Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Ghost of the Innocent Man
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.benjaminrachlin.com/
CITY: Boston
STATE: MA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-rachlin-1b348771/ * https://www.npr.org/2017/08/13/542062535/ghost-of-the-innocent-man-chronicles-justice-too-long-delayed
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017101751
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017101751
HEADING: Rachlin, Benjamin
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670 __ |a Ghost of the innocent man, 2017 : |b title page (Benjamin Rachlin) ; jacket flap (his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Time, and elsewhere. He lives near Boston.)
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, B.A.; University of North Carolina Wilmington.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Bowdoin College, Sinkinson Prize; University of North Carolina Wilmington, Schwartz and Brauer fellowships.
WRITINGS
Contributor of nonfiction to periodicals, including New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Time.
SIDELIGHTS
New Englander Benjamin Rachlin writes nonfiction and historical crime books. He grew up in New Hampshire and earned a degree in English from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he received the Sinkinson Prize. He also studied writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he won Schwartz and Brauer fellowships. He has published nonfiction in various outlets, including New York Times Magazine, Time, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Rachlin lives in the Boston, Massachusetts area.
Rachlin’s debut book is Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption, which National Public Radio, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, and Shelf Awareness have all called one of the Best Books of 2017. Rachlin’s analysis of a miscarriage of justice centers on a North Carolina case of forty-one-year-old African American Willie J. Grimes who in 1988 was wrongfully convicted of first-degree rape of a sixty-nine-year-old widow and sentenced to life imprisonment. Later investigation revealed botched evidence, suspect testimony, erroneous identification, incompetence, refusal to believe Grimes’ alibis, concealed evidence pointing to a known local criminal, and complete lack of physical evidence tying Grimes to the crime that led to his conviction. Over the years, he refuses to admit to the crime and admitting to be a sex offender, an admission that would have hastened his release.
Rachlin provides the determination to prove Grimes’ innocence through the heroic efforts of attorney Christine Mumma, cofounder of the North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission, established in 2006. After enduring twenty-four years of physical and psychological abuse in prison, Grimes is finally released and exonerated. Unfortunately, the story is all too common as over the last thirty years, more than two thousand Americans have been exonerated from wrongful conviction. Ghost of an Innocent Man provides hope for an overhaul of the flawed American criminal justice system. “Rachlin combines a gripping legal drama with a penetrating exposé of the shoddy investigative and trial standards nationwide,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. In a review in Library Journal, Kate Sheehan said: “Grimes’s story is both compelling and enraging, and his thoughtfulness and persistence propel the story.” Sheehan added that the book aimed at readers interested in social justice, legal history, and civil rights.
Noting the emotional whiplash the book provides, Edward Morris said in BookPage: “Rachlin fits the North Carolina reforms into the national thrust to free the wrongly convicted, especially with the advent of DNA testing.” Ably managing a complex narrative, “Rachlin builds to this cinematic conclusion with empathetic, thorough (if sometimes gradually paced) prose and solid investigative detail. A sprawling, powerful, unsettling longitudinal account of an overdue legal movement,” according to a writer in Kirkus Reviews. Writing in Booklist, Annie Bostrom noted how Rachlin recounts in his debut book “the terrifying personal costs and complex legalities, so dependent on fallible humans, of wrongful conviction and imprisonment.”
Describing the scope and accomplishment of Rachlin’s book, Martha Anne Toll explains on the National Public Radio Website: “How to convey those hopeless years behind bars for crimes not committed; evidence unlawfully withheld, botched police investigations, mistaken identity, false testimony, racial bias skewing every level of the process, errors compounding errors? Benjamin Rachlin’s Ghost of the Innocent Man tackles this challenge.” Praising Rachlin’s careful reporting, New York Times contributor Alex Kotlowitz said: “Where Rachlin fully succeeds is in his rich, intimate portrait of Grimes, who is isolated and alone, whose soul is cracking. With understatement and painstaking reporting, Rachlin introduces us to Grimes, and the slow piling of one humility on top of another.” According to Dennis Drabelle online at Washington Post: “In Rachlin’s skilled hands, Grimes’s story triggers indignation but also confers solace, Grimes being one of the solacing features.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption, p. 4.
BookPage, August, 2017, Edward Morris, review of Ghost of the Innocent Man, p. 26.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Ghost of the Innocent Man.
Library Journal, September 1, 2017, Kate Sheehan, review of Ghost of the Innocent Man, p. 135.
Publishers Weekly, May 8, 2017, review of Ghost of the Innocent Man, p. 46.
ONLINE
Benjamin Rachlin Website, http://www.benjaminrachlin.com (February 1, 2018), author profile.
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (October 27, 2017), Alex Kotlowitz, review of Ghost of the Innocent Man.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (August 13, 2017), Martha Anne Toll, review of Ghost of the Innocent Man.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (September 8, 2017), Dennis Drabelle, review of Ghost of the Innocent Man.
Print Marked Items
Ghost Of the innocent man
Edward Morris
BookPage.
(Aug. 2017): p26.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
Ready yourself for emotional whiplash as Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and
Redemption, Benjamin Rachlin's account of a man wrongly convicted of rape, seesaws from scenes of
judicial haste, incompetence and indifference to episodes of sublime compassion and legal professionalism.
In 1987 near Hickory, North Carolina, a 69-year-old, white widow answered a knock at her door. A black
man she didn't recognize rushed in and raped her twice before leisurely helping himself to some fruit from
her kitchen and walking away. Through police negligence and mishandling of evidence, 41-year-old Willie
Grimes was convicted of the crime and sentenced to life plus nine years. Although the victim identified
Grimes as her attacker, her identification was contradictory, and there were no physical markers linking him
to the crime.
But just when the reader is prepared to write off North Carolina as a legal snake pit, Rachlin shifts his
narrative to a group of lawyers, law professors, judges and prosecutors who, on their own time, form a
committee aimed at making trials fairer and freeing the innocent. They are led by Christine Mumma, who
put herself through law school and has the instincts and resourcefulness of a street fighter. Together they
create the Innocence Inquiry Commission, which is eventually recognized and funded by the state.
Grimes remained in various state prisons for 24 years, refusing to confess to the crime even though doing so
would have led to his early release. Rachlin recounts in heartbreaking detail the physical and psychological
agonies Grimes suffered before finding a measure of relief in becoming a Jehovah's Witness. Finally, with
Mumma acting as his attorney, Grimes was exonerated of all charges. Rachlin fits the North Carolina
reforms into the national thrust to free the wrongly convicted, especially with the advent of DNA testing.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Little, Brown
$27, 400 pages
ISBN 9780316311496
eBook available
LAW
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Morris, Edward. "Ghost Of the innocent man." BookPage, Aug. 2017, p. 26. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499345400/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2410ff37.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499345400
Rachlin, Benjamin: GHOST OF THE
INNOCENT MAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rachlin, Benjamin GHOST OF THE INNOCENT MAN Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 8, 15
ISBN: 978-0-316-31149-6
A chilling story of wrongful conviction, focused on one man's ordeal, and the growth of the movement to
support actual innocence.In his debut book, Rachlin ably manages a complex narrative. In 1988, when the
author's subject, Willie Grimes, was tried for a horrific sexual assault in North Carolina, "no one had any
clue how often [somebody] was wrongfully convicted in America, or where, or how long he spent
imprisoned." Grimes was convicted based on a slipshod investigation and erroneous identification by an
elderly, traumatized victim despite numerous witnesses to his alibi and nonviolent character. He began
serving his life sentence in disbelief, eventually becoming a Jehovah's Witness while always insisting upon
his innocence. Rachlin alternates between this slow tale of Grimes' unjust imprisonment (he would serve
over 20 years) and the greater narrative of a growing consensus that protections against such convictions
were inadequate. A commission was formed by several lawyers and one conservative judge who had come
to realize that "wrongful conviction was a national problem...it ought to concern everyone." This
acknowledgement was partly due to the first cases of DNA exoneration, which shook the public's trust in
policing, but Rachlin particularly focuses on the determination of attorney Christine Mumma to expose the
reality of wrongful conviction: "The doubts she felt now were not technicalities. It was ludicrous to think
the courts couldn't distinguish between basic guilt and innocence." Mumma championed a law empowering
the Innocence Inquiry Commission to hear wrongful conviction petitions, the first of its kind. Following an
intensive investigation by the IIC into Grimes' claim, which included discovery of concealed fingerprint
evidence that pointed to the likely perpetrator, a well-known local criminal inexplicably excluded in the
initial investigation, Grimes was cleared by the IIC judicial panel. Rachlin builds to this cinematic
conclusion with empathetic, thorough (if sometimes gradually paced) prose and solid investigative detail. A
sprawling, powerful, unsettling longitudinal account of an overdue legal movement.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rachlin, Benjamin: GHOST OF THE INNOCENT MAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427405/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=666249ee. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427405
Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of
Trial and Redemption..
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption.
By Benjamin Rachlin.
Aug. 2017.400p. Little, Brown, $27 (9780316311496). 345.
In small-town Hickory, North Carolina, 1987, Willie Grimes heard that the police were looking for him and
went straight to the station to clear up a certain misconception. Instead, he was arrested on the spot; soon
tried and convicted, with a startling lack of evidence, of raping a 67-year-old woman; and sentenced to life
imprisonment. For the next 25 years, Willies physical and mental health deteriorate as he's shuffled
endlessly through the system and denied parole because he won't accept responsibility for the crime he
didn't commit. Interspersed with Willie's absorbing story, written with close access to case records and
Willie himself, Rachlin follows the long road to the 2006 formation of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry
Commission, a state entity uniquely devoted to reviewing claims of innocence and exonerating the
wrongfully convicted, and the many people who made it happen. In his moving first book, Rachlin, with
confidence and care, relays both the terrifying personal costs and complex legalities, so dependent on
fallible humans, of wrongful conviction and imprisonment.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption." Booklist, 1 July
2017, p. 4. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862620/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e2f6ffb2. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862620
Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of
Trial and Redemption
Publishers Weekly.
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption
Benjamin Rachlin. Little, Brown, $27 (400p)
ISBN 978-0-316-31149-6
Justice is unconscionably delayed in this absorbing true-crime saga. Rachlin's debut recounts the case of
Willie James Grimes, a North Carolina man sentenced to life in prison for rape in 1988. Despite having a
competent lawyer and a strong alibi, Grimes was convicted on forensic analysis of a hair found at the crime
scene and on the victim's seemingly ironclad--as far as the jury knew--identification. Without procedural
errors to appeal and with the physical evidence apparently lost after the trial, the attempts to prove Grimes's
innocence hit a judicial brick wall, resulting in a decades-long stay for Grimes in North Carolina's prison
system. Rachlin weaves Grimes's Kafkaesque ordeal--Grimes's chance at parole hinged on his confessing
guilt--together with the efforts of lawyer Christine Mumma and other reformers to establish North Carolina's
Innocence Inquiry Commission, an innovative state agency that investigates potential wrongful convictions.
Rachlin combines a gripping legal drama with a penetrating expose of the shoddy investigative and trial
standards nationwide, as evidenced by hundreds of postconviction exonerations. Finally, as Grimes moves
beyond anger and despair over his plight, Rachlin's narrative offers a moving evocation of faith under
duress. Photos. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 46.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949104/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2a88cfc4. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949104
Sheehan, Kate
Library Journal. 9/1/2017, Vol. 142 Issue 14, p135-136. 2p.
Rachlin, Benjamin. Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption. Little, Brown. Aug. 2017. 400p. photos. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780316311496. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780316311489. CRIME
Journalist Rachlin’s account of the founding of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission and the heartbreaking case of Willie J. Grimes, wrongly convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison, leaves readers wondering why more states haven’t followed this model, instead relying on nonprofits such as the Innocence Project to find and free the innocent. North Carolina’s neutral state agency can subpoena evidence and testimony and refers cases to a panel of judges with the power to exonerate. Grimes’s story is both compelling and enraging, and his thoughtfulness and persistence propel the story as much as the determination and passion of the lawyers working to establish the Commission. Grimes was convicted without adequate checks on the evidence collected, and his exoneration was delayed by the disposal and poor tracking of what evidence remained. VERDICT This sobering account of both a wrongful conviction and the structural impediments to fixing miscarriages of justice (with a gut punch of a closing paragraph) is for readers and book groups interested in social justice, legal history, and civil rights. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]
'Ghost Of The Innocent Man' Chronicles Justice Too Long Delayed
August 13, 20177:00 AM ET
MARTHA ANNE TOLL
Ghost of the Innocent Man
A True Story of Trial and Redemption
66
Innocence cases spotlight the many corruptions of our justice system: Mistakes beget mistakes — some intentional, some not. An epic bureaucracy protects a deeply flawed system. Thousands are wrongfully convicted. The National Registry of Exonerations calculates that over 18,000 years have been lost by innocent people serving time.
How to convey those hopeless years behind bars for crimes not committed; evidence unlawfully withheld, botched police investigations, mistaken identity, false testimony, racial bias skewing every level of the process, errors compounding errors? Benjamin Rachlin's Ghost of the Innocent Man tackles this challenge through the case of Willie J. Grimes. A crisply written page turner, Rachlin's book reports from two perspectives: Grimes' personal tragedy, and the story of North Carolina's criminal justice system sluggishly lumbering toward the acknowledgment that innocent people might be incarcerated.
In 1987 Grimes was a textile worker who had a second job delivering furniture. He had no money, but his life was far from impoverished. He was close to family and friends, and had a long-term girlfriend. Then, a 69-year-old widow named Carrie Elliott was raped in her Hickory, N.C. home. With the incentive of a $1,000 reward, Elliott's neighbor falsely accused Grimes; despite a seemingly airtight alibi and no record of violent crime, he was arrested and charged. His physical features didn't match the victim's description: Grimes had missing fingertips, a large raised scar below his collarbone, and was 35 pounds lighter than the assailant. DNA analysis was in its infancy, and Grimes' lawyer's request for it was ignored. Grimes was convicted and sentenced to life.
Rachlin painstakingly renders Grimes' life behind bars. He's angry and lonely and depressed. He loses his appeal. He works with a jailhouse lawyer, then becomes one himself. He writes endless letters, begging people to take up his cause. He's transferred from prison to prison and back again, signing up for every program that will demonstrate he's a model prisoner, advance his 12th-grade education, and better his chances for parole. His siblings die; he loses his friends. Frequent psychological tests note he's "still" protesting his innocence. He develops prostate cancer. He joins the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Months, years, decades go by. Grimes arrives at a truth:
"Nothing in a world like this could be relied on; it was all only chance. He grasped now he had been wrong to think some influential person might help him. There was no such person, there was no such influence. He could trust no one and nothing but himself."
Meanwhile, a parallel story inches forward. Activist Christine Mumma has a hunch that all is not right with North Carolina's justice system. Like Grimes, she's in it for the long game. She goes to law school and becomes an advocate — a dog with a bone when it comes to the perils of false convictions — and finds a champion in North Carolina's conservative Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake. While Grimes languishes behind bars, there are heroes on the outside, lawyers and judges who care about the integrity and trustworthiness of the courts. They're paying attention to high profile exonerations around the country, and recognize that "an innocent person can be convicted even when no one did anything wrong."
Deploying the same precision with which he documents Grimes' prison life, Rachlin recounts the arduous and complex work to move the wheels of justice. 19 years after Grimes' arrest, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill to establish an Innocence Inquiry Commission; Chris Mumma's fingerprints were all over it.
Read Rachlin's Ghost of the Innocent Man to follow the twisted path that led Chris Mumma to pick up Grimes' file, ultimately exposing the use of outdated photos to mis-identify the perpetrator, the failure to fingerprint relevant parts of the crime scene, exculpatory evidence destroyed, contorted "science" involving a single hair, and more.
But don't read for the gripping story alone. Willie Grimes spent 24 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit, while the real perpetrator continued to offend. Shouldn't we be better than this?
A Quarter of a Century Behind Bars, for a Crime He Didn’t Commit
By Alex Kotlowitz
October 29, 2017,
On a fall evening in 1987, in the town of Hickory, N.C., 69-year-old Carrie Elliott, a recent widow, answered a knock at the door. It was a stranger who forced his way in and then raped her, twice. Elliott, who was all of five feet tall and 90 pounds, paid attention to the features of her assailant, and later picked a man named Willie Grimes out of a lineup, telling a police sergeant, “I will never forget his face.” Moreover, her neighbor told the police she knew who did it, someone who matched the victim’s description, and gave the police the name of Grimes. What Grimes and his attorney didn’t know is the neighbor received a $1,000 reward for that information. At the trial, six people confirmed Grimes’s alibi, testifying that they were with him the night of the crime. When asked to point out her rapist in court Elliott first pointed to his attorney. Nonetheless, Grimes was convicted and sentenced to natural life in prison.
In “Ghost of the Innocent Man,” Benjamin Rachlin has taken this far-too-commonplace story — far-too-commonplace because it happens so often — and spun out a captivating, intimate profile of one man’s stubbornly persistent efforts to convince others of his innocence. It took a quarter of a century. Alongside Grimes’s story, Rachlin also chronicles a young lawyer’s efforts to create one of the nation’s first state-sponsored agencies dedicated to looking at claims of innocence.
Rachlin is a skilled storyteller, but what’s not sufficiently clear is why he chose to tell this particular story. Over the past 28 years and as of this writing, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been 2,102 people whom the courts or government officials have found to be wrongfully convicted. Some of these cases have been the subjects of newspaper series, books and documentary films, often because there’s something larger at stake than an individual’s guilt or innocence. After reading The Chicago Tribune’s series on questionable convictions in death penalty cases, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois was so shaken that days before his term ended he commuted the sentences of all 171 people on death row, converting their terms to life sentences. The documentary “The Central Park Five” traced the ultimate exoneration of five black and Latino teenagers who were convicted of beating and raping a white woman jogging in the park. Four of the boys had confessed to the crime, and the case came to be shaped by the undertow of race. (Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads in four New York City dailies calling for the return of the death penalty, and more recently has said he’s still convinced they were involved in the rape.) Or there’s the case of Ronald Cotton, which Rachlin briefly recounts. Cotton was convicted of raping two women, one of whom identified him from photos and then from a lineup. After 10 years in prison, DNA evidence cleared him — and pointed to the real rapist. Cotton ended up meeting his accuser, who asked for forgiveness. The two became friends, and ended up writing a book together, “Picking Cotton,” which speaks to the problems with eyewitness testimony.
The story of Willie Grimes unfolds at the same time that DNA testing is introduced as a tool in criminal cases, which, of course, changed so much. It’s what freed the teenagers who had falsely confessed to the rape in Central Park. But interestingly DNA played no role in Grimes’s case — though not for lack of trying. The police, inexplicably, destroyed most of the evidence after the trial. While race may have been a factor, it did not seem to be the singular factor. Both Grimes and the actual rapist were African-American, as was the lead detective. Nor was Grimes’s conviction a result of ineffective or derelict counsel. In fact, his defense attorney fully believed in his innocence, so much so that he didn’t think the case would even make it to trial. Grimes’s conviction, in the end, appears to have been the result of sloppy and lazy police work, and as a reader I’m not sure what to take away from this. Rachlin works hard at trying to place Grimes’s predicament in context, dedicating nearly half the book to chronicling the efforts to form the state’s Innocence Inquiry Commission, a body created by the state legislature that considers post-conviction claims of innocence. But Grimes’s case, unlike Ronald Cotton’s, didn’t appear to play a big role, if any, in the commission’s formation — though it was the commission that ultimately freed him.
Where Rachlin fully succeeds is in his rich, intimate portrait of Grimes, who is isolated and alone, whose soul is cracking. With understatement and painstaking reporting, Rachlin introduces us to Grimes, and the slow piling of one humility on top of another. He attempts to address the very human questions that most of us have: When serving time for a crime you didn’t commit, how do you not become consumed by anger and bitterness? How do you maintain your equilibrium? As Rachlin recounts Grimes’s incarceration over the years and decades, we witness the slow-motion crushing of his spirit. Grimes loses two brothers and a girlfriend to illness. He suffers from insomnia and depression along with physical ailments undoubtedly related to his stress. He is diagnosed with prostate cancer. He is transferred from prison to prison so many times I lost count. At one point, Rachlin writes, “When he shuddered awake at 2 in the morning he was aglow, he was seething. His every filament vibrated hideously. … He sensed he might be corroding internally, like a battery.”
Yet somehow Grimes persists. He repeatedly writes his attorney, who believes in his innocence but doesn’t think there’s anything he can do to prove it, and he writes other attorneys, including one who takes a $4,200 payment from a relative and then stops taking their calls. Sometimes Grimes has to wait months for a reply, and usually it’s to say there’s nothing to be done. Grimes combs law books and leans on fellow inmates to help him with letters pleading his case. He finds succor in religion, in Jehovah’s Witnesses, a church through which he meets members who visit him regularly and come to believe his story. At various points along the way, prison officials suggest to Grimes that if he wants to become eligible for parole he needs to enlist in a course for sex offenders. He refuses because it would require that he sign a form expressing remorse for the rape he didn’t commit. It’s his single act of defiance. He is, after all, not a sex offender.
It’s this part of the book that will most stay with you, a soft-spoken, gentle man who tries, as best he can, to hold on to who he is. Grimes was 41 when he went to prison. His only previous arrests were for driving under the influence. Amazingly, he came out as dignified a man as when he went in. It’s in these chapters that this story becomes remarkable. That, I suppose, is reason enough to tell this tale.
Alex Kotlowitz is a writer in residence at Northwestern University and is working on his fourth book, about the violence in Chicago.
An innocent man serving 24 years in prison who bears no grudges
Willie Grimes has been characterized by people who know him as a shy, gentle mansoul who respects women. His rape conviction and imprisonment left him shattered. (CHRIS SEWARD/NEWS OBSERVER VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS)
By Dennis Drabelle September 8, 2017
Dennis Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, lives in Asheville, N.C.
Here in North Carolina, we’re still shaking off the effects of the “bathroom bill.” For the year or so in which that spiteful and ludicrous law was on the books, the state was — to quote Roy Cooper, who rode the backlash to victory in the 2016 gubernatorial race — a “national laughingstock.” How bracing, then, to be reminded by Benjamin Rachlin in his first book, “Ghost of the Innocent Man,” that when it comes to doing right by the wrongly convicted, North Carolina leads the way.
The innocent of Rachlin’s title is Willie Grimes, from south-central North Carolina. One day in 1987, Grimes heard that the police were looking for him. With nothing on his conscience, he turned himself in. To his dismay, he faced two counts of first-degree rape. To his stupefaction, less than a year later he was convicted.
[Black people are more likely to be wrongly convicted and less likely to be exonerated when they are]
The evidence that swayed the jury was weak. The victim confidently based her identification on a facial mole but had not spotted the prominent scar on Grimes’s collarbone. Nor, during two incidents of unwanted sex, had she noticed that he was missing two fingertips on his right hand. The only physical evidence linking Grimes to the crime — a hair found at the scene that allegedly matched one taken from him later — relied on science that has since been discredited. On top of that, he had a strong alibi, although the prosecuting attorney undermined it by pointing out that it came from friends and relatives, as though they weren’t exactly the people Grimes — or, indeed, any of us — would be most likely to hang out with.
Grimes may not have been a plasterboard saint — he was once arrested for drunken driving — but those who knew him characterized him as a shy, gentle man who respected women. His conviction and imprisonment left him shattered. Rachlin vividly describes the anguish that would well up in Grimes again and again during his 24 years behind bars: “When he shuddered awake at two in the morning he was aglow, he was seething. His every filament vibrated hideously. Against the walls of his lungs roiled gales of pressure, as though his entire chest had been cauterized. He sensed he might be corroding internally, like a battery. He felt equally likely to explode.”
Not the least of Grimes’s frustrations was the prison system’s policy of linking various privileges and even parole to an inmate’s remorse — of which, being innocent, Grimes had none. He refused to make a false confession. Better to serve out his sentence, he decided, than to tell such a soul-searing lie, especially after his in-prison conversion to the Jehovah’s Witness faith.
Rachlin alternates chapters on Grimes’s plight with ones on outsiders’ pursuit of a novel idea: There ought to be a way to reopen old cases and exonerate the wrongfully convicted. It’s worth noting that some of the activists pressing this reform had been crime victims whose mistaken identifications sent innocent people to prison. (For a dramatic illustration of how this can happen, see Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Wrong Man.”)
Crafting a solution was a drawn-out and vexing process. When a task force circulated a proposal reflecting years of hard work, one of its own members attacked the plan as likely to undermine public confidence in the criminal justice system. Eventually, however, even die-hards saw that nothing undermines public confidence like wrongful convictions, which also leave the real perpetrators free to commit more crimes.
The result was the creation of North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission, which as of 2015 had helped exonerate nine wrongly convicted inmates. (The actual call is made by a panel of state court judges to which the commission submits an investigated case.) One of the nine was Grimes.
In Rachlin’s skilled hands, Grimes’s story triggers indignation but also confers solace, Grimes being one of the solacing features. He bears no grudges. In fact, he declined to sue the state for damages until a friend convinced him it was the best way to deter police and prosecutors from behaving so sloppily again. Grimes settled out of court for a bundle.
Meanwhile, according to Rachlin, since DNA became valid evidence in 1989, more than 1,700 people have been cleared of their convictions, “at least one in each state in the country.” Only North Carolina, however, has formalized the process by entrusting it to a dedicated body. “There’s a lot to be said for agencies like the NCIIC,” the National Registry of Exonerations reported in 2015, “but there are no other agencies like the NCIIC in the United States.”
The wrongful conviction exposed by Michael Bishop in “A Murder in Music City” grew out of events starting in February of 1964, when a promising college student named Paula Herring flew home to Nashville for the weekend. While babysitting her 6-year-old brother that Saturday night, she was shot to death. Based on evidence that was either circumstantial or shaky or both, the son of a local judge was convicted of her murder.
[Has DNA met its match as a forensic tool? ]
Bishop’s interest was kindled in 1997, when a friend working on an ambitious scheme to catalogue the past century of Nashville crime happened to mention the Herring murder over lunch. Among several odd aspects of the case, two would not let Bishop alone. First, Herring’s mother had been the one to find her daughter’s body, and a few years earlier the woman had discovered her husband dead in a hotel room, after an apparent suicide. (“I couldn’t calculate the odds of such unfortunate luck,” Bishop dryly notes.) Second, Herring’s younger brother seemed to have slept through the noise of two gunshots inside what was not a large house. After 20 years of amateur investigating, Bishop, a salesman for a health education company, has shown pretty conclusively not only that the convicted man (now dead), was framed, but also by whom.
As we accompany the author on his long, obsessive search, the case expands to encompass alcoholism, prostitution, drug-pushing nurses, cops and prosecutors willing to commit fraud to get a conviction, and eventually the 1960s Nashville political establishment. The author spends little time examining his motives, but his achievement speaks for itself. Determined to right a wrong that everyone else had looked away from, Michael Bishop became a one-man innocence commission.