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John Grisham says US 'has gone nuts' with child porn incarcerations, then issues apology

John Grisham. ABA file photo.

Legal thriller author John Grisham has issued an apology after telling a British newspaper that the United States “has gone nuts” with incarcerations of people for viewing child porn.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Telegraph on the U.S. judicial system, Grisham said judges have “gone crazy” locking up people such as Martha Stewart, teens on minor drug charges, and people who viewed child porn online.

“We have prisons now filled with guys my age. Sixty-year-old white men in prison who’ve never harmed anybody, would never touch a child,” he said. “But they got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn.”

He said the justice system fails to distinguish between child abusers and people who download porn. “I have no sympathy for real pedophiles,” Grisham said, “God, please lock those people up.”

Grisham cited the case against “a good buddy from law school,” as an example of overzealous sentencing. According to Grisham, the buddy, whose drinking was out of control, visited a website touting “16-year-old wannabe hookers.” Grisham said it turned out to be a sting, and the buddy went to prison for three years.

“There’s so many of them now,” Grisham said. “There’s so many sex offenders—that’s what they’re called—that they put them in the same prison. Like they’re a bunch of perverts, or something; thousands of them. We’ve gone nuts with this incarceration.”

A later Telegraph article identified the friend who went to prison as Michael B. Holleman. He had actually served 15 months of an 18-month sentence, and had sent an undercover agent 13 sexually explicit images, some of children younger than 12, according to a U.S. Justice Department lawyer who spoke with the local Herald Sun newspaper for a 1997 article. The Mississippi Supreme Court agreed to that Holleman’s conditional reinstatement after disbarment in this June 2002 opinion. Grisham was one of about 60 people who wrote letters of recommendation asking them to reinstate Holleman, according to the Telegraph.

USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and CNN are among the publications with news of Grisham’s apology.

“Anyone who harms a child for profit or pleasure, or who in any way participates in child pornography—online or otherwise—should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” Grisham said in a statement. “My comments made two days ago during an interview with the British newspaper the Telegraph were in no way intended to show sympathy for those convicted of sex crimes, especially the sexual molestation of children. I can think of nothing more despicable. I regret having made these comments, and apologize to all.”

This Washington Post column by Radley Balko notes that Grisham has devoted much of his time to criminal justice reform. He helped found the Mississippi Innocence Project and is on the board of directors of the Innocence Project in New York. A focus of his has been racial disparities in arrests and incarceration.