John Grisham will write about one of Texas’ most controversial death penalty cases in a nonfiction book coming in 2026.
Doubleday will publish the novelist’s Shaken: The Rush To Execute an Innocent Man next spring, the press announced in a news release. It calls the book “the harrowing true story of a Texas father condemned to die for a crime that never happened.”
Shaken will tell the story of Robert Roberson, who was convicted in 2003 of murdering his 2-year-old daughter the year before. He received the death penalty for the slaying. His attorneys argued that the girl died of pneumonia and sepsis, and appealed the conviction under Texas’ “junk science law.”
Roberson lost his appeals, and is currently scheduled to be executed on October 16.
Grisham is on the board of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that advocates for the wrongfully convicted. He has written about the subject in two previous nonfiction books, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town and Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, co-written with Jim McCloskey.
In the new book, Doubleday says, Grisham “exposes the many failures that led to a blameless man’s death sentence, and a justice system more eager for a conviction than the truth. Powerful, urgent, and frequently unimaginable, this is both a riveting legal drama as only John Grisham can tell it, and a searing indictment of our criminal justice system.”
Shaken is scheduled for publication on June 9, 2026.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
