Ghost of the Innocent Man

Starred review from May 8, 2017
Justice is unconscionably delayed in this absorbing true-crime saga. Rachlin’s debut recounts the case of Willie James Grimes, a North Carolina man sentenced to life in prison for rape in 1988. Despite having a competent lawyer and a strong alibi, Grimes was convicted on forensic analysis of a hair found at the crime scene and on the victim’s seemingly ironclad—as far as the jury knew—identification. Without procedural errors to appeal and with the physical evidence apparently lost after the trial, the attempts to prove Grimes’s innocence hit a judicial brick wall, resulting in a decades-long stay for Grimes in North Carolina’s prison system. Rachlin weaves Grimes’s Kafkaesque ordeal—Grimes’s chance at parole hinged on his confessing guilt—together with the efforts of lawyer Christine Mumma and other reformers to establish North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission, an innovative state agency that investigates potential wrongful convictions. Rachlin combines a gripping legal drama with a penetrating exposé of the shoddy investigative and trial standards nationwide, as evidenced by hundreds of postconviction exonerations. Finally, as Grimes moves beyond anger and despair over his plight, Rachlin’s narrative offers a moving evocation of faith under duress. Photos.

June 15, 2017
A chilling story of wrongful conviction, focused on one man's ordeal, and the growth of the movement to support actual innocence.In his debut book, Rachlin ably manages a complex narrative. In 1988, when the author's subject, Willie Grimes, was tried for a horrific sexual assault in North Carolina, "no one had any clue how often [somebody] was wrongfully convicted in America, or where, or how long he spent imprisoned." Grimes was convicted based on a slipshod investigation and erroneous identification by an elderly, traumatized victim despite numerous witnesses to his alibi and nonviolent character. He began serving his life sentence in disbelief, eventually becoming a Jehovah's Witness while always insisting upon his innocence. Rachlin alternates between this slow tale of Grimes' unjust imprisonment (he would serve over 20 years) and the greater narrative of a growing consensus that protections against such convictions were inadequate. A commission was formed by several lawyers and one conservative judge who had come to realize that "wrongful conviction was a national problem...it ought to concern everyone." This acknowledgement was partly due to the first cases of DNA exoneration, which shook the public's trust in policing, but Rachlin particularly focuses on the determination of attorney Christine Mumma to expose the reality of wrongful conviction: "The doubts she felt now were not technicalities. It was ludicrous to think the courts couldn't distinguish between basic guilt and innocence." Mumma championed a law empowering the Innocence Inquiry Commission to hear wrongful conviction petitions, the first of its kind. Following an intensive investigation by the IIC into Grimes' claim, which included discovery of concealed fingerprint evidence that pointed to the likely perpetrator, a well-known local criminal inexplicably excluded in the initial investigation, Grimes was cleared by the IIC judicial panel. Rachlin builds to this cinematic conclusion with empathetic, thorough (if sometimes gradually paced) prose and solid investigative detail. A sprawling, powerful, unsettling longitudinal account of an overdue legal movement.

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July 1, 2017
In small-town Hickory, North Carolina, 1987, Willie Grimes heard that the police were looking for him and went straight to the station to clear up a certain misconception. Instead, he was arrested on the spot; soon tried and convicted, with a startling lack of evidence, of raping a 67-year-old woman; and sentenced to life imprisonment. For the next 25 years, Willie's physical and mental health deteriorate as he's shuffled endlessly through the system and denied parole because he won't accept responsibility for the crime he didn't commit. Interspersed with Willie's absorbing story, written with close access to case records and Willie himself, Rachlin follows the long road to the 2006 formation of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, a state entity uniquely devoted to reviewing claims of innocence and exonerating the wrongfully convicted, and the many people who made it happen. In his moving first book, Rachlin, with confidence and care, relays both the terrifying personal costs and complex legalities, so dependent on fallible humans, of wrongful conviction and imprisonment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2017

Journalist Rachlin's account of the founding of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission and the heartbreaking case of Willie J. Grimes, wrongly convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison, leaves readers wondering why more states haven't followed this model, instead relying on nonprofits such as the Innocence Project to find and free the innocent. North Carolina's neutral state agency can subpoena evidence and testimony and refers cases to a panel of judges with the power to exonerate. Grimes's story is both compelling and enraging, and his thoughtfulness and persistence propel the story as much as the determination and passion of the lawyers working to establish the Commission. Grimes was convicted without adequate checks on the evidence collected, and his exoneration was delayed by the disposal and poor tracking of what evidence remained. VERDICT This sobering account of both a wrongful conviction and the structural impediments to fixing miscarriages of justice (with a gut punch of a closing paragraph) is for readers and book groups interested in social justice, legal history, and civil rights. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]--Kate Sheehan, C.H. Booth Lib., Newtown, CT

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2017

Rachlin chronicles the case of Willie J. Grimes, wrongly convicted of a 1987 rape in North Carolina owing to mistaken identification, sloppy evidence gathering, and suspect testimony. His longtime-coming exoneration resulted from the unshakable belief of supporters who included Christine Mumma, the force behind the creation of North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2017

Journalist Rachlin's account of the founding of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission and the heartbreaking case of Willie J. Grimes, wrongly convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison, leaves readers wondering why more states haven't followed this model, instead relying on nonprofits such as the Innocence Project to find and free the innocent. North Carolina's neutral state agency can subpoena evidence and testimony and refers cases to a panel of judges with the power to exonerate. Grimes's story is both compelling and enraging, and his thoughtfulness and persistence propel the story as much as the determination and passion of the lawyers working to establish the Commission. Grimes was convicted without adequate checks on the evidence collected, and his exoneration was delayed by the disposal and poor tracking of what evidence remained. VERDICT This sobering account of both a wrongful conviction and the structural impediments to fixing miscarriages of justice (with a gut punch of a closing paragraph) is for readers and book groups interested in social justice, legal history, and civil rights. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]--Kate Sheehan, C.H. Booth Lib., Newtown, CT

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.