Catherine Raynes: Framed and The Elements of Marie Curie

Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey  

John Grisham is known worldwide for his bestselling novels, but it’s his real-life passion for justice that led to his work with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, the first organization dedicated to exonerating innocent people who have been wrongly convicted. Together they offer an inside look at the many injustices in our criminal justice system. 
 
A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty, there is very little room to prove doubt. These ten true stories shed light on Americans who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount the dramatic hard-fought battles for exoneration. They take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and corruption in the court system that can make them so hard to reverse. 
 
Impeccably researched and told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of winning freedom when the battle already seems lost and the deck is stacked against you. 

  

The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel  

For decades Marie Curie was the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings, and despite constant illness she travelled far and wide to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. She is still the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. 
 
Her ingenuity extended far beyond the laboratory walls; grieving the death of her husband, Pierre, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne, devotedly raised two daughters, drove a van she outfitted with x-ray equipment to the front lines of World War I, befriended Albert Einstein and inspired generations of young women to pursue science as a way of life. 
 
Approaching Marie Curie from a unique angle, Sobel navigates her remarkable discoveries and fame alongside the women who became her legacy – from Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch and France’s Marguerite Perry, who discovered the element francium, to her own daughter, Irene, a Nobel Prize winner in her own right. The Elements of Marie Curie deftly illuminates the trailblazing life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time. 

 

LISTEN ABOVE 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from Newstalk SEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
It's twenty one to twelve you with Jack Tame on
Newstalks 'DB. John Grisham has a new book, but he's
doing things a little bit differently this time round. Our
book reviewer Katherin Rains is here with all the details.
Gold to Catherine.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Good morning, Jack, So tell us.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
About Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
So this is all about true stories about wrongful convictions.
And obviously, John Grisham's a well known author and he
is also a lawyer, and he's teamed up with this guy,
Jim McCluskey, who's the founder of Centurion Ministries, and it's
a nonprofit organization dedicated to exonerating the wrong for the convicted,
and he's been working on that for about forty five years.
So in alternating chapters, they both present different cases of

(00:51):
miss justice miscarried resulting in the unwarranted incarceration of ten
innocent people. And you know, they talk about how they're
rail raided into confessions after these interrogation nightmares and the
blind eyes cast by authorities who just overlook material that
would exonerate them because they determined they had their man.
And so they look at the why and the wear
of how each case, and it's explained about, you know,

(01:13):
the people who were responsible for fitting innocent people in prison,
and you know, some of those people ended up on
death row, and the prosecutors and judges and policemen and
some of these cases are actually still working and some
of these incarcerated people are still in prison even though
there's proof that they're not guilty of the crime that
they wisked him. So you get this deceasing corruption. It's
found at every government level and prosecutors that are willing

(01:34):
to go to any lengths to secure convictions in the
selections of jurors, particularly around co and the particularly around
co's confessions using polygraphs, and they tell them that they
failed and they hadn't. And then probably most prevalent in
these is jail house snitches who were relied to say
anything and just no credibility because actually they were getting

(01:55):
their own sentences and sometimes for murder reduced. And then
there's on the other side of this as well, there's
the experts who had done nothing in this field that
they were supposedly ecs and other than take a very
short course and really don't know a lot about their subjects.
And probably one of the most compelling cases and there
is a guy called Cameron Todd Willingham, and he's executed

(02:17):
for allegedly setting fire that killed his own children, and
only very later does it become clear that the fire
was completely accidental, and the experts that working about it
believed in faulty arts and science, and so it's really interesting.
And in some cases these perpetrators of the crimes actually
are key witnesses for the prosecution. So it's fascinating. And

(02:42):
the authors mcluskey and Grisham aren't saying that this kind
of wrongful confection is widespread, but what they do talk
about is really compelling and eye opening and some of
those grave injustices that just happen in the criminal justice
system and really really fascinating look in cases.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Sounds great, sounds really really interesting. Okay, that's framed by
John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. You've read the Elements of
Marie by Dava Soble So.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Dava Sober notes right in the beginning that Murray Currey
is one of the few female scientists that most of
us can actually name, and she was twice winning Nobel
Laureate and what she achieves in her lifetime is immense.
And you know, Dava takes us back to Murray's childhood
and education. She was born in Poland before she moves

(03:29):
to the Suborn in Paris to further her studies, and
when she enrolls in eighteen ninety one, she's one of
one of twenty three female students among two thousand men
to study science. And her experimental work was always at
the forefront of her life. And she found love with
her research partner, Pierre, and they married and had two daughters,
and she focused on her work, but she always found

(03:51):
time to give back to her scientific community and particularly
other women in science, and that theme really flows at
the book and other stories that are here, and she
talks about how Marie and Peria collaborated on Marie's doctoral
thesis and studying the unusual energy excluded by uranium, and
during their investigation that's what they later term radioactivity, they

(04:13):
discover the two new elements polonium and radium, and then
it really upended everything scientists understood about the material world.
And her work shows that atoms were not as they
being believed invisible, and the funding boldrooing plots of our universe,
and she's just she was just amazing and what she
created and the scientific discoveries, but also this really focuses

(04:34):
on the human stories of the people and the work
and her you know, the people that she works with
as well, and the people that she pulled together in
her labs. And it's fascinating and it looks at that
perspective of her work and life and research and all
the accolades, and it's a very interesting look at one
of the great minds of science and how immense her
contribution was and still is to the way that we

(04:55):
understand the world, and particularly the periodic table. Main amazing
feat what she achieved.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Okay, great, but that is The Elements of Marie Curry
by Dava Sobel and Frame by John Grisham and Jim
McCloskey was Catherine's first book. Where both of those will
be on the News Talk's EDBE website of course, for

Speaker 1 (05:13):
More from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live to
News Talks EDB from nine am Saturday, or follow the
podcast on iHeartRadio