Grisham's account of the tragic life of Ron Williamson is tailor-made for a Hollywood blockbuster. Williamson narrowly missed out on a career in major league baseball but stayed around the big-time long enough to pick up some of its bad habits. His return to small-town obscurity, his subsequent lapses into drinking and womanizing, and the redemptive drama of mental illness and wrongful imprisonment were almost too useful as plot points for them to sound believable, even for a popular novelist who spends most of his time inventing similar crises. Grisham found the story in an obituary-he had missed the brief moment of media interest which followed Williamson's release-and so he came to his subject with a biographer's curiosity. A famously knowledgeable observer of the American legal system, and the number one best-selling novelist of the last decade, Grisham could have written about any number of other stories that caught his attention. But he settled on this one, and human rights groups all over the world will soon be very grateful that he did.

Given Grisham's devoted readership, the Williamson saga will almost certainly reach a wider audience than any previous death row story. Already the book has sold 400,000 copies after being on sale in the United States for only a few weeks. It is also likely to reopen a much needed debate on the shortcomings of the death penalty process in America, and, by extension, the questionable assumptions often made about capital punishment around the world. In some ways, Grisham's book will continue the work of Ken Armstrong and Steve Mill, two reporters from the Chicago Tribune who recently carried out an investigation of death row prisoners which uncovered so many flaws in their local courts that two months after the series concluded, Governor Ryan decided to impose a moratorium on all executions in the state of Illinois.

Mill and Armstrong published a survey of the systemic failures of the capital crimes process, based on a close examination of the case histories of 285 death row inmates. Much of what they found is echoed in Grisham's book, but it bears repeating. More than 10 percent of the defendants were represented by attorneys who had been disbarred or suspended; 35 black defendants has been convicted by all-white juries (in one trial prosecutors had rejected 20 blacks from the jury pool to ensure a white jury); 46 cases used evidence from a jailhouse informant; at least 20 cases included as evidence a crime lab employee's visual comparison of human hairs, even though this is so notoriously inexact that it is disallowed in some jurisdictions. When the reporters took a look at case records of 131 people executed in Texas while George W. Bush was governor, the results were even worse. In 43 of these cases the trial or appeal lawyer for the defence had been publicly sanctioned for misconduct and in 40 cases the defence had presented no evidence or offered only a single witness during the trial's sentencing phase. At almost every stage, prejudice, a lack of proper legal representation and avoidable human error significantly affected the trials.