by Edward Humes
David’s father, an adult member of the congregation, was sent away on a church mission. His name does not appear on David’s birth certificate—no father was listed. Jo Ann, however, was placed on Mormon probation, a common form of discipline within the church for members who confess to having sex outside of marriage. In further punishment, Lorraine decided Jo Ann would have to live with a Mormon foster family, too, separated from both David and the rest of her family.
Although she had been under the age of legal consent, no police or county child welfare reports of sexual assault were ever made. It was all kept private, within the family and within the church.
Just a few weeks later, before any adoptive parents could be found, David died during the night while in the care of his new foster parents. The cause of death was reported variously as “crib death” and sudden infant death syndrome.
In the wake of David’s death, Jo Ann began what would become a lifelong pattern. The lively child turned rebellious teenager turned distraught teen mother, described as friendly and outgoing by adults in her life up to that point, appeared emotionally numb when told of David’s death. She seemed at first to take the news in stride, stoically, even mechanically. “Can you give me a ride now?” she asked Lorraine after her mother had broken the news. Jo Ann had made plans to see a movie that afternoon, she explained, and she didn’t want to miss the showtime. Lorraine gave her the ride, and she watched the film as planned.
At the funeral days later, with flowers Jo Ann had chosen on display before a tiny coffin, the delayed grief finally seemed to find her. She seemed genuinely despondent at the lonely little service. But mostly she had felt disconnected from the entire pregnancy, birth, and death, as if it had happened to someone else, or she had been observing events in her life as if they were scenes in a movie, projected in front of her rather than inside her.
Years later, a psychologist would postulate that Jo Ann the teenager may have exhibited signs of a dissociative disorder similar to the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by many combat veterans and other trauma survivors. Dissociative disorder affects about 2 percent of the population, primarily women. Such a diagnosis, if correct, would not mean Jo Ann was mentally ill or eligible for a legal insanity plea as a defense against any crime, whether shoplifting or arson-murder. But such an ailment could appear to blunt a person’s emotions and, at times, make even a caring person appear outwardly uncaring or unlikable. Or guilty.
I have grown up behind walls. I was this naive little girl that whatever their husband said went. I couldn’t stand and say how I felt or what I wanted. All I cared about was giving my babies everything they ever wanted. I wanted their lives to be different than mine. I didn’t want them to grow up in a single-parent household like I did. Or to want something and couldn’t have it. I wanted the best for them and I couldn’t give that to them.
* * *
• • •
Within a few weeks of David’s funeral, Jo Ann ran away from the foster home. She had asked if she could go home, but her mother said no. She describes this time as living “on the streets,” but usually she would find friends who would let her stay the night and feed her. Then she would just roam.
One evening she walked into a Laundromat in search of a warm place to rest. A thirty-five-year-old man loading his clothes into a big tumble dryer struck up a conversation with her. She invented the name Josefina Garcia to introduce herself, and though she was barely seventeen years old and had not completed eleventh grade, “Josie” gave her age as nineteen. She ended up going for pizza with this man, and then to his home, and then into his bed.
When she was about to leave the next morning, he asked her to return at five o’clock that evening. She didn’t question it. She simply said, “Okay.”
When Jo Ann arrived at the appointed hour, the man awaited her with flowers and a ring. He would protect and care for her, he promised the seventeen-year-old grieving mother. He said he was in love.
“You’ll never have to feel unwanted or unloved again,” he vowed.
Jo Ann burst into tears. Then she slipped on the ring. The following day, she retrieved her things from her foster home, then ran out the door even as her foster mom phoned Lorraine to report, “Jo Ann’s leaving with some man.”
Three days later, they were married. The marriage was illegal, as it was under Jo Ann’s false name and birth date. But she didn’t want to think about that, or the fact that at the start of her marriage, her husband called her “Josie.”
Did Jo Ann know even then that she had attached herself to the sort of man she always claimed she wished to avoid—someone who shared many of the qualities of her stepfather? Decades later, Jo Ann would reflect that she probably had known this was the case at some level, but that the love and protection and solidity of age he offered her seemed like the ultimate seductive narcotic.
Like her stepfather, Jo Ann’s new husband started out pleasant and docile, full of plans for starting his own businesses and building a life for the two of them far more opulent than either of them had ever known. In front of others, he would always appear so. Over time, however, he transformed into a verbally abusive, then physically violent tyrant when they were alone, Jo Ann would later say. But by the time she allowed herself to see this aspect of his nature, their first baby was on the way.
Jo Ann’s life with Ronald E. Parks had begun.
10
They Told Me I Couldn’t
Mommy, what do you do at a prison?” four-year-old August Cohen asked one evening.
The question jarred Raquel Cohen. She hadn’t noticed her daughter sidle up as she carped to her husband, Ryan, about the daunting logistics of her first visit with Jo Ann Parks at the state women’s prison in the California outback. She faced a seven-hour drive to Chowchilla, the desolate location for the world’s largest women’s penitentiary. The Cohens’ previous five-hundred-square-foot apartment, though a step up from living in her in-laws’ basement, had offered no opportunities to sneak up on anyone. Their new and deliciously spacious two-story house in suburban San Diego, however, offered endless hiding, tripping, falling, spilling, and listening locations for a precocious preschooler, and August made it her mission to find and use them all. She is her mom in miniature.
Cohen’s mind raced. She had never really tried to explain her all-consuming, frequently maddening job to her preschooler. How could she make her work on behalf of a person wrongly convicted of murder comprehensible without stripping away a child’s innocence and confidence and optimism?
“Prison is like a place for adults who have to go in time-out,” Cohen finally said. August’s eyes grew almost comically wide at this, while Cohen cast about wildly for a way to be honest without terrifying her girl. “Now, for some of them, it’s like if you were put in time-out but you didn’t do anything wrong and you don’t think it’s fair. So my job is to get those people out of time-out.”
August laughed with delight at the notion of her mommy, provider of juice boxes, bedtime stories, and reminders to go potty before sleep, as a human get-out-of-jail-free card. From that day on, whenever she saw some cartoon character or human actor land in jail, August would shriek some variation of “Mommy, go help them! Make them your friend and get them out of time-out!”
“It’s actually not a bad description of what we do,” Cohen mused later. “Except it leaves out the horrific parts. You know, the stuff that has me watching endless repeats of Elf or SpongeBob, just to block out the horror for a while.”
Innocence work, the art of getting convicts out of the most soul-killing time-out ever devised—being guiltless while imprisoned and surrounded by predators—was not what Raquel Cohen envisioned for herself as a kid. Growing up in the heart of Las Vegas, young Raquel Barilla was immersed instead in the world of gymnastics and cheerleading, always training for a meet, traveling to a meet, or competing in one. She excelled at tumbling and vault, gaze
d at the balance beam as if it were a monster from a child’s nightmare, and generally loved the sport until a shoulder injury sidelined her at age sixteen. Instead of a year of tedious, iffy, and painful rehab, she turned to coaching, finding that she loved that nearly as well as performing.
Then an undergrad class at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas shook her focus and, ultimately, her career plans. She was assigned to research a paper on death row inmates who turned out to be innocent. This was in the early 2000s, a time when news of wrongful convictions, once a rarity, had become a daily news staple. The maturing technology of DNA testing, initially touted as the ultimate search engine for the guilty, had emerged as the unexpected savior of the innocent, shattering decades of complacency about a justice system thought to have been far better at policing its own errors than it turned out to be. Through her research, Cohen became aware of the growing network of innocence projects clamoring for the systematic use of DNA testing to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.
A short time later, the local judge who had taken on Cohen as a student intern recommended a law school for her: the judge’s alma mater, California Western School of Law in San Diego. Cohen already knew and loved California’s southernmost beach town from frequent gymnastics competitions held there. When she requested more information from Cal Western, the material she received included a pitch from the California Innocence Project based at the school, outlining the project’s need for volunteers, interns, and applicants for its clinical law program.
Reading that pamphlet, Cohen felt as if everything she had been doing, from gymnastics to her internship to her undergraduate classes, had converged and pointed her toward San Diego and innocence work. She applied and was accepted, starting law school and work with the project in 2007, with the goal of being hired on as a staff attorney after graduation.
Her introduction to the practical side of innocence project work came within a few weeks of the start of her first year in law school, when she was assigned to investigate the case of Jason Rivera. “Thrown into the deep end of the swamp,” is how Cohen would later describe the experience. “I was scared to death.” She later realized that this was the innocence project’s modus operandi, because it revealed fairly quickly which students were a good fit for the work, and which weren’t.
The Rivera investigation grabbed, enthralled, and horrified Cohen from the start. Little about the murder case made sense to her, least of all the catalyst for the destruction of multiple lives: One person died, one was gravely injured, and Rivera’s freedom ended, all because of a ludicrous fight over a girl at a high school party.
When arrested, Rivera was an eighteen-year-old varsity soccer player who had never been in trouble in his life, the college-bound son of a prosperous and prominent family in the inland city of Riverside, California. Teamed with second-year student Alissa Bjerkhoel, Cohen met her first client on her first-ever visit to a prison. Rivera had just turned thirty-one years old at that point, thirteen years into his life sentence for murder.
The chain of poor choices and fatal coincidences that put him there started on the evening of March 18, 1994. Rivera had gone to Riverside’s poshest neighborhood, Hawarden Hills, for a raucous “Celebrate Friday” party, which also doubled as a birthday party for his younger sister, Jennifer. Shortly after arriving, he encountered Dominic Luna, a formidable 220-pound sophomore football player with a grudge against Rivera. Luna disliked what he considered to be the disrespectful way Rivera had dumped his girlfriend, who happened to be a friend of the football player’s. The confrontation turned into a fistfight. Bouncers patrolling the party quickly broke it up and ordered both young men to leave.
That should have been the end of it. But for his sister’s sake, Rivera decided to return later, along with three other students. Two of the other teens were Rivera’s friends, Richard and Paul. But Richard brought a third student, eighteen-year-old Manuel Martin Navarette, introduced to Rivera for the first time that evening. Navarette had a gun in his jacket pocket.
The timing of Rivera’s return could not have been worse. As he and the other students walked toward the house, a car came roaring up from behind and Dominic Luna jumped out. He grabbed Rivera and threw him to the ground between two parked cars. Then the husky football player—who outweighed Rivera by more than sixty pounds—crouched over his target, punching him hard enough to give him a concussion. Dominic’s twenty-year-old brother, Albert Luna, stopped other partygoers from interfering with the fight even as Rivera cried out to his friends for help. Witnesses heard someone yell, “Blast him!” Then Navarette pulled out his gun and started firing. When he was done, Dominic writhed on the ground, seriously wounded. Albert Luna lay dying.
When the police arrived to sort out the mess, there was no doubt about Navarette’s guilt. He ended up with consecutive life sentences, which meant he could not even apply for parole until he was nearly sixty years old. But witnesses gave conflicting accounts about other aspects of the fight, the shooting, and who shouted “Blast him,” with one person testifying that it had been Rivera who called out those fateful words during the confusion and violence.
Prosecutors charged and tried Rivera and Navarette together, weaving a theory that the boys conspired with each other to return to the party to seek revenge on Dominic for the first fight. No one actually testified that there was such a plan, but prosecutors argued that Rivera must have known Navarette had a gun, otherwise he would never have shouted those words, Blast him. And if that were true, the law holds him as responsible for murder as the triggerman.
Rivera denied all of this, saying he and his friends had returned to the party with nothing more felonious in mind than picking up his little sister, so they could take her home and then move on to another party where they would be welcome. They had no reason to believe Luna would even be there, since he had been kicked out as well. Rivera swore he only met Navarette that night and had no idea he carried a gun.
Even prosecutors harbored doubts about their case before the trial. They offered Rivera a plea bargain in which he’d have to admit responsibility but would be spared hard prison time. Insisting on his innocence and unwilling to be saddled with a criminal record, Rivera turned down the offer. There are no do-overs when it comes to plea bargains. He literally rolled the dice with his future.
At trial, jurors believed the prosecution’s narrative of conspiracy and revenge and found Rivera guilty. He received a single life sentence, with parole eligibility available only after at least fifteen years’ hard time.
Cohen and Bjerkhoel dug into the case at once, spending many hours with Rivera and his family. They re-interviewed witnesses about the fight and the shooting—what was seen, what was heard, what was done, who said what. The two young lawyers were learning the art of how to be “reverse detectives.” Cohen soon realized they were good at this, playing off each other, keeping witnesses off balance with pointed questions and sudden shifts in topic. The innocence project cannot afford staff investigators—it relies on the attorneys and a battalion of students to do the legwork—and the process is a fascinating analog to police work. Instead of building a case, the two law students were searching for holes, preferably new ones, to break down the narrative so assiduously constructed by the government. Reverse detective work is like deconstructing a building, exposing foundations that might be solid as a rock, leaving little room for appeal, or uncovering a rotting core, unable to support the assumptions laid over them that led to a conviction.
And Cohen and Bjerkhoel found those holes in the foundation of People v. Rivera. First they cracked Rivera’s friend Richard, the only one in the group who knew Navarette before that night. Cohen reported that Richard even admitted to being the one who shouted, “Blast him!” That utterance had been the key to convicting Rivera, and it turned out someone else had shouted the fateful words.
Navarette confirmed this when Bjerkhoel appeared in his prison visiting room. He also grudg
ingly admitted Rivera had no idea he was armed that night. But when it came to signing a sworn affidavit, the convicted killer asked, “What’s in it for me?” He’d only swear to it, he said, if the innocence project could help him get out of prison as well. That, the attorney knew, they could not do. And even if they could, it wouldn’t help, because prosecutors would argue—correctly—that a convict in Navarette’s position had no credibility. He would say anything if it gave him a shot at freedom.
When the innocence project cobbled together a habeas corpus petition based on Cohen and Bjerkhoel’s findings, it got nowhere in the courts. The official reason the courts rejected the plea was “untimeliness,” meaning it was too little, too late. The lasting lesson for Cohen was that, in any innocence case, the new revelations have to be overwhelmingly compelling or no judge was going to cut a convicted killer loose. It didn’t matter that Rivera was a nice guy with enormous potential before prison, a model inmate once he was behind bars, or that there were some new holes in the original case against him. Absent a newly discovered videotape or some other incontrovertible proof that the government used false information to win the case, Rivera’s habeas petition had little chance. The basic facts remained unchanged even after Richard’s and Navarette’s revelations: Rivera still came back to a party from which he had been ejected for fighting; he brought a posse for backup; one student in this posse of four had a gun; and the witness who said Rivera yelled, “Blast him,” remained adamant that Rivera was the culprit. Those facts alone provided any appeals court more than sufficient reason to leave in place the jury’s decision to convict Rivera and embrace the prosecution’s revenge narrative over the defense’s wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time interpretation of the facts.