John Grisham on the guilt of guilt: “It is not so difficult to punish the innocent.”

What happened to Army veterans Mark Jones, Dominic Lucci and Kenny Gardiner that January night in 1992 is almost unbelievable. “It just blindsides you like lightning,” Lucci said.

“It was a shock and a shock,” Jones said.

Gardiner said, “One day you are preparing to go to the promotion board, the next day you are fighting for freedom.”

A chance meeting with a Savannah, Georgia, police officer investigating the murder charges each man 26 years in prison for a crime they did not commit. “Why us? Then why?” said Lucci. “We have nothing in our lives that would lead anyone to that assumption. There is no logical reason to do anything.”

The arrest, conviction and fight for freedom are as dramatic as the plot of a legal thriller, says bestselling author John Grisham, who has written nearly 50 of them. “It’s all there: drama, suffering, injustice, you name it,” Grisham said.

The story of the Savannah 3 is one of ten cases outlined in Grisham’s new book, “Framed,” which he co-authored with Jim McCloskey, the founder of Centurion, one of the first non-profit organizations in the country that helps free the wronged. The case he describes, he says, is not an outlier; in fact, Grisham said, it’s “the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of these cases, maybe thousands.”

This is only the second non-fiction work by Grisham, a former lawyer, who sits on the board of Centurion. Asked about the emotional upheaval of the story, he said, “We can’t believe that someone would last 20 years on death row, and come out, and be able to walk. And I’ve met a lot of these guys. Over the years , he has suffered the unfathomable.

In relation to the title of the book, “Framed,” who did the framing? “Police and prosecutors,” McCloskey said. “Police force witnesses to testify falsely. Prosecutors hide exculpatory evidence from defendants. It goes on and on.”

The walls of the Centurion office, in Princeton, New Jersey, are lined with some of the faces of clients, and the number, said Grisham and McCloskey, is disturbing. Nationwide, 3,600 people have been released since 1989; 68 percent are people of color.

“Racism is a big factor,” Grisham said.

“If you’re a person of color and disenfranchised, you have to fight, because you don’t have the resources to fight these wrongful beliefs,” McCloskey said.

And most of the people who were wronged – as in the case of Kenny Gardiner, Mark Jones and Dominic Lucci – were just unlucky.

Back on January 31, 1992, the three soldiers, then in their early twenties, were together at a wedding rehearsal the day before Jones was set to marry. “Everything finally connected and came together in my life,” he said.

After dinner, the three soldiers drove 45 miles to a nightclub in Savannah for an impromptu bachelor party. Lucci said, “We tried to get to the strip club that didn’t let us in because (Mark’s) birthday was three months away. So, we went to another one. We didn’t know how to get there.

He stopped three times to get directions to the police, unaware that there had been a drive-by shooting nearby, and that he would cross paths with an eyewitness.

Lucci said, “We asked a police officer who was walking down the street with a gentleman in a suit where the place was. He said, ‘It’s right there.’ We assumed that the man in the suit was a detective, that he was an eyewitness who told us, ‘That’s like a car.’

Soon, the police brought the three men in for questioning. They were arrested for killing hours later.

None of them have a criminal history. No one knows the victim. And no gun was found in the car. “There was no gun found anywhere, but no gun was found,” Lucci said.

There, Jones said, nothing to connect to the shooting. So how do we not only arrest them, but punish them? “Wrong place, wrong time,” he said.

There was also, said McCloskey, racial riots in Savannah, and the killing of a Black man was blamed on three white men putting the city on the edge. “They made a case against them to demonstrate to the Black leadership that they care as much about Black victims as they do white,” McCloskey said. “And these three innocent soldiers fell into his hands, and departed.”

At the trial, an eyewitness, James White, identified two men as the shooters. Other witnesses, and the prosecution, were painted as racists and sensation seekers. The jury was out for 8 hours and 20 minutes, before returning verdicts of guilty of murder and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime.

“I almost passed out, because I was so shocked,” Gardiner said.

He was sentenced to life in prison, plus five years. Lucci asked, “Does that mean I have to serve life, and if I die in prison, you’ll keep me for five more years before you release it to my family? I don’t know what’s going on here!”

Lucci wrote letter after letter to Centurion, which received only one or two new cases each year. But in 2009, McCloskey and his team took on the case.

It will still take years to get justice. Even after James White admitted that he lied about his identification in court, they remained in prison, until December 20, 2017. The Supreme Court of Georgia decided that the state failed to produce the main evidence for the defense in the original trial, even if it was unintentional, breaking the law. Lucci, Gardiner and Jones are finally free.

“Those are the moments that make you lose your cool,” McCloskey said. “You can not believe it really happened, and you are very happy for the families and mothers, to bring their children home to them.”

Kenny Gardiner now lives in Texas, and rents a room in the house where Mark Jones lives, together with his mother. They both have pizza delivery jobs. Dominic Lucci moved to Ohio, where he worked as a telephone operator at a VA hospital. The three, now in their 50s, are still the best of friends.

While the Georgia Legislature awarded compensation to the three men, they could not recover what they had lost.

“Think about what you’ve done from age 21 to age 47, and lose everything — your college, your marriage, your home,” Gardiner said.

“Your child is born,” Lucci added.

“No work history. Twenty-six years of Social Security not included,” Gardiner said.

And he couldn’t let go of the past. He admits it’s still a nightmare. And when asked if they have trouble trusting people, Lucci laughed: “I don’t trust anyone! Family is so far, and (Kenny and Mark) are part of the family.”

These people are actually people with a lot of money, says John Grisham. There are others who are still waiting to be heard: “What we will do is to draw attention to the case and show people that these cases happen all the time. It is not difficult to punish innocent people; it is almost impossible to get out.”

READ EXCERPTS: “Framed” by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey

EDITOR’S NOTE: In response to questions about John Grisham’s reliance on other people’s reports in “Framed,” the author provided this statement to “Sunday Morning”:

“I have long been interested in stories about wrongful convictions, an issue that has featured in many novels and nonfiction over the past thirty years. The Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries.

“There are eight total pages of source notes on ‘Framed.’ I clearly stated that Jim McCloskey has lived with this case in the course of his excellent life work in Centurion, I did not live this story, I read about it, through newspaper and magazine articles, books, legal briefs, court opinions, and documentaries.

“And I have acknowledged and acknowledged all my sources for every chapter in ‘Framed.’ While the facts of any case are indisputable and cannot be changed in any form, the writing in ‘Framed’ is my own. For the rest of the statement is simply and patently untrue.”

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Story produced by Michelle Kessel. Editor: Ed Givnish.

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