Brown Bag Book Discussion

Sandy Miller will lead a discussion of John Grisham and Jim McCloskey's book Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions. Participants are encouraged (but not required) to read the book in advance. Ask for a copy at the library’s information desk.

From Publisher's Weekly:

Bestseller Grisham teams up with Centurion Ministries founder McCloskey, whose nonprofit works to exonerate wrongly accused individuals, to tell 10 such stories in this gripping account. In alternating chapters, Grisham and McCloskey cover cases with a variety of stakes and backgrounds—some involve forced confessions, others faulty forensics. Most chilling is the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man convicted of killing his three daughters by setting fire to their house, who was executed in 2004, just before a new forensics report went public, confirming that the lethal fire wasn’t arson. Not all the stories are so bleak: Grisham opens with a detailed account of the “Norfolk Four,” Navy sailors who were given nearly $5 million by the Virginia government in 2017 after their wrongful convictions for a rape and murder. Elsewhere, McCloskey traces the decades-long saga of soldier Mark Jones and his friends, who were exonerated of a murder that took place on the night of Jones’s 1992 bachelor party. Both men deliver a series of thoroughly researched spellbinders. The results are equal parts fascinating and infuriating.