Wrongful Convictions Read online

  “No cheese.”

  2

  Joanne Hart-Benson got hit with a blast of sand that had been carried by a ferocious wind gust across the parking lot. Although the sun was hot, the wind gust signified a front was moving in and a storm was just around the corner. Everyone in Minneapolis and St. Paul was praying for relief. This was the hottest summer on record. Today was the fourth day in a row the mercury had touched triple digits and the Twin Cities had seen nineties every day since July 24th, more than a month. A thunderhead was forming on the western horizon and anyone who had spent any time in Minnesota knew that humidity like this was going to be followed by one hell of a tempest. St. Paul hadn’t seen rain since early May; the typically lush green St. Stevens campus had browned up after the watering ban was put in place in early July along with the rest of the city. There had been watering bans in place throughout the Twin Cities, and the normally beautiful green of the metropolitan area had long since dried up and turned brown.

  Joanne had been a professor at St. Stevens for eight years now. The first six had been a breeze, but the last two on the other hand had been more of a struggle. The trouble hadn’t surprised her. The last two years of her life had been a struggle. A wave of disdain washed over her, and Joanne understood that she was beginning to hate the university.

  Joanne fully understand her state of mind. The school had been very good to her. The job certainly paid well. She was given a ton of leeway to set her own schedule and she had the respect of her colleagues. When Joanne paused for a moment and looked at the building, a realization came to her: it wasn’t the university she hated, it was the students. Each new class that entered seemed to have an added degree of arrogance. Her mind played back her first year. She had seen a fire in their eyes, a passion for the law. As she stood in front of them, sharing in their discovery of the law, she saw idealists. They had an aura that suggested a healthy fear and a determination to change the world. That determination fueled her passion like spraying lighter fluid on a bonfire. Joanne herself was an idealist, unlike many of her own classmates. Her passion to change the world had not burned out when she got her first big check. Instead it raged, burning hotter and hotter with every case.

  Joanne had graduated from the Cardozo School of Law in 1993 and she had been a member of the first Innocence Project, a non–profit legal clinic that focused its efforts on exonerating innocent people based on DNA evidence. After graduating law school, she went to work at the New York State Defenders office, and in her first year had oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States on a death penalty case. That case had been argued successfully. Her first win. The decision was not a landmark by any means, but it was the first in a series of victories against the death penalty that set her on a path that lead her to St. Stevens University. Along the way she met Frank Dekalb and the two of them founded the American Innocence Institute that was based at St. Stevens. It was at St. Stevens that she met Shannon McCarthy.

  Shannon McCarthy was a legacy at St. Stevens. Her great-great-great-grandfather had been one of the first five men to enroll at the Saint Paul building on September 22nd,1880. She was a fifth generation student. There was a building on campus named after her grandfather. To say that Shannon came from money was an understatement. Shannon’s family was money, at least in Minnesota. The fact that Shannon had taken her mother’s maiden name in high school was not a sign of embarrassment about her family’s wealth, but it was symbolic of her desire to blaze her own trail in life. Unlike many of her current classmates at St. Stevens, Shannon didn’t live lavishly off her trust fund. She didn’t spend late nights partying on Grand Avenue in St. Paul and only touched the trust when an emergency arose, or for a large purchase like the down payment on her house in Northeast Minneapolis.

  Shannon was a modest woman who worked full time while going to law school. She had a certain amount of resentment for her classmates whose family connections assured them jobs after law school. Her resentment wasn’t based in jealousy, for she certainly had her own connections, but rather contempt for her classmates’ lack of self-reliance. Yes, she had connections, but she had no intention of using them.

  It was Shannon’s self-reliance that first caught Joanne’s attention, a quality that Joanne felt was one of her own most endearing traits. Joanne had taken Shannon under her wing over the summer and had put her to work with the institute. The work was tedious but Shannon never complained, and Joanne’s respect for her protégé grew. Joanne hadn’t met Marcel Wright yet, but she had heard plenty about his brilliance from Shannon over the summer and was looking forward to meeting him this fall. She had gotten her class rosters a week earlier and both Shannon and Marcel had been on her roster for Wrongful Convictions. If Marcel was half the legal mind Shannon had made him out to be, his skill combined with Shannon’s work ethic would make this a truly special class. Special was what she needed. The institute had suffered a series of high profile losses within the last couple of years, and Joanne had been dealing with her own personal issues as well. Some new blood would do everyone good.

  3

  Shannon wheeled into the parking lot at St. Stevens as Joanne Hart-Benson was walking across it. She pulled into a parking space between a black Toyota Corolla and a red Nissan 380zx and watched Joanne walk up to the law school. She observed the woman pause at the front and take a long look at the name above the door. Letting all entrants know that they were about to cross the threshold of the St. Stevens University School of Law. St. Stevens University carried with it an air of superiority, and it wasn’t shy about letting everyone know it. Joanne’s pause was odd. Everyone else passed in and out of the vestibule with little thought. Why would a woman who had been working at the school for eight years all of a sudden be captivated by the name above the door that had greeted her every day? Shannon had observed a lot of odd behavior in Joanne recently.

  Shannon had class with Joanne this evening. It promised to be the most interesting class she would take at St. Stevens. 1L classes are the same for every student in every law school in the country. Everyone took Civil Procedure, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, Legal Writing, Property and Constitutional Law. Those classes were mostly foundational, and there is nothing particularly sexy about any of them. Constitutional Law I was interesting. Shannon, a self proclaimed history buff, had enjoyed the interplay between the social issues of the day and the Supreme Court’s ruling on cases and how those cases shaped our present day. Contracts, on the other hand, was a brutal exercise in fortitude; the year long class didn’t apply to her beyond 1L and provided little entertainment.

  The second year of law school was designed for students to load up on the heavy subjects that most interest them: white collar crime, wills and trusts, consumer protection, the meat and potatoes of the law. 3L or the third year was where students coast home with clinics and practicums, Trial Practice, Lawyering Skills, the hands on applications that were vital to post-graduate employment. Wrongful Convictions was a course that fit somewhere in between, a year long course with a heavy emphasis on case law and writing during first semester. The second semester was a practicum with the Innocence Institute.

  Like most other students, Shannon had enrolled in the class this year because rumors were rampant about the future of the American Innocence Institute at St. Stevens. One of the fascinating things about law school was the tendency for adults to revert back to high school students once they were accepted. Where college was a journey for young adults to find themselves, law school is a rumor mill filled with pettiness, backbiting and treachery. It was an ultra competitive forum for people that never had to compete on an equal playing field and didn’t feel the need to start. From stolen materials in the library to all out false information campaigns, law school was really a finishing school for sharks. Circling the waters waiting for the smell of blood, attacking when the time was right. Joanne Hart-Benson was not above the rumors and the respect she once garnered at St. Stevens had started to wain. There were rumors
about her drug use, cocaine primarily but more recently there was talk that she was suffering from a paralyzing addiction to Narcodone. Attorneys and drug use were not a new phenomenon. In fact a survey of lawyers in the Twin Cities would probably find most had some form of addiction: drugs, sex, booze, gambling, whatever. It was the nature of the business: long work hours, isolation, ego, money. But the most recent rumors where more damning, the type of allegations that brought censure and disbarment, ended careers, and sometimes lives.

  Shannon was the type of person that would know better than to believe every law school rumor, however there were signs that no one could miss. Joanne had aged about ten years in the last eighteen months. She had been an attractive woman, hosting her own show on Cable TV. The show was a roundtable program with a pro-defense bias that generally humiliated a backwoods law enforcement officer or bumbling prosecutor every week. The show was canceled after poor ratings because most people that watched garbage like that were not looking for her liberal opinions. Moreover, everyone suspected that Joanne’s looks going to hell weren’t helping her plight. She had become more haggard; the combination of stress and drugs no doubt has that effect on a person. Shannon herself hadn’t seen anything in person working alongside her, but in her experience functioning addicts could be very adept at hiding their plight. After Joanne entered the building, Shannon exited her car and made her way to the building herself.

  4

  Marcel parked his bike in the parking lot on the rear side of the law school, separated from Shannon and Joanne’s parking lot by Thol Tennis Courts and the graduate buildings. Marcel always parked in that lot because there were designated spots for motorcycles that were always open. During the day it was the only way he could get a parking spot within eight blocks of the school. At night, however, parking was more abundant, but Marcel was a creature of habit. His route to the parking place was a rote act at this point.

  Jarvis hated the thought of Marcel riding a motorcycle. Jarvis, as always, had a cautionary tale. This one was a fighter named Diego Corrales. Jarvis mentioned his name every time he saw the bike, so often Marcel now began to tune him out. Marcel was not a thrill seeker and figured it was the aggressive look of the Kawasaki ZX-6 that most scared Jarvis. Though Marcel knew it was capable of reaching a ridiculous top speed, he himself had never really tested it out. For Marcel it was more about the versatility that riding the bike gave him. Plus he thought it was sexy.

  Marcel was excited about the upcoming class, which was more than he could say about any of the classes he took as a 1L. When he had sat down with his friend Shannon last spring to look at the course catalog and plan out what they were going to take, that had been the course that most intrigued him. He had seen Joanne Hart-Benson’s show on TV at a friend’s once. He didn’t really care much for it, but the thought of having a celebrity professor was kind of cool. Not that Marcel cared much about celebrity, but he hoped she would bring some experiences to the classroom that were foreign to him. Marcel also liked the idea of the American Innocence Institute. He was very aware of what DNA was doing to shake up the criminal justice system, and he was shocked by how many innocent people had been convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. The thought reminded him of his own childhood fear, that someday he would be sent to prison for something he didn’t do. The idea of being locked away in prison was a horrifying thought to Marcel; he couldn’t envision himself living as a caged animal, much less doing so because of something he hadn’t done.

  The notion of prison brought with it a tornado of emotions to Marcel’s conscious. His own father had died in prison the victim of a petty dispute. The thoughts of his dad’s death brought great sorrow, but it also brought great anger, thinking about the life his father had chose to live. Rather than raising his kids, he chose drugs and crime. The twenty-five year sentence he’d died serving had been his third stretch of hard time. He had pulled the first when he was eighteen, two years for stealing a car. Henry Wright Jr. had been released as a twenty year old felon without much hope for the future. It wasn’t long before he was a repeat offender, this time earning a seven year sentence for possessing enough methamphetamine to supply the entire Midwest for six months. He was released at age twenty-eight, now hardened from an adult life behind bars. He had become adjusted to that life and had no fear of going back, but he had also gotten clean and wanted to try and do right or at least that is what Henry had told Marcel. Junior moved away from Colorado to escape the drug influences. That was when he met Marcel’s mother. Junior and Caroline were together on and off for a few years, long enough to sire two sons. Junior had been clean most of the time, gotten work as an auto mechanic at a local shop and attempted to be a citizen.

  Marcel always wondered if going to the reservation was the right choice for his father. On the one hand, his felony record didn’t automatically exclude him from being part of society. People that lived hard lives understood hard choices. There were a lot of other ex-cons living in Northern Minnesota, especially on the reservation. No one judged his father on his past. The problem was there were plenty of other dirtbags around to pull his father down which was exactly what happened.

  Looking back, his dad should have never had the gun. As a convicted felon, he lost the right to possess a firearm. The gun wasn’t his only misdeed. An addict shouldn’t have been in a bar, either. Unfortunately in Northern Minnesota, the forms of entertainment were extremely limited. Forget going to a ball game, a movie, a fancy restaurant if a man were without a driver’s license his only real form of entertainment was the local VFW club. Besides hanging around outside the gas station, which closed at ten, it was the only thing in town.

  At first, his father would only go out on Friday nights. Then it was Friday and Saturday, and pretty soon there weren’t many nights when his dad wasn’t at the bar. Take a shot of Jack Daniels, mix it with an ex-con and a dead end town, add ice, and you have a volatile cocktail. It began with him slapping Marcel’s mother around, then he put her in the hospital a couple of times. Finally, when rumors started flying around the VFW that she was running around with Nip Johnson, Marcel’s drunken dad had loaded his .357 with hollow points and put four of them into Nip. Two in the chest, one in the leg, and one in the face that closed the casket. Marcel’s mom was only shot once. She had lingered in a coma for two weeks before eventually dying. Marcel hadn’t been old enough to remember any of this. He was still an infant. His mother’s mother had taken him and his brother in and raised them like her own sons. That was until his own brother was murdered.

  Marcel shook off the memory, dabbing his eyes that had started to well up with tears. He knew he had to get it together. He gathered himself and walked up to the building, looking off to the western sky at the gathering clouds. He was a little irritated at himself for not checking the weather report in the morning; he had left fairly early for a run with a couple other amateur fighters at the gym, then had worked the front desk until his training session with Jarvis. It hadn’t rained in months. He hadn’t planned on that changing, so he had ridden his bike like every other day. He had a feeling he would be regretting this later.

  The St. Stevens University Law School was connected to the Grad School by a third floor skywalk. At ground level they were separated by a sidewalk that connected the back parking lot to the front parking lot. Marcel and Shannon reached opposite ends of the sidewalk at the same time. Marcel saw Shannon’s smile from one hundred yards away. Marcel was happy to be greeted with that big smile. Marcel considered her a friend; friends were a rare commodity at St. Stevens. At St. Stevens there were colleagues. It was much too cut throat an environment to have friends, and if one was naïve enough to think otherwise, they would have been eaten alive in 1L. Shannon was different. She didn’t care about law review or being top of the class. Much like Marcel, she never planned to practice law. Shannon had her sights set on the business world. Marcel thought that Shannon was a very attractive woman; she had thick flowing black hair that complimented her dark
eyes perfectly. She was small in stature but had a big personality. She was brimming with a positive energy that always invigorated Marcel. Without her dynamism Marcel doubted he would have survived the grind of civil procedure. Marcel was also intrigued by Shannon’s element of class: she was proper, she dressed nicely, spoke right, didn’t cuss, and had appeared to Marcel to have a high degree of ethics. Marcel and Shannon did not come from the same worlds. Marcel’s world was harsh and cruel, Shannon’s was prim and proper. Marcel liked having that respite. Marcel loved boxing, and though governed by the Marquis of Queensbury rules it had migrated from a sport of nobility to a sport that existed on the fringe. Shady characters abounded and a boxing gym wasn’t the place for those offended easily. Marcel had always wondered how Shannon would react to his gym. He thought that most likely she would be appalled. He had wanted to invite her to his last fight, but had chickened out. He didn’t want to risk alienating the one person he had a connection with at St. Stevens.

  Marcel had been in Minnesota for about eighteen months. In those eighteen months his social life consisted of road work with younger fighters, hundreds of rounds of sparring and one date. That had been an abject disaster. The date had been Jarvis’ idea, set up not long after Marcel had moved to Minnesota. The thing Marcel failed to consider when accepting a blind date through Jarvis was that Jarvis was from the hood. Being from the hood, his associates also came from the hood. Marcel wanted nothing more to do with the hood. The woman’s name was Chandra, a stripper with a penchant for drugs and partying. Jarvis had no idea, at least about the drugs. Marcel had no doubt that Jarvis knew she was a stripper. Marcel knew plenty of girls who had danced their way through school, they were women with goals and a slightly broken moral compass. That didn’t mean they were dope fiends with no future. Chandra was a dope fiend with no future. She had no self-esteem, and stripping was a way for her to get male attention at least that’s how he assessed the situation. On the date she had gotten high during dinner, attempted to make fools out of both of them, and Marcel had decided to excuse himself from the situation for the bathroom. He paid for his meal and left her at the restaurant. He never talked to Jarvis about the incident, and Jarvis never asked.