THE GURARDIANS by John Grisham

Finished Fr 1/26/24

This is a harbdback that Janny loaned to me. 

'The Gurardians' is a group of lawyers who specialize in people who have been placed in prison in error. 

2 Cases:

1) A man is in jail for nearly ten years for a rape that he didn't commit. Police did not do DNA testing on a few pubic hairs. One of the lawyers from the group 'borrowed' a hair to have it tested. This showed that all of the hairs belonged to another man.

2) A lawyer was shotgunned to death and a black man was held responsible. The conviction was based on three snitches and a flashlight that had blood on it, but was missing from the evidence. The flashlight was photographed and a phony 'expert' said that it was blood splatter. Later in the novel the flashlight is recovered (in an abandoned house that was cursed by a voodoo witch).

My question: The man's wife testified that this was his flashlight, but he claimed he had never seen it before. She was lying, but how could this prove that he never bought a flashlight that she wasn't aware of? 

It's a very easy read and a compelling reading experience. 

From the book's page at GoodReads:

"In the small north Florida town of Seabrook, a young lawyer named Keith Russo was shot dead at his desk as he worked late one night. The killer left no clues behind. There were no witnesses, no real suspects, no one with a motive. The police soon settled on Quincy Miller, a young black man who was once a client of Russo’s.

Quincy was framed, convicted, and sent to prison for life. For twenty-two years he languished in prison with no lawyer, no advocate on the outside. Then he wrote a letter to Guardian Ministries, a small innocence group founded by a lawyer/minister named Cullen Post.

Guardian handles only a few innocence cases at a time, and Post is its only investigator. He travels the South fighting wrongful convictions and taking cases no one else will touch. With Quincy Miller, though, he gets far more than he bargained for. Powerful, ruthless people murdered Keith Russo, and they do not want Quincy exonerated.

They killed one lawyer twenty-two years ago, and they will kill another one without a second thought."

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"The prolific Grisham (The Reckoning, 2018, etc.) turns in another skillfully told procedural.

Pay attention to the clerical collar that Cullen Post occasionally dons in Grisham’s latest legal thriller. Post comes by the garb honestly, being both priest and investigative lawyer, his Guardian Ministries devoted to freeing inmates who have been wrongly imprisoned. Says an adversary at the start of the book, learning that his conviction is about to be overturned, “Is this a joke, Post?” Post replies: “Oh sure. Nothing but laughs over here on death row.” Aided by an Atlantan whom he sprang from the slam earlier, Post turns his energies to trying to do the same for Quincy Miller, a black man imprisoned for the murder of a white Florida lawyer who “had been shot twice in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun, and there wasn’t much left of his face.” It’s to such icky details that Post’s meticulous mind turns: Why a shotgun and not a pistol, as most break-ins involve? Who would have done such a thing—surely not the guy's wife, and surely not for a measly $2 million in life insurance? As Grisham strews the path with red herrings, Post, though warned off by a smart forensic scientist, begins to sniff out clues that point to a culprit closer to the courtroom bench than the sandy back roads of rural Florida. Grisham populates his yarn with occasionally goofy details—a prosecuting attorney wants Post disbarred “for borrowing a pubic hair” from the evidence in a case—but his message is constant throughout: The “innocent people rotting away in prison” whom Post champions are there because they are black and brown, put there by mostly white jurors, and the real perp “knew that a black guy in a white town would be much easier to convict.” The tale is long and sometimes plods, especially in its courtroom scenes, but it has a satisfying payoff—and look out for that collar at the end."