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In John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction since The Innocent Man, “the master of the legal thriller” (Associated Press) teams up with Jim McCloskey, “the godfather of the innocence movement” (Texas Monthly), to share ten harrowing true stories of wrongful convictions.John Grisham is known worldwide for his bestselling novels, but it’s his real-life passion for justice that led to his work with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, the first organization dedicated to exonerating innocent people who have been wrongly convicted. Together they offer an inside look at the many injustices in our criminal justice system.A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty, there is very little room to prove doubt. These ten true stories shed light on Americans who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount the dramatic hard-fought battles for exoneration. They take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and corruption in the court system that can make them so hard to reverse.Impeccably researched and told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of winning freedom when the battle already seems lost and the deck is stacked against you.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"A masterful history of the Troubles. . . Extraordinary. . .As in the most ingenious crime stories, Keefe unveils a revelation — lying, so to speak, in plain sight."—Maureen Corrigan, NPRFrom award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussionsIn December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

A fresh new voice in art and cultural criticism takes on the day's most pressing questions about representations of violence in art. Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

The crimes of Jack the Ripper have haunted the imagination of the world since his murderous reign drew to a close late in 1888. This Casebook is an invaluable survey of the killer, his times and the web of complex and contradictory theories that have sprung up in his wake.

Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer PrizeIn what is arguably his greatest book, America's most heroically ambitious writer followsthe short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America'sprisons who became notorious for two reasons: first, for robbing two men in 1976, thenkilling them in cold blood; and, second, after being tried and convicted, for insisting ondying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent onkeeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in hisprocession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and arestraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. TheExecutioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources ofAmerican loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget.

A famous defender of the underdog, the oppressed, and the powerless, Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) is one of the true legends of the American legal system. His cases were many and various, but all were marked by his unequivocal sense of justice, as well as his penchant for representing infamous and unpopular clients, such as the Chicago thrill killers Leopold and Loeb; Ossian Sweet, the African American doctor charged with murder after fighting off a violent, white mob in Detroit; and John T. Scopes, the teacher on trial in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Published for the first time in 1957, Attorney for the Damned collects Darrow's most influential summations and supplements them with scene-setting explanations and comprehensive notes by Arthur Weinberg. Darrow confronts issues that remain relevant over half a century after his death: First Amendment rights, capital punishment, and the separation of church and state. With an insightful forward by Justice William O. Douglas, this volume serves as a powerful reminder of Darrow's relevance today.

FOR TEN YEARS, HE TERRORIZED THEM WITHOUT MERCY…Ken McElroy robbed, raped, burned, shot, and maimed the citizens of Skidmore, Missouri, without conscience or remorse. Again and again, the law had failed to stop him.UNTIL THEY TOOK JUSTICE INTO THEIR OWN HANDS.On July 10, 1981, Ken was shot to death on the main street of this small farming community. Forty-five people watched. No indictments were ever issued, no trial held…and the town of Skidmore protected the killers with silence. With this powerful, true-life account, Edgar Award-winning author Harry N. MacLean reveals what drove a community of everyday American citizens to commit murder…IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

**The inspiration for Hulu’s forthcoming Mastermind documentary**A vivid behind-the-scenes look into the creation of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit and the evolution of criminal profiling, written by the pioneering forensic nurse who transformed the way the FBI studies, profiles, and catches serial killers.Lurking beneath the progressive activism and sex positivity in the 1970-80s, a dark undercurrent of violence rippled across the American landscape. With reported cases of sexual assault and homicide on the rise, the FBI created a specialized team—the "Mindhunters" better known as the Behavioral Science Unit—to track down the country's most dangerous criminals. And yet narrowing down a seemingly infinite list of potential suspects seemed daunting at best and impossible at worst—until Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess stepped on the scene.In A Killer By Design, Burgess reveals how her pioneering research on sexual assault and trauma caught the attention of the FBI, and steered her right into the middle of a chilling serial murder investigation in Nebraska. Over the course of the next two decades, she helped the budding unit identify, interview, and track down dozens of notoriously violent offenders, including Ed Kemper ("The Co-Ed Killer"), Dennis Rader ("("BTK"), Henry Wallace ("The Taco Bell Strangler"), Jon Barry Simonis ("The Ski-Mask Rapist"), and many others. As one of the first women trailblazers within the FBI's hallowed halls, Burgess knew many were expecting her to crack under pressure and recoil in horror—but she was determined to protect future victims at any cost. This book pulls us directly into the investigations as she experienced them, interweaving never-before-seen interview transcripts and crime scene drawings alongside her own vivid recollections to provide unprecedented insight into the minds of deranged criminals and the victims they left behind. Along the way, Burgess also paints a revealing portrait of a formidable institution on the brink of a seismic scientific and cultural reckoning—and the men forced to reconsider everything they thought they knew about crime.Haunting, heartfelt, and deeply human, A Killer By Design forces us to confront the age-old question that has long plagued our criminal justice system: "What drives someone to kill, and how can we stop them?"As Featured on ABC 20/20One of Amazon's "Best True Crime" BooksA "Best Book of the Month" Pick for Amazon (December 2021)An Apple Audio "Must-Listen" (December 2021)

One boy who bravely speaks up. A church determined to keep him silent. Brendan was an eleven-year-old altar boy when he first met Father Smyth. When the abuse began, he didn't know what to do -- surely he should trust a priest? But he knew he wasn't the only victim, and his worst nightmare was that his sisters would be next. It was three years before he plucked up the courage to tell another minister. An inquiry was quickly called, in which Brendan was sworn to secrecy. But the abuse didn't stop. Instead, Father Brendan Smyth continued to prey on other children for two more decades until he was finally convicted. This shocking memoir tells how, for years, a priest's abuse was ignored by the Catholic Church -- and how one brave small boy stood up for justice. - Co-written with BBC investigative reporter Darragh MacIntyre, this is a powerful expose of the Irish church

The story of the rise and fall of smallpox, one of the most savage killers in the history of mankind, and the only disease ever to be successfully exterminated (30 years ago next year) by a public health campaign.