A true tale told in the John Grisham manner

AS a novelist, John Grisham had an advantage in turning his hand to nonfiction for the first time in "The Innocent Man." He knows how to tell a story swiftly and cleanly; he knows that we want to read about people's lives, not just about the ills of the U.S. justice system. So he keeps his focus tightly on the two men, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, who were convicted of raping and killing a 21-year-old cocktail waitress, Debra Sue Carter, in Ada, Okla., in 1982.

In Grisham's telling, Williamson was hardly a model citizen. A former high school baseball star who never got over his failure to make the major leagues, he had been acquitted of two previous rape charges. He was a moocher and a noisy drunk who couldn't hold a job and displayed symptoms of manic depression and schizophrenia. He had become, in short, a likely suspect. In Ada, pop. 16,000, only members of Williamson's family saw much amiss when he was found guilty in 1988 and sentenced to death.

Nor did Oklahoma's appellate courts find anything wrong with his trial, though the prosecution's case, as Grisham describes it, was a flimsy assemblage of junk science (including microscopic comparisons of hairs that Williamson's attorney, a blind man, was unable to challenge), testimony by jailhouse snitches and a coerced confession in which a dream of the defendant's was presented as his actual memory of the crime.

Williamson spent a decade on Oklahoma's death row in McAlester, Okla., first in a crumbling old building with vile food and no heating or air conditioning, later in a "modern" underground facility with cramped cells and no natural light or fresh air. Already mentally unstable, he became psychotic and suicidal yet received little treatment because authorities reckoned he would be dying soon anyway.

In 1994, Williamson came within five days of death by lethal injection before he was granted a stay of execution.

As for Fritz, the evidence against him was even slimmer. He received a life sentence, Grisham says, simply because he was an acquaintance of Williamson's and had a similar record of petty crime. Detectives theorized that Carter's injuries and the damage to her apartment pointed to two assailants, not one: "They needed another suspect. Fritz was their man."