Shaken: The Rush to Execute an Innocent Man

Shaken is John Grisham's nonfiction account of Robert Roberson, a Texas father on death row for the death of his daughter — a conviction built on the now-discredited shaken baby syndrome hypothesis. Grisham traces the failures at every level of the criminal justice system that produced a death sentence in a case where the medical science underlying the charge was never as settled as prosecutors claimed. The book is both a legal narrative and an indictment of the machinery that moves cases toward conviction regardless of evidence.

The narrator information is not available for this entry, but Grisham's track record with true crime — from The Innocent Man to Framed — establishes the context: methodical, clear-eyed, and written with genuine moral urgency about the gap between legal outcome and justice.