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Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
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. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Kirkus
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 problemit 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de Booklist
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.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
Critique du New York Review of Books
FIVE-CARAT SOUL, by James McBride. (Riverhead, $27.) In his debut story collection, the author of the National Book Award-winning novel "The Good Lord Bird" continues to explore race, masculinity, music and history. McBride's stories often hum with sweet nostalgia, and some even dispatch a kind of moral. THE APPARITIONISTS: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost, by Peter Manseau. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) Manseau's expedition through the beginnings of photography and its deceptions is a primer on cultural crosscurrents in mid-19th-century America. GIRL IN SNOW, by Danya Kukafka. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Danya Kukafka's bewitching first novel spins a spell of mournful confession around a "Twin Peaks"-like centerpiece. In Kukafka's capable hands, villainy turns out to be everywhere and nowhere, a DNA that could be found under the fingernails of everybody's hands. DUNBAR, by Edward St. Aubyn. (Hogarth, $26.) In this latest entry in Hogarth's series of contemporary reimaginings of Shakespeare's plays, "King Lear" is recast as a struggle for control over an irascible father's corporate empire. St. Aubyn's version, not unlike the play itself, turns out to be a thriller. THE POWER, by Naomi Alderman. (Little, Brown, $26.) In the future of this fierce and unsettling novel, the ability to generate a dangerous electrical force from their bodies lets women take control, resulting in a vast, systemic upheaval of gender dynamics across the globe. BLACK DAHLIA, RED ROSE: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder, by Piu Eatwell. (Liveright, $26.95.) An account of the brutal killing of a beautiful young woman that also delves into the broader culture of postWorld-War-II Los Angeles. "Her story," Eatwell writes, became "a fable illustrating the dangers posed to women" by Hollywood. AFTER THE ECLIPSE: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search, by Sarah Perry. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) This memoir moves swiftly along on parallel tracks of mystery and elegy, as Perry searches through the extensive police files pertaining to her mother's murder, when Perry was 12. THE DARK NET, by Benjamin Percy. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) The fate of the world in Percy's novel depends on the ability of a motley gang of misfits to head off the satanic forces emanating from the murkiest recesses of the internet. GHOST OF THE INNOCENT MAN: A True Story of Trial and Redemption, by Benjamin Rachlin. (Little, Brown, $27.) Rachlin writes about Willie Grimes, imprisoned for 24 years for a sexual assault he did not commit, in this captivating, intimate profile. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Critique du Library Journal
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.