Ghost of the Innocent Man by Benjamin Rachlin

If transparency is what you want, then this style of non-fiction investigative journalism will deliver that on every page.

No one’s name has been changed because it’s all a matter of public record. The entire gripping story is gleaned from 25 years worth of notes, transcripts, forms, files, interviews and testimony. The book offers a profound reckoning not only with the shortcomings of our criminal justice system but also with its possibilities for redemption.(Sept.

Ghost of the Innocent Man is both rare and essential, a masterwork of empathy. But through the harrowing and suspenseful account of one life, told from the inside, we experience the full horror of wrongful conviction on a national scale. Grimes, for all its outrage, dignity, and grace, is not a unique travesty. The jarring and unsettling truth is that the story of Willie J. With meticulous, prismatic research and pulse-quickening prose, Benjamin Rachlin presents one man's tragedy and triumph. That commission - unprecedented at its inception in 2006 - remains a model organization unlike any other in the country and one now responsible for a growing number of exonerations. These were spearheaded by his relentless champion, Christine Mumma, a cofounder of North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his innocence and the identity of the true perpetrator. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. When the final gavel clapped in a rural Southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Ghost of the Innocent Man brings us one of the most dramatic of those cases and provides the clearest picture yet of the national scourge of wrongful conviction and of the opportunity for meaningful reform. During the last two decades, more than 2,000 American citizens have been wrongfully convicted.

Ghost of the Innocent Man by Benjamin Rachlin