LETTERS FROM JAIL

HEADNOTE

Taking time to right a wrong

In an era of electronic mail, a small part of my correspondence still arrives the old-fashioned way, by U.S. Postal Service. The penmanship of these letters is frequently awful,

and my address is sometimes incorrectly rendered. But John Williams has delivered mail to my home for twenty-one years, so the letters reach me. They are from convicted felons, their loved ones, or their lawyers, all of whom have written because it seems I am one of the few journalists who pay attention to their claims of innocence, and sometimes I even reply.

Because most of them carry return addresses from prisons, my wife worried that Mr. Williams would wonder about my uprightness. So she explained to him that I am an investigative reporter examining the frequency of wrongful convictions in the supposedly first-rate U.S. criminal justice system. Mr. Williams assured her that he never notices return addresses, but she thinks otherwise.

December 4, 2000

Dear Mr. Weinberg,

I am writing to you in a veiy desperate attempt to ask for help in a very wrongful conviction .... My son was sentenced to 57 years for a domestic incident. There was really no crime committed .... My son went to trial May 1, 2000. It was a hung jury six to six. Then he went back to trial July 17, 2000, and it was unbelievable some of the stuff the prosecutor did and the judge allowed. We knew this time it was over .... Please, Mr. Weinberg, before you make a decision or tell me you can't help me, please let me send you some papers to look over and see for yourself what has happened, how unjustly they took my son's life away from him .... I've spent two years trying to get help.

I have been receiving unsolicited letters from convicted murderers, rapists, and drug dealers claiming their innocence since the beginning of my career. Like too many journalists, I used to skim the letters, then discard them without reply. Such conduct was both inhumane and professionally misguided - after all, wise journalists never assume anything, including the guilt of inmates who say they're innocent. But again, like too many journalists, I somehow "knew" that convicts self-servingly protest their innocence and ought to be disbelieved without further inquiry. Period.

In 1999, thirty years into my investigative career, I ended my discard-without-reply policy. This is about how I got from there to here, and why it's vital for journalists in all 2,341 district attorney's jurisdictions who are still discarding those letters to make the same journey.

Macro and micro reasons intruded on my misguided ways. The macro reason was a phenomenon even a fool could see. Defense lawyers, private investigators, and a few journalists were demonstrating repeatedly that wrongful convictions are more common than acknowledged by the police, prosecutors, and judges. DNA evidence, available in some but not all cases, showed that conclusion to be indisputable. Even in non-DNA cases, reformers succeeded in proving actual innocence as they came to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of recurring problems like mistaken eyewitness identification and coerced false confessions. Hearing about new exonerations day after day, month after month, year after year, it became difficult to deny a new reality.

The micro reason for my revised thinking stemmed from my first in-depth study of a reversed wrongful conviction. I conducted it so I could calculate how much time and money would be required to investigate thoroughly whether someone had been wrongfully convicted. I had conceived a plan, you see, to clarify the controversy over the number of imprisoned innocents in the fifty states. But I wanted to take a baby step first.

In 1984, Ellen Reasonover, an African American single mother with no record of violence, was accused of murdering a Caucasian gas station attendant in a St. Louis suburb. She was found guilty; one holdout among the twelve jurors prevented a death sentence. When I began examining the case in 1999, Reasonover had just been freed on appeal by a federal judge. I hoped to explain what had gone wrong, when, and why.

One of the first things I learned was that Reasonover's road to freedom involved a piece of journalism and a letter she wrote asking for help. Three years into her prison sentence, Reasonover read an article in Jet about a Princeton, New Jersey, minister devoted to investigating alleged wrongful convictions. He was James McCloskey at Centurion Ministries. Reasonover sent him a letter, and McCloskey did what many journalists wouldn't have done: he read it carefully. A few years later - a delay caused by limited resources - McCloskey made the Reasonover case one of his priorities. Without new evidence uncovered by Centurion - which employed the former Seattle Times reporter Paul Henderson to assist Reasonover would still be in a Missouri prison.

The Reasonover case fascinated me partly because it didn't hinge on definitive DNA evidence. When such evidence is absent, discerning the truth about innocence can be difficult, if not impossible. Still, red flags began waving as I read about the Reasonover case in the files of Cheiyl Pilate, a former newspaper reporter and the lead appeals lawyer hired by Centurion Ministries. The police investigation had turned up nothing: no murder weapon, fingerprints, soiled clothing, or blood. The police had no eyewitnesses, motive, or coherent theory of the crime, either. Pilate told me the only evidence against Reasonover consisted of statements by jailhouse snitches, who claimed the defendant had blurted out a confession minutes after meeting them.

At first I found Pilate's version unbelievable. How could twelve jurors sworn to uphold the standard of reasonable doubt convict anybody on such meager evidence? As I read the trial transcript and related material, I realized what had happened. The jailhouse snitches lied after receiving promises of secret deals from the prosecution. Lacking this vital information, the jury convicted Reasonover. Weak defense lawyers, a frightened community (the actual perpetrators were never caught), and racial bias (perhaps unconscious) within the all-white jury also played a role in the verdict.

In 2000, after I had concluded my research of the Reasonover case, I proposed a national study of wrongful convictions, with an emphasis on the vital but usually ignored role of prosecutors. I also wanted to supply inmates and their advocates with some resources for exploring legal remedies. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., agreed to fund the project. I advertised in prison newsletters and posted Internet notices about the study, asking inmates and their advocates to contact me about wrongful convictions, identifying the role played by prosecutors. In a matter of weeks John Williams was delivering replies to my mailbox.

I knew I would hear from a lot of prisoners. I was correct, thousands of times correct. For two years, while in the early and intermediate stages of the Center for Public Integrity project, I responded to every plea for help, even if only cursorily. Then, exhausted and facing publication deadlines, I began to reply more selectively. Another two years out, I stopped replying to most of the pleas, in part because I found it difficult to persuade magazine or newspaper editors to pay me to investigate specific cases.

Every day, I feel guilty about that.

The December 4, 2000, letter I received from the distraught mother of a prisoner never led to a reopening of the case. I could not find the time to investigate it thoroughly, so I helped her open a conversation with an investigative journalist at a daily newspaper in the city where the conviction occurred. That journalist gave up before writing anything. Then I helped the mother find a lawyer with experience winning freedom for the imprisoned innocent. That is no easy task - such lawyers are rare and all whom I have met are overwhelmed with requests. The lawyer accepted money from the mother but failed to deliver meaningful assistance.

Letters from prisoners to journalists sometimes result not only in freedom for the imprisoned innocent but also in the arrest of the actual perpetrator. The most dramatic case known to me started on September 16, 1981, when a letter from the convicted murderer Dennis Williams arrived at Chicago Lawyer. The return address read "Condemned Unit, Box 711, Menard, Illinois." Managing editor Margaret Roberts opened the letter, read it carefully, then showed it to Rob Warden, the magazine's founder. What happened after that is told in a book by Warden and the Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess. The book's self-explanatory title is A Promise of Justice: The Eighteen-Year Fight to Save Four Innocent Men.

Some reporters and editors may think they can't look into wrongful convictions because they lack the time and resources of a Protess or Warden. I disagree. Journalists in every newsroom can carve out some time to examine individual cases. You can squeeze in a few extra minutes of document research and interviews while at the courthouse on other assignments, or use journalism students and law students as interns to help with research. Your time may be precious, but then so is the promise of justice.

SIDEBAR

Like too many journalists, I used to skim the letters, then discard them without reply. Such conduct was professionally misguided.

AUTHOR_AFFILIATION

Steve Weinberg is a contributing editor to CJR.