The Innocent Man
B OX S E T
Somewhere near the beginning of his chilling documentary, best-selling crime writer John Grisham, on whose nonfiction book the series is based, says “If
I’d written The Innocent Man as a novel, nobody would have believed it.”
The story which then unfolds through archive footage, interviews with Grisham himself and other major players in criminal investigations dating back to the early 1980s entirely supports his claim.
The setting is the unremarkable town of Ada in Oklahoma a place where nothing much out of the ordinary happens and the inhabitants are mostly decent god-fearing folk. (As one of the contributors points out – there is a church on practically every corner).
In 1982 a young woman, Debbie Carter, was found brutally murdered in her apartment. Police investigated but two years later no suspects had been found. Then two young men – both troubled, with drug, alcohol and mental health issues – were arrested. Despite their protestations of innocence and without and any strong evidence against them, they were sent to trial and convicted. One received a death sentence the other life imprisonment. In 1984 another young woman, Denice Haraway, went missing, abducted from the gas station she worked at. Once again there were no immediate suspects and two young men were arrested and eventually ‘confessed’ to the crime. It went to trial and they received life sentences. The convictions in both cases were unsafe and the series exposes these appalling miscarriages of justice, shining a light on the failings of the American criminal justice system, police and prosecutors at state and federal level.