The Confession

Despite publishing nearly 30 #1 best sellers across four decades and practicing law for 10 years before publishing his first legal thriller in 1981, in the Author’s Note of The Confession, John Grisham identifies himself not as a writer or as a lawyer, but rather as a member of the Board of Trustees for The Innocents Project in New York and the chair of the Board of Directors for the Mississippi branch of the same organization.

As he has often shared in interviews, Grisham dates his advocacy against the death penalty to an epiphany in the early 1990s when he visited a Louisiana death house while researching The Chamber. During a conversation with the prison chaplain, Grisham—a practicing Christian—suddenly realized that a state, any state, executing anyone under any circumstances violated the love and mercy he had always found at the heart of the Christian vision.

Since 1992, The Innocents Project has championed the rights of the incarcerated and advocated widespread reform within the American criminal justice system. Staffed largely by attorneys working pro bono, investigative journalists, unpaid interns, and law school students, The Innocents Projects cites several factors that lead to wrongful conviction, each of which occurs in The Confession: slipshod police work, coerced confessions, dubious eyewitness testimony, ineffective counsel, reliance of jailhouse snitches trading reduced sentences for testimony, prosecutors and judges with political agendas, and the persistent and disturbing reality of racism.

Since joining the Innocents Project, Grisham has used his celebrity to advocate for the exoneration of those wrongly convicted through the use of DNA evidence not available at the time of their convictions. The Project cites more than 300 such exonerations as of 2023, and notes that given the careless and arbitrary application of justice in America, there are undoubtedly thousands more wrongfully convicted and imprisoned people. While it seems obvious to conclude that innocent people should be free, Grisham shows in The Confession the sobering reality that is it is much easier to put an innocent person in prison than to get that same person out of prison. To date, Grisham has published four other novels focused on the moral and ethical problems with capital punishment, most notably The Chamber (1994).