By Vijitha Yapa

The issue of the police taking the law into its own hands has surfaced more often than not. A recurring scenario during previous governments involved suspects being taken on a boat ride, allegedly to reveal hidden weapons. The offender would attempt to escape from the police boat before reaching the destination – and would later be pronounced dead, reportedly by drowning.

However, such scenes are not confined only to Sri Lanka – they occur in many third world countries and even the US, which positions itself as a champion of democracy while blaming other nations for committing human rights violations.

In the book ‘Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions,’ John Grisham together with close friend Jim McCloskey – the founder of Centurion Ministries, the first US organisation dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals – recounts 10 stories on miscarriages of justice.

It details the harrowing experiences of the accused, who were convicted of crimes they never committed but spent many years in prison before being freed eventually.

Grisham is the author of many bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly 50 languages. And while he is widely known for his fiction, this book focusses on real life cases.

During the course of writing this book, he met with many exonerees, as well as their families, lawyers, advocates and former cellmates. Grisham says that as a group, these individuals are extraordinary and notes that they survived unimaginable nightmares, which most people cannot even begin to comprehend.

Grisham acknowledges that writing about actual cases is far more challenging than crafting fiction.

In the case of writing this book, it involved reviewing thousands of pages of trial transcripts, police reports, witness statements – which often varied from one stage to the next – prison records, forensic tests petitions, motions, pleadings and court orders written by lawyers and judges, all of which had to be carefully read and understood.

Twenty-three defendants in the 10 wrongful conviction cases described in the book spent decades in prison before the truth of their innocence finally came to light, leading to their release.

Four of them landed on death row, and two came within days of execution while one was tragically executed before being proven innocent.

Grisham and McCloskey say that often in many cases, the real perpetrators were under the nose of the police from the outset of the crime. And in two instances, they even served as the star witnesses for the prosecution but were never prosecuted. The forgery of evidence by police and civilian witnesses was pervasive in these stories that came under the microscope.

These wrongful convictions were not merely the result of unintentional mistakes by law enforcement officers or misidentification but often due to erroneous forensic analysis, the authors note.

And they assert: “They were rooted in law enforcement misconduct and chicanery, men and women hell-bent on clearing cases or gaining a conviction through a wide variety of illicit means – subornation of perjury, secret deals with criminals in exchange for their fabricated testimony, coercing witnesses into false testimony or suspects to falsely confess…”

Reviewing these cases proved to be very challenging with the judges often reluctant to admit that the decisions made by their peers were wrong.

Most often, the cases turn the spotlight towards police officers who were determined to find innocent people guilty of crimes, convicted either to life imprisonment or languish in jail for years without any genuine attempt to uncover the truth.

Attempts to try and secure compensation for the many years the wrongly accused spent in prison were frequently denied.

One case features a so-called expert on autopsies who claimed to perform over 100 autopsies in a day – a police officer even described the scenes as being in an ‘autopsy factory’ where there was no concern and care for the actual facts or care for accuracy.

This book is an eye-opener for those seeking justice to be served, revealing cases where police officers were more focussed on securing convictions than on identifying the guilty – even though they were often those entirely unrelated to the crimes.