The Guardians

by John Grisham

His name is Mark Carter. White male, age thirty-three, lives in a small rental house in the town of Bayliss, ten miles from Verona. In my files I have photos of his house and truck and current live-in girlfriend. Eleven years ago, Carter raped and murdered Emily Broone, and now all I have to do is prove it.

Bite mark and hair analysis have been discredited in most advanced jurisdictions. Both belong to that pathetic and ever-shifting field of knowledge derisively known among defense and innocence lawyers as “junk science.” God only knows how many innocent people are serving long sentences because of unqualified experts and their unfounded theories of guilt.

Frankie was my first exoneree. He was serving life in Georgia for someone else’s murder when I met him. At the time, I was working as an Episcopal priest at a small church in Savannah.

Jailhouse snitches testify every day in this country. Other civilized countries prohibit them, but not here.”

In white America, prisons are good places where bad men pay for their crimes. In black America, they are too often used as warehouses to keep minorities off the streets.

We like to say that skin color doesn’t matter, but that’s not always true. We often use it to open doors.

I suppose that in America everything, including education and corrections, is fair game for profiteers.

it’s fairly easy to convict an innocent man and virtually impossible to exonerate one.”

In the U.S. there are over two million people locked up, and it takes one million employees and $80 billion in tax dollars to take care of them. NCCIW should be closed, like all women’s prisons. Very few women are criminals. Their mistakes are picking bad boyfriends.

We go through each of my other clients: Shasta Briley on death row in North Carolina, convicted of arson that killed her three daughters; Billy Rayburn in Tennessee, convicted by the dubious science of what has become known as the Shaken Baby Syndrome after he tripped and fell while holding his girlfriend’s baby; Duke Russell, still on death row in Alabama; Curtis Wallace, convicted in Mississippi of the abduction, rape, and murder of a young woman he never met; and Little Jimmy Flagler, who was seventeen and mentally retarded when Georgia locked him away for life.