Framed by John Grisham & Jim McCloskey Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions
What's it about?
Framed (2025) examines extraordinary cases of wrongful conviction, revealing how innocent people can lose decades of their lives to prosecutorial misconduct and flawed evidence. Through meticulous research, these stories demonstrate the devastating failures of the American legal system and spotlight the tireless work of civil rights activists fighting to exonerate the innocent.
Meet a small but resilient group of people. These people know firsthand just how flawed the US judicial system can be. They have endured the unthinkable. They have suffered needless trauma and lost years of their lives. Only through the most determined work, and the most extraordinary luck, are they able to tell their stories.
Who are they? Exonerees. People convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.
People like the Norfolk Four, sailors Derek Tice, Danial Williams, Joseph Dick, and Eric Wilson, who were coerced into confessing to a rape and murder they had nothing to do with. Like Clarence Brandley, the Black janitor from Texas who spent nearly a decade on death row for the rape and murder of a white teenager, a crime he did not commit. Like Levon Brooks, who served sixteen years in Mississippi prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter – convicted largely on fabricated evidence.
In this lesson, you’ll hear the stories of these exonerees and others. You’ll also begin to unravel the complex web of flawed systems, legal failings, corruption, perjury, and witness coercion that conspired to see them wrongly convicted.
Billy and Michelle Bosko were a young Navy couple from Pittsburgh, stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, home to the world’s largest naval base. Michelle was a fastidious housekeeper, and when Billy returned from a two-week deployment on July 8, 1997, their apartment was typically immaculate. Immaculate except for the bedroom, where Michelle’s body lay.
The crime scene told a clear story. A knife lay beside the body, money was missing from her purse, and vaginal injuries indicated rape. It was clear the culprit was a sole assailant who’d entered without force. DNA evidence was recovered – semen on a blanket, and blood under Michelle’s fingernails.
Here’s what happened: Omar Ballard, a serial predator who’d murdered two other women in the months surrounding Michelle’s death, had briefly taken shelter with the Boskos during a rainstorm. When Bosko returned weeks later, Michelle, characteristically kind, had invited him in. Two years later, DNA would unquestionably identify Ballard as the perpetrator.
So why, with clear evidence of a lone assailant and DNA pointing to one man, did four innocent sailors end up wrongfully convicted?
It began with a hunch. Officer Judy Gray, reasoning that the lack of forced entry meant Michelle knew her killer, questioned neighbors. Tamika Taylor mentioned two men: Dan Williams, who lived next door, and Omar Ballard. The police only followed up one of those leads.
Dan Williams was twenty-five, a former Boy Scout, Navy-trained. Hardly guessing that he was a suspect, when he went to the station he waived his Miranda rights. Police interrogated him without a lawyer. They administered a polygraph test and told him he’d failed. This was a lie; it’s perfectly legal for officers to lie during interrogations. After nearly twelve hours of interrogation, in which police implied Williams might have been sleepwalking or blacked out at the time of the murder, he confessed.
When DNA results came back with no match, Williams should have been freed. Instead, police doubled down, claiming he’d been there but hadn’t acted alone.
The same coercive tactics snared Williams’s fellow naval officers Joe Dick, Eric Wilson, and Derek Tice. All eventually confessed under relentless pressure. Three other suspects held in jail refused to confess and were quietly released. When Ballard finally wrote from prison confessing to Michelle’s murder, with DNA confirming his guilt, prosecutors reluctantly dropped charges against the three who hadn’t confessed. But they stubbornly maintained the other four had been present at Michelle’s murder, along with Ballard.
The path to justice stretched over years. All four men received conditional pardons in 2005, acknowledging serious flaws in their cases. But conditional pardons aren’t full exonerations.
It wasn’t until 2017 that the final chapter unfolded. Detective Robert Glenn Ford, who’d orchestrated these coercive interrogations, was himself imprisoned for corruption in an unrelated case. Only then were Williams, Tice, Dick, and Wilson granted full, unconditional pardons.
The truth was there from day one – in the crime scene, in the DNA, in the clear signs of a single perpetrator. Four innocent men lost years of their lives not because the truth was hidden, but because those in power chose to ignore it.
When police asked Clarence Brandley, the manager of a team of high school custodians, to account for his actions on the morning of August 23, 1980, this is what he told them: He’d restocked toilet paper in the boys’ bathroom – per school policy, he didn’t enter the girls’ bathroom. He went to his office for a smoke. He rejoined his janitorial team. It was a Saturday and the school was empty except for a girls’ volleyball match. When the visiting team raised the alarm that Captain Cheryl Fergeson had gone to the bathroom and not returned, Brandley joined the search party. With colleague Icky Peace, he found Fergeson’s body in the girls’ bathrooms – sexually assaulted and strangled.
Police put it to Brandley that things had gone differently. They accused him of following Fergeson to the bathroom and killing her. Samples were taken, questions asked, but only of Brandley and Peace. They declined to question anyone else.
Of all the custodians at the school that day, only Brandley was Black. When Texas Ranger Wesley Styles brought Brandley and Peace in for questioning, he told them one of them would hang for this crime. Since Brandley was Black, Styles told him, “You're elected.”
Brandley faced trial in December 1980 before an all-white jury. The prosecution’s case relied entirely on circumstantial evidence. No physical evidence linked Brandley to the crime. Pubic hairs with alleged “negroid characteristics” were found on the body, but no expert testified they belonged to Brandley. These hairs subsequently vanished from evidence. Sperm from the victim’s body had been destroyed before trial, and was never tested. A blood spot on Fergeson’s blouse was Type A. Brandley had Type O blood.
One juror refused to convict, forcing a mistrial. At the second trial in February 1981 – another all-white jury – prosecutors presented witness Danny Taylor, who claimed Brandley had made threatening remarks about white female students. The medical examiner testified that Brandley’s belt was consistent with the murder weapon. The district attorney suggested Brandley was a necrophiliac, based on the fact he sometimes performed odd jobs at a funeral home.
Brandley was convicted and sentenced to death.
Eleven months later, Brandley’s lawyers discovered crucial evidence had disappeared from prosecution custody: Caucasian pubic hairs found on Fergeson’s body that belonged to neither her nor Brandley, and photographs showing Brandley wasn’t wearing the belt prosecutors claimed was the weapon on the day of Fergeson’s murder.
Eventually, through the work of civil rights activists, the truth emerged. Custodian Gary Acreman admitted on videotape that another former janitor, James Robinson, had killed Fergeson. Robinson had Type A blood – matching the blood on the victim’s blouse.
On October 1, 1990, prosecutors finally dropped all charges. Brandley walked free after nearly a decade on death row – not because justice eventually prevailed, but because the web of racism and corruption finally collapsed.
Picture an autopsy room – sterile, clinical, almost cathedral-quiet. The pathologist works methodically, searching for truth in tissue and bone. Every cut, every measurement, every sample could determine whether a killer walks free or an innocent person spends their life behind bars.
The reality of the autopsy doesn’t always match up to this ideal.
In 1980s and ‘90s Mississippi, budget constraints meant few pathologists were available to perform autopsies. One man, Dr. Steven Hayne, cornered the market, conducting an astounding 80 percent of the state’s autopsies. While his peers managed 250 to 300 autopsies annually, Hayne performed over 1,000 – and worked prolifically as a prosecution expert witness. Detractors said there was no way he could maintain quality at such a pace. Frankly, they were right. Hayne was negligent. We’ll never know how many innocent people his sloppy examinations sent to prison. But we do know he was largely responsible for the wrongful conviction of one man: Levon Brooks.
On September 15, 1990, three-year-old Courtney Smith was abducted from her Brooksville, Mississippi home and found murdered two days later. Hayne performed her autopsy and claimed to find bite marks on the child’s wrist. These marks would become the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case.
Enter the next expert. Dr. Michael West was a dentist who, like Hayne, charged premium rates as an expert witness. When West examined ten male suspects in Smith’s murder – without warrants or lawyers present – he took dental molds and declared he’d found his match. Levon Brooks, he testified with absolute certainty, had bitten little Courtney Smith.
Here’s what Hayne and West got catastrophically wrong: the marks on Courtney’s body weren’t human bite marks at all. They were likely post-mortem injuries from insects or decomposition – common findings that experienced pathologists recognize. But based on their flawed testimony, Brooks received a death sentence.
The house of cards began crumbling when another child, Christine Jackson, was murdered nearby. Kennedy Brewer was convicted on similar bite mark evidence, also thanks to Hayne and West. But when DNA testing became available in 2001, it revealed the truth: both murders were committed by Justin Albert Johnson, a serial predator. When Johnson finally confessed, he adamantly denied biting either victim.
A 2001 study revealed that bite mark “experts” had a staggering 63 percent error rate – worse than a coin flip. The science behind bite mark analysis is fundamentally flawed: human skin isn’t stable enough to retain accurate dental impressions, and individual bite patterns aren’t unique enough for definitive identification.
Both Brooks and Brewer were exonerated in 2008, but Brooks died just ten years later, having lost sixteen precious years to this forensic misconduct. Their cases exposed how so-called experts harnessed pseudoscience for personal profit, no matter the cost to others.
They were childhood sweethearts: when they met, Joe Bryan was in second grade, Mickey Blue in first grade. They stayed friends, then dated, then trained together as teachers. When they returned to Clifton – the town where Mickey grew up – Mickey taught at the elementary school, while Joe became the high-school principal.
Mickey Blue was known for arriving early at Clifton Elementary. So when her classroom was still locked at 8:15 one October morning in 1985, her colleague Susan Kleine knew something was wrong. Hours later, Mickey's body was discovered in her bedroom, naked from the waist down. She had been shot to death.
Joe was 120 miles away in Austin at a principals’ conference. He’d spoken to Mickey at 9 pm the night before, and told her he loved her. When he heard the news, Joe collapsed into a chair in the hotel lobby.
The Texas Rangers’ investigation showed no forced entry. Joe’s gun was missing, along with some valuables. A cigarette butt lay on the kitchen floor – this was significant, as neither Joe nor Mickey smoked.
Mickey’s brother Charlie flew in from Florida with private investigator Bud Saunders. In Joe’s car trunk, Saunders found a flashlight with speckles on the lens. Police sent it to the crime lab: they found Type O blood on the flashlight. Joe wasn’t Type O; Mickey was, along with about half the population. The Rangers arrested Joe Bryan.
The Rangers had their (questionable) evidence. What they did not have was a motive. The Bryans were the perfect couple: happy, fulfilled, and financially stable. Desperate to establish a motive, they hypothesized that Joe was gay, that Mickey had found out, and that he’d murdered her in a rage. Their proof? A Chippendales calendar in the trunk – a gag gift for a friend.
Now, Robert Thorman entered the picture. Thorman had just completed a one-week, $400 course in bloodstain spatter analysis. This was his first case as a fee-paid expert. Thorman testified that blood spatter on the flashlight proved Joe had fired the fatal shots while holding it. The jury deliberated for four hours. Guilty.
Years later, Thorman admitted in a sworn affidavit that his conclusions were wrong. The Texas Forensic Science Commission agreed that the analysis was not scientifically supported. Despite this, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused a new trial. Joe was denied parole seven times. Finally, in March 2020, he walked out of Huntsville prison at age 79 after 33 years – released on parole, but not exonerated.
His attorneys petitioned the US Supreme Court for a declaration of actual innocence. The Court denied review.
Joe Bryan died in September 2024 at age 84, still legally a murderer. He never got to visit Mickey’s grave as an exonerated man and never got to tell her, “We know who did it.” For Joe Bryan, justice simply never came.
On March 30, 1976, the Hasty Mart convenience store in rural New Iberia, Louisiana, was robbed, and its elderly proprietor, Louis Gladu, was fatally shot.
The perpetrators? Preston Demouchet and Jerry Paul Francis, two career criminals with violent records, along with Malcolm Roy, who drove the getaway car. Over the following weeks, they killed two more people during robberies in nearby towns. Their final crime, shooting a bank teller in Parks, brought federal investigators into the hunt. Tracked to Houston, all three were captured.
Back in Louisiana custody, Francis gave a full confession. He described the crimes in detail and took deputies directly to where he’d hidden the gun. Tests proved it was the weapon that killed Gladu. Roy confessed as well. Both men provided specific details about the Hasty Mart robbery. For example, Francis told authorities that Gladu’s glasses fell off before he was shot, that cigarette packages were knocked off the counter, that the cash register drawer was left hanging open.
An open-and-shut case. Or it would have been, if it weren’t for the fact that by the time Francis confessed and led deputies to the weapon, the Sheriff and District Attorney had already indicted innocent men for the Hasty Mart murder.
The prosecution’s case rested on the testimony of Mary Arceneaux, a habitual offender facing prison time for check fraud. She claimed she’d witnessed the Hasty Mart killing, naming David Alexander, Harry Granger, and Sammy Derouen as the killers. When deputies mistakenly arrested Herbert Derouen instead of his brother Sammy, Arceneaux adapted her story accordingly – now Herbert had been there, not Sammy.
Alexander and Granger insisted on their innocence. Herbert Derouen, who had intellectual disabilities, gave a confession after enduring an overnight interrogation marked by physical abuse. His confession contradicted Arceneaux’s version of events entirely.
Now the sheriff faced an impossible situation of his own making: the real killers had confessed and provided the murder weapon, but he’d already built a case against six innocent men. His solution? He pressured Francis and Roy to take back their confessions. Roy later described how investigators pressured him to recant, insisting he was lying about what actually happened.
Based on the contradictory testimonies of Arceneaux and Herbert Derouen, Alexander and Granger received life sentences. Both Arceneaux and Derouen eventually recanted.
Civil rights activists spent a decade fighting to free Alexander and Granger. The case gained national attention through a 1998 CBS 60 Minutes investigation. Yet every court – state, federal, even the US Supreme Court – declined to review the overwhelming evidence of innocence.
Thirty years after their convictions, the Louisiana Parole Board finally released Alexander and Granger in 2006. No formal exoneration was ever granted. Both men settled back in New Iberia, living out their remaining years in the very place where a corrupt system had stolen three decades of their lives.
In this lesson to Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey, you’ve learned that the American justice system convicts innocent people even when evidence clearly points elsewhere – through mechanisms like coerced confessions, racial prejudice, unreliable forensic examinations, and corruption. When authorities get it wrong, they often double down rather than admit their mistakes. Exoneration, if it comes at all, arrives decades too late, and frequently without any formal acknowledgment that an injustice occurred.
Framed (2025) examines extraordinary cases of wrongful conviction, revealing how innocent people can lose decades of their lives to prosecutorial misconduct and flawed evidence. Through meticulous research, these stories demonstrate the devastating failures of the American legal system and spotlight the tireless work of civil rights activists fighting to exonerate the innocent.
Meet a small but resilient group of people. These people know firsthand just how flawed the US judicial system can be. They have endured the unthinkable. They have suffered needless trauma and lost years of their lives. Only through the most determined work, and the most extraordinary luck, are they able to tell their stories.
Who are they? Exonerees. People convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.
People like the Norfolk Four, sailors Derek Tice, Danial Williams, Joseph Dick, and Eric Wilson, who were coerced into confessing to a rape and murder they had nothing to do with. Like Clarence Brandley, the Black janitor from Texas who spent nearly a decade on death row for the rape and murder of a white teenager, a crime he did not commit. Like Levon Brooks, who served sixteen years in Mississippi prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter – convicted largely on fabricated evidence.
In this lesson, you’ll hear the stories of these exonerees and others. You’ll also begin to unravel the complex web of flawed systems, legal failings, corruption, perjury, and witness coercion that conspired to see them wrongly convicted.
Billy and Michelle Bosko were a young Navy couple from Pittsburgh, stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, home to the world’s largest naval base. Michelle was a fastidious housekeeper, and when Billy returned from a two-week deployment on July 8, 1997, their apartment was typically immaculate. Immaculate except for the bedroom, where Michelle’s body lay.
The crime scene told a clear story. A knife lay beside the body, money was missing from her purse, and vaginal injuries indicated rape. It was clear the culprit was a sole assailant who’d entered without force. DNA evidence was recovered – semen on a blanket, and blood under Michelle’s fingernails.
Here’s what happened: Omar Ballard, a serial predator who’d murdered two other women in the months surrounding Michelle’s death, had briefly taken shelter with the Boskos during a rainstorm. When Bosko returned weeks later, Michelle, characteristically kind, had invited him in. Two years later, DNA would unquestionably identify Ballard as the perpetrator.
So why, with clear evidence of a lone assailant and DNA pointing to one man, did four innocent sailors end up wrongfully convicted?
It began with a hunch. Officer Judy Gray, reasoning that the lack of forced entry meant Michelle knew her killer, questioned neighbors. Tamika Taylor mentioned two men: Dan Williams, who lived next door, and Omar Ballard. The police only followed up one of those leads.
Dan Williams was twenty-five, a former Boy Scout, Navy-trained. Hardly guessing that he was a suspect, when he went to the station he waived his Miranda rights. Police interrogated him without a lawyer. They administered a polygraph test and told him he’d failed. This was a lie; it’s perfectly legal for officers to lie during interrogations. After nearly twelve hours of interrogation, in which police implied Williams might have been sleepwalking or blacked out at the time of the murder, he confessed.
When DNA results came back with no match, Williams should have been freed. Instead, police doubled down, claiming he’d been there but hadn’t acted alone.
The same coercive tactics snared Williams’s fellow naval officers Joe Dick, Eric Wilson, and Derek Tice. All eventually confessed under relentless pressure. Three other suspects held in jail refused to confess and were quietly released. When Ballard finally wrote from prison confessing to Michelle’s murder, with DNA confirming his guilt, prosecutors reluctantly dropped charges against the three who hadn’t confessed. But they stubbornly maintained the other four had been present at Michelle’s murder, along with Ballard.
The path to justice stretched over years. All four men received conditional pardons in 2005, acknowledging serious flaws in their cases. But conditional pardons aren’t full exonerations.
It wasn’t until 2017 that the final chapter unfolded. Detective Robert Glenn Ford, who’d orchestrated these coercive interrogations, was himself imprisoned for corruption in an unrelated case. Only then were Williams, Tice, Dick, and Wilson granted full, unconditional pardons.
The truth was there from day one – in the crime scene, in the DNA, in the clear signs of a single perpetrator. Four innocent men lost years of their lives not because the truth was hidden, but because those in power chose to ignore it.
When police asked Clarence Brandley, the manager of a team of high school custodians, to account for his actions on the morning of August 23, 1980, this is what he told them: He’d restocked toilet paper in the boys’ bathroom – per school policy, he didn’t enter the girls’ bathroom. He went to his office for a smoke. He rejoined his janitorial team. It was a Saturday and the school was empty except for a girls’ volleyball match. When the visiting team raised the alarm that Captain Cheryl Fergeson had gone to the bathroom and not returned, Brandley joined the search party. With colleague Icky Peace, he found Fergeson’s body in the girls’ bathrooms – sexually assaulted and strangled.
Police put it to Brandley that things had gone differently. They accused him of following Fergeson to the bathroom and killing her. Samples were taken, questions asked, but only of Brandley and Peace. They declined to question anyone else.
Of all the custodians at the school that day, only Brandley was Black. When Texas Ranger Wesley Styles brought Brandley and Peace in for questioning, he told them one of them would hang for this crime. Since Brandley was Black, Styles told him, “You're elected.”
Brandley faced trial in December 1980 before an all-white jury. The prosecution’s case relied entirely on circumstantial evidence. No physical evidence linked Brandley to the crime. Pubic hairs with alleged “negroid characteristics” were found on the body, but no expert testified they belonged to Brandley. These hairs subsequently vanished from evidence. Sperm from the victim’s body had been destroyed before trial, and was never tested. A blood spot on Fergeson’s blouse was Type A. Brandley had Type O blood.
One juror refused to convict, forcing a mistrial. At the second trial in February 1981 – another all-white jury – prosecutors presented witness Danny Taylor, who claimed Brandley had made threatening remarks about white female students. The medical examiner testified that Brandley’s belt was consistent with the murder weapon. The district attorney suggested Brandley was a necrophiliac, based on the fact he sometimes performed odd jobs at a funeral home.
Brandley was convicted and sentenced to death.
Eleven months later, Brandley’s lawyers discovered crucial evidence had disappeared from prosecution custody: Caucasian pubic hairs found on Fergeson’s body that belonged to neither her nor Brandley, and photographs showing Brandley wasn’t wearing the belt prosecutors claimed was the weapon on the day of Fergeson’s murder.
Eventually, through the work of civil rights activists, the truth emerged. Custodian Gary Acreman admitted on videotape that another former janitor, James Robinson, had killed Fergeson. Robinson had Type A blood – matching the blood on the victim’s blouse.
On October 1, 1990, prosecutors finally dropped all charges. Brandley walked free after nearly a decade on death row – not because justice eventually prevailed, but because the web of racism and corruption finally collapsed.
Picture an autopsy room – sterile, clinical, almost cathedral-quiet. The pathologist works methodically, searching for truth in tissue and bone. Every cut, every measurement, every sample could determine whether a killer walks free or an innocent person spends their life behind bars.
The reality of the autopsy doesn’t always match up to this ideal.
In 1980s and ‘90s Mississippi, budget constraints meant few pathologists were available to perform autopsies. One man, Dr. Steven Hayne, cornered the market, conducting an astounding 80 percent of the state’s autopsies. While his peers managed 250 to 300 autopsies annually, Hayne performed over 1,000 – and worked prolifically as a prosecution expert witness. Detractors said there was no way he could maintain quality at such a pace. Frankly, they were right. Hayne was negligent. We’ll never know how many innocent people his sloppy examinations sent to prison. But we do know he was largely responsible for the wrongful conviction of one man: Levon Brooks.
On September 15, 1990, three-year-old Courtney Smith was abducted from her Brooksville, Mississippi home and found murdered two days later. Hayne performed her autopsy and claimed to find bite marks on the child’s wrist. These marks would become the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case.
Enter the next expert. Dr. Michael West was a dentist who, like Hayne, charged premium rates as an expert witness. When West examined ten male suspects in Smith’s murder – without warrants or lawyers present – he took dental molds and declared he’d found his match. Levon Brooks, he testified with absolute certainty, had bitten little Courtney Smith.
Here’s what Hayne and West got catastrophically wrong: the marks on Courtney’s body weren’t human bite marks at all. They were likely post-mortem injuries from insects or decomposition – common findings that experienced pathologists recognize. But based on their flawed testimony, Brooks received a death sentence.
The house of cards began crumbling when another child, Christine Jackson, was murdered nearby. Kennedy Brewer was convicted on similar bite mark evidence, also thanks to Hayne and West. But when DNA testing became available in 2001, it revealed the truth: both murders were committed by Justin Albert Johnson, a serial predator. When Johnson finally confessed, he adamantly denied biting either victim.
A 2001 study revealed that bite mark “experts” had a staggering 63 percent error rate – worse than a coin flip. The science behind bite mark analysis is fundamentally flawed: human skin isn’t stable enough to retain accurate dental impressions, and individual bite patterns aren’t unique enough for definitive identification.
Both Brooks and Brewer were exonerated in 2008, but Brooks died just ten years later, having lost sixteen precious years to this forensic misconduct. Their cases exposed how so-called experts harnessed pseudoscience for personal profit, no matter the cost to others.
They were childhood sweethearts: when they met, Joe Bryan was in second grade, Mickey Blue in first grade. They stayed friends, then dated, then trained together as teachers. When they returned to Clifton – the town where Mickey grew up – Mickey taught at the elementary school, while Joe became the high-school principal.
Mickey Blue was known for arriving early at Clifton Elementary. So when her classroom was still locked at 8:15 one October morning in 1985, her colleague Susan Kleine knew something was wrong. Hours later, Mickey's body was discovered in her bedroom, naked from the waist down. She had been shot to death.
Joe was 120 miles away in Austin at a principals’ conference. He’d spoken to Mickey at 9 pm the night before, and told her he loved her. When he heard the news, Joe collapsed into a chair in the hotel lobby.
The Texas Rangers’ investigation showed no forced entry. Joe’s gun was missing, along with some valuables. A cigarette butt lay on the kitchen floor – this was significant, as neither Joe nor Mickey smoked.
Mickey’s brother Charlie flew in from Florida with private investigator Bud Saunders. In Joe’s car trunk, Saunders found a flashlight with speckles on the lens. Police sent it to the crime lab: they found Type O blood on the flashlight. Joe wasn’t Type O; Mickey was, along with about half the population. The Rangers arrested Joe Bryan.
The Rangers had their (questionable) evidence. What they did not have was a motive. The Bryans were the perfect couple: happy, fulfilled, and financially stable. Desperate to establish a motive, they hypothesized that Joe was gay, that Mickey had found out, and that he’d murdered her in a rage. Their proof? A Chippendales calendar in the trunk – a gag gift for a friend.
Now, Robert Thorman entered the picture. Thorman had just completed a one-week, $400 course in bloodstain spatter analysis. This was his first case as a fee-paid expert. Thorman testified that blood spatter on the flashlight proved Joe had fired the fatal shots while holding it. The jury deliberated for four hours. Guilty.
Years later, Thorman admitted in a sworn affidavit that his conclusions were wrong. The Texas Forensic Science Commission agreed that the analysis was not scientifically supported. Despite this, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused a new trial. Joe was denied parole seven times. Finally, in March 2020, he walked out of Huntsville prison at age 79 after 33 years – released on parole, but not exonerated.
His attorneys petitioned the US Supreme Court for a declaration of actual innocence. The Court denied review.
Joe Bryan died in September 2024 at age 84, still legally a murderer. He never got to visit Mickey’s grave as an exonerated man and never got to tell her, “We know who did it.” For Joe Bryan, justice simply never came.
On March 30, 1976, the Hasty Mart convenience store in rural New Iberia, Louisiana, was robbed, and its elderly proprietor, Louis Gladu, was fatally shot.
The perpetrators? Preston Demouchet and Jerry Paul Francis, two career criminals with violent records, along with Malcolm Roy, who drove the getaway car. Over the following weeks, they killed two more people during robberies in nearby towns. Their final crime, shooting a bank teller in Parks, brought federal investigators into the hunt. Tracked to Houston, all three were captured.
Back in Louisiana custody, Francis gave a full confession. He described the crimes in detail and took deputies directly to where he’d hidden the gun. Tests proved it was the weapon that killed Gladu. Roy confessed as well. Both men provided specific details about the Hasty Mart robbery. For example, Francis told authorities that Gladu’s glasses fell off before he was shot, that cigarette packages were knocked off the counter, that the cash register drawer was left hanging open.
An open-and-shut case. Or it would have been, if it weren’t for the fact that by the time Francis confessed and led deputies to the weapon, the Sheriff and District Attorney had already indicted innocent men for the Hasty Mart murder.
The prosecution’s case rested on the testimony of Mary Arceneaux, a habitual offender facing prison time for check fraud. She claimed she’d witnessed the Hasty Mart killing, naming David Alexander, Harry Granger, and Sammy Derouen as the killers. When deputies mistakenly arrested Herbert Derouen instead of his brother Sammy, Arceneaux adapted her story accordingly – now Herbert had been there, not Sammy.
Alexander and Granger insisted on their innocence. Herbert Derouen, who had intellectual disabilities, gave a confession after enduring an overnight interrogation marked by physical abuse. His confession contradicted Arceneaux’s version of events entirely.
Now the sheriff faced an impossible situation of his own making: the real killers had confessed and provided the murder weapon, but he’d already built a case against six innocent men. His solution? He pressured Francis and Roy to take back their confessions. Roy later described how investigators pressured him to recant, insisting he was lying about what actually happened.
Based on the contradictory testimonies of Arceneaux and Herbert Derouen, Alexander and Granger received life sentences. Both Arceneaux and Derouen eventually recanted.
Civil rights activists spent a decade fighting to free Alexander and Granger. The case gained national attention through a 1998 CBS 60 Minutes investigation. Yet every court – state, federal, even the US Supreme Court – declined to review the overwhelming evidence of innocence.
Thirty years after their convictions, the Louisiana Parole Board finally released Alexander and Granger in 2006. No formal exoneration was ever granted. Both men settled back in New Iberia, living out their remaining years in the very place where a corrupt system had stolen three decades of their lives.
In this lesson to Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey, you’ve learned that the American justice system convicts innocent people even when evidence clearly points elsewhere – through mechanisms like coerced confessions, racial prejudice, unreliable forensic examinations, and corruption. When authorities get it wrong, they often double down rather than admit their mistakes. Exoneration, if it comes at all, arrives decades too late, and frequently without any formal acknowledgment that an injustice occurred.
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