''Framed: Astonishingly True Stories of Wrongful Convictions,'' by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey (Doubleday) and ''The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men and a 20-Year Fight for Justice'' by Dan Slepian (Celadon)
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It's painful to read those stories of men wrongly condemned and forgotten, slowly abandoned by everyone, casualties of an overzealous criminal justice system.
''Framed'' is Grisham's second foray into nonfiction and his storytelling skills are well-displayed here. McCloskey is founder of Centurion Ministries, which works to free the wrongly convicted. ''The Sing Sing Files" focuses on six men imprisoned in the infamous New York prison.
Both books are meticulous to a fault in recounting the steps that led each of the men they focus on to conviction and imprisonment. ''Framed'' is more clinical, carefully assembling the stories of those wrongly imprisoned, but Slepian's book is the more compelling and emotionally wrenching of the two, starkly illuminating the unimaginable suffering of the wrongly imprisoned and their families.
He describes one prisoner this way: ''Frustration and anger seemed to be radiating off him like heat.''
Grisham and McCloskey present 10 unrelated cases around the nation; Slepian focuses on how the pursuit of one wrongful conviction led him to examine the other five.
Slepian cites figures suggesting 100,000 more innocents remain among approximately 2 million people locked away in American jails and prisons. America leads the world in the number of people imprisoned.