Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Books, Legal, United States

Book Review: ‘The Innocent Man’…

INTRO…

The Innocent Man, John Grisham’s first piece of non-fiction work, is a well-researched book primarily on account of Ron Williamson, who was wrongly convicted of murder in 1998, and who spent twelve years on Oklahoma’s ‘H’ death row before advances had been made in DNA technology which eventually proved him innocent. Grisham tells a startling and disturbingly true story about America’s justice system gone terribly wrong, the deplorable and totally unacceptable living conditions on Oklahoma’s death rows, and the often sadistic guards employed to watch these inmates. Convicted, also, to the blindness of injustice was another innocent man, Dennis Fritz, although Fritz wasn’t sent to McAlester’s death row. Fritz was later released, too, once DNA was unable to support his original conviction. Throughout, Grisham offers great insight and sharp direction to the miscarriages of justice of these two men.

NON-FICTION…

THE STORY starts by telling of a promising small town high school athlete and baseball player, Ron Williamson, who signs a contract with the infamous Oakland A’s in 1971. Grisham chronicles well his festive send-off, elucidating his failure in meeting the discipline and skill level needed for the “big league”, and Williamson’s bouts with bipolar depression and schizophrenia after his release from first the A’s and later the Yankees sporting club who had, too, been interested in his sporting potential.

By 1982, Williamson, is unemployed, living back with his parents in Oklahoma, and spending most of his days sleeping on the couch. When not at home, often in the evenings and early hours, he’s wandering the neighbourhood acting “strangely” or drinking loudly in the local bars. When neighbour, Debbie Carter is brutally murdered, Ron becomes one of the “usual suspects” – but, at the exclusion of some fundamental and routine police work. Continually dogged by police harassment and provocation, Ron Williamson confesses to a crime he did not commit. Five years after the murder of Debbie Carter, Williamson is arrested for the murder.

John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller yet.

John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller.

The prosecution’s case against Williamson is riddled with errors. The state exercises coercion, the use of false and inappropriate witnesses, and overlooks and suppresses evidence, not to mention the defendant’s deteriorating mental state and wellbeing. Still, he is convicted on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death.

The reader is taken on a journey of utter despair; the frightening and unhealthy living conditions of death row, and the appalling abyss by which Ron Williamson descends into deeper madness. Only after eight years in prison, and just five days away from the death chamber, does he receive notification of a retrial. Eighteen months later, after intense scrutiny and thousands of hours of labour by his pro-bono law team, he is released after DNA testing excludes him from the evidence found at the murder scene. His exoneration touched-off a frenzy of media attention.

In the small town of Ada, Oklahoma, from which Williamson had sprung, the townsfolk were always left pondering the guilt and original conviction passed upon him. It is evidently clear that after reading John Grisham’s testimonies, Ron Williamson had always been innocent. DNA aside, exculpatory evidence, which could have been used in proving innocence, was ignored because the police and state prosecutor “had their man”. So much of the evidence that should have been produced at the original trial had been excluded and, as such, Williamson had been denied a fair trial, an assumption that has always underpinned the US justice system. Williamson’s twelve years on death row was a travesty of justice, to put things mildly.

Unfortunately, Williamson was not to enjoy his freedom for long. He died of cirrhosis of the liver just five years after his release. Upon his release and newly found freedom Ron had turned heavily to drinking.

AFTERWARD…

IN his afterward, Grisham says he was unaware of the Williamson case until he read Ron’s obituary in the New York Times. Intrigued with the story, he then spent five years talking to Ron’s sisters, lawyers, fellow inmates, jailors, and neighbours, before delivering his first work of non-fiction.

The Innocent Man is a compelling and convincing account of American justice gone awry. Much similar to Sister Helen Prejean’s 1994 novel, Dead Man Walking, it makes the reader question the justice in America’s death penalty statutes. Although it tends to drag a little around mid-story, with no fictionalised suspense to hold the reader’s interest, the reversal and subsequent acquittal, and the drama surrounding it, more than make up for this lull.

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Arts, History, United States

Gustave Whitehead may have pipped the Wright Brothers in first powered flight…

HISTORICAL ERROR?

For more than a century the world has accepted that the Wright brothers were the first to conquer the skies in a powered flight.

But, now, it appears, a US state has rewritten history… and given the crown to a German-born inventor.

Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy has signed into law a bill recognising that Gustave Whitehead, a former resident of the state, flew in 1901, two years and four months before Orville and Wilbur lifted off in North Carolina.

Gustave Whitehead: Supporters of Mr Whitehead believe he became lost to history and believe it important to correct a historical error, namely that he was the first person to make a powered flight in 1901.

Gustave Whitehead: Supporters of Mr Whitehead believe he became lost to history and believe it important to correct a historical error, namely that he was the first person to make a powered flight in 1901.

The move is not mere local bravado. There have long been claims about Whitehead and his bizarre-looking contraption, called Condor. But new evidence unearthed by Australian aviation historian John Brown has prompted some experts to concede that Whitehead may have pipped the Wright brothers to the post by quite some way.

It is understood that Mr Brown discovered a blurred newspaper photograph which apparently showed Condor in flight, its propeller whirring as it rose into the air on wooden wheels and canvas wings stretched taut over bat-like wooden arms. It supported testimony from eyewitnesses that the machine first flew at Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the early hours of August 14, 1901, covering a mile and a half at a height of 50ft, managing to turn slightly in both directions. The Wright brothers’ first flight lasted just 12 seconds.

Whitehead’s supporters, who hailed Connecticut’s move as an important first step to correcting a historical error, believe he became lost to history because he showed poor business sense and failed to capitalise on his breakthrough.

Advocates for the Wright camp, however, said the photograph of the Condor flight was too fuzzy to prove anything.

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Arts, History, Philosophy

Quantum Leaps: Socrates, ‘Academic and essential thinker’…

PLATO’S UNDERLING?

SOCRATES (c.470-399 BC) lived through times of great political upheaval in his birthplace of Athens, a city which would eventually make him a scapegoat for its troubles and ultimately demand his life. Much of what is known about Socrates comes through the works of his one-time pupil Plato, for Socrates himself was an itinerant philosopher who taught solely by means of public discussion and oratory. He never wrote any philosophical works of his own.

Unlike the Greek philosophers before him, Socrates was less concerned with abstract metaphysical ponderings than with practical questions of how we ought to live, and what the good life is for man. Consequently, he is often hailed as the inventor of that branch of philosophy known as ethics. It is precisely his concern with ethical matters that often led him into conflict with the city elders, who would accuse him of disrupting and corrupting the minds of sons of the wealthy elite with revolutionary and unorthodox ideas.

Socrates was certainly a maverick often claiming to the consternation of his interlocutors that the only thing he was sure of was his own ignorance. Indeed, much of his teaching consisted in asking his audience to define various common ideas and notions, such as ‘beauty’, or the ‘good’, or ‘piety’, only to show through reasoned argument that all of the proposed definitions and common conceptions lead directly to paradox or absurdity. Some of his contemporaries thought this technique disingenuous, and that Socrates knew more than he was letting on. However, his method was meant to provide salutary lessons in the dangers of uncritical acceptance of orthodoxy. He often railed against, and made dialectic victims of, those who claimed to have certain knowledge of some particular subject.

Bust of Socrates – Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy.

Bust of Socrates – Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy.

Socrates taught his pupils to think for themselves. He created a teaching method known today as the ‘Socratic Method’, which promotes clear thinking, and by questioning their currently accepted ways of thinking. He demanded that these accepted ways be questioned.

It is chiefly through the influence of Socrates that philosophy developed into the modern discipline of continuous critical reflection. Suspension of critical thought, Socrates said, is the biggest threat to society and the individual. How true that is of the practices used by religious and political leaders not wishing to be questioned on matters of principle who regard themselves as sacrosanct or, at times, infallible on ‘interpretation’.

Loved by the city’s aristocratic youth, Socrates inevitably developed many enemies throughout his lifetime. In his seventieth year, or thereabouts, after Athens had gone through several changes of leadership and failing fortunes, Socrates was brought to trial on charges of ‘corrupting the youth’. It would seem that the charges were brought principally to persuade Socrates in renouncing his provocative public speeches and that by convincing the citizens of Athens that the new leadership had a tight rein on law and order. Socrates was also indicted on charges of ‘not believing in the city gods’. With a plea of guilty he might perhaps have walked away from the trial and lived out the rest of his life as a private citizen.

However, in characteristic style, he robustly defended himself, haranguing his accusers and claiming that god himself had sent him on a mission to practice and teach philosophy. When asked, upon being found guilty, what penalty he thought he should receive, Socrates mocked the court by suggesting, brazenly, a trifling fine of only 30 minae. Outraged, a greater majority voted for Socrates to be put to death by the drinking of hemlock than had originally voted him guilty.

Unperturbed, Socrates readily agreed to abide by the laws of his city and forbade his family and friends from asking for a stay of execution.

Socrates trial, death and final speeches are wonderfully captured by Plato in his dialogues Apology, Crito and Phaedo.

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