prison, refused to testify, and Jones decided to have the testimony Gore gave at the preliminary hearing read to the jury: according to Gore, on the night of December 7, 1982, Carter had asked him at the Coachlight nightclub to protect her from Williamson, who was also there. Other prosecution witnesses, including Hett, cooperated at the trial, and despite Ward?s call once for a mistrial because of a Brady violation, the trial ended in conviction and a death sentence.Fritz went to the Conner Correctional Center, where he studied in the prison?s law library. Williamson went to death row in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, where his emotional instability eventually made him the victim of taunting from guards and other inmates.On May 15, 1991, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Fritz?s and Williamson?s appeals. Williamson, however, had advocates in the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, and Fritz had support from the Innocence Project. Scheduled to die on September 27, 1994, Williamson received an indefinite stay of execution from a federal judge, Frank Seay, who, along with his staff, carefully investigated the trial and found crucial mistakes. On September 19, 1995, Seay ordered a new trial for Williamson. Before any second trial was scheduled, however, more legal procedures ensued, and more time passed. Eventually, DNA testing exonerated Williamson, as well as Fritz, and implicated Gore. On April 15, 1999, in Ada, Judge Tom Landrith dismissed the charges against the two friends. Afterward, the persecuted men won a big sum through a lawsuit. Gore was tried and convicted twice for Carter?s murder and eventually sentenced to life without parole. Fritz moved back to metropolitan Kansas City; and on December 4, 2004, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, attended by his loyal sisters, Williamson died of cirrhosis of the liver? prematurely old, but free.

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