‘Ghost of the Innocent Man’: True-life tale of utter injustice
On a quiet October night in 1987, Carrie Elliott answered a knock on her door. The 69-yearold widow hesitated, not expecting visitors that late at her public housing home in Hickory, N.C. As she cracked the door open, a stranger shoved his way inside, raped her, soon after raped her again, then fled.
Benjamin Rachlin’s debut book, Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption (Little, Brown, 400 pp., eeeE), begins with an account of that disturbing sexual assault. It shifts immediately to the flawed trial of Willie Grimes, a black man who at age 41 was convicted of the crime based on shoddy police work and mistaken eyewitness testimony. An innocent man, Grimes spent more than 24 years in prison.
This book is a fine piece of investigative journalism, but don’t get your hopes up for a truecrime read. Nothing about Grimes’ arrest was true; nothing about his trial and conviction were true. That’s the book’s point: Wrong convictions happen.
Rachlin shuffles into Grimes’ tale the story of North Carolina attorney Christine Mumma and her heroic quest to establish North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission, the nation’s first state agency created to exonerate wrongly convicted people.
Of course, early on, Grimes’ case lands on Mumma’s desk. So do other troubling cases — many of them establishing beyond reasonable doubt that America’s justice system suffered from a grievous glitch.
At times, the momentum of Rachlin’s otherwise compelling storytelling bogs down with inordinate detailing and reads a little too much like tedious courtroom transcripts. His realistic picture of Grimes’ tormenting prison years is intriguing until mundane minutiae, including clinical assessment documents and redundant failed appeals, overburden the narrative and make the reader want to call out “Objection!”
This level of detail will captivate certain readers. It will turn off others whose desire for an entertaining wrongful-conviction tale may be better served by something less encumbered, like
John Grisham’s non-fiction account The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town.
Yet, like Grisham’s book, this is story that profoundly elevates good-cause advocacy to greater heights — to where innocent lives are saved. By its end, Ghost of the Innocent Man becomes a gripping legal-thriller/mystery about how to free Willie Grimes, a prisoner everyone knows is innocent but who is still incarcerated.
The book’s title? Famous American judge and judicial philosopher Learned Hand wrote in
1923 that the courts had been “haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted,” arguing that “watery sentiment” obstructs the prosecution of crime. The counterargument, evident in Rachlin’s book, is that every wrongful conviction that is reversed potentially puts the real criminal behind bars.
In 2012, largely because of Mumma’s persistence, a threejudge panel set Grimes free.
In the past 20 years, more than
2,000 Americans have been wrongfully convicted. This empathetic book tells the story of the beginnings of the movement to right a national crisis of wrongful convictions — and of one of its first victories.