![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() our dangers do not lie in too little tenderness to the accused. The title of the book comes from Justice Learned Hand’s now infamous assertion that “the accused has every advantage. Through Grimes we endure some of the criminal justice system’s Kafkaesque cruelties, such as the requirement that even convicts with exemplary prison records like Grimes admit their guilt to be eligible for parole - another consequence of unjustified confidence in the accuracy of guilty verdicts. We follow Grimes into prison, share his disbelief and despair as he comes to realize that no one will recognize or correct the glaring errors that led to his wrongful conviction, witness his suffering at the hands of indifferent prison officials and finally, his vindication through the work of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. Willie Grimes, convicted on flimsy evidence for a rape he did not commit, gives the victims of our overconfident and needlessly punitive criminal justice system a human face. “Ghost of the Innocent Man” reads like an inverted police procedural, where the criminal conviction comes first, before the detectives discover the facts and where justice arrives only at the end - long delayed and therefore, in an important sense, forever denied. ![]()
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