A Filmmaker's Review: “The Innocent Man” (Netflix, 2018)

John Grisham is probably best known for his dramas of law and order in the world of literature. Films like “The Rainmaker” were based on his novels and his newest novel “Camino Island” is just as good as the others, I can assure you. As an incredible writer of fiction, there was one time when Grisham took a dip into the world of nonfiction, much like Truman Capote and others, he chose to cover the topic of true crime. The focus of his book being false confessions, coaxed interviews and wrongful imprisonment. The problems with the judicial system are probably Grisham’s forte in exploration but this took him far beyond anything he could imagine. He not only discovered a law enforcement team that were wrongfully imprisoning the ones they had coaxed to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, but he also discovered a law enforcement team that were corrupt as to ask for half of whatever the prisoner who had actually committed the crime was getting: whether it be drugs, money etc. In this incredible limited series, John Grisham not only explores what is wrong with the law enforcement in small towns, but also what people would do when given far too much power in a situation where they would have no requirement to give it up against their will.

Whilst he explores two murders of women in Oklahoma, he gains access to many people: a forensic psychologist, women who knew the victims or were related to them and even the prisoner who has been falsely imprisoned because of the murder. And yes, he is still appealing his sentence even though these crimes happened in the early to mid-1980s. John Grisham’s analysis of the problems with law enforcement and power politics gives rise to a notion that the police are meant to protect us and yet, in their hands is so much power that they become corrupt and turn against the people Ensuring instead, to line their own pockets, gain their own material goods and simply close cases without any real investigation.

The first man who was incarcerated did not actually commit the murder of a woman called Debbie. In this, he confessed to something he had not done under the influence and guidance of law enforcement. Some people think about how they would never confess to something they have not done, but fail to think about how the police can actually intimidate you to say something that you did not actually do in a place you never were. I found it incredible that the time in which the man was released from prison, he spent the next five years drinking himself to death. I found this incredible because of the fact he was never compensated, nobody ever apologised to him and nobody even gave a shit about the fact he has spent so long behind bars for a crime he had never actually committed. The biggest conflict you will see in this show is that law enforcement officers seemed to know who it really was all along and then, did not even capture him until it was proven by DNA and the falsely imprisoned man was released. It was dually noted that the man who had actually committed the crime was lining the law enforcement officers’ pockets as well, during his previous imprisonment.

When it comes to the second murder of a woman called Denise, the man who confessed is not the man who committed the crime and, throughout this case, you get to see the serious wrongs of law enforcement and the massively crude natures of the ways in which they operate. They arrest people because they ‘look poor’ and they beat people because they don’t like the look of them. This is exactly what happened to the man who was imprisoned for the second murder. It is a shocking documentary filled with judicial wrongs and it opens our eyes to the failures, faults, corruptions and contempts of the law enforcement agencies all over small town America. The interviews from each law enforcement professional from the psychologist to the private investigator, medical examiners and beyond only prove that this man could not have committed that crime. It is an attack on the judicial system like you have never seen it before.