“She doesn’t trust men,” Trena explained. Diamond’s daddy hadn’t been a constant in her life, her uncle had been locked up since before she was born, and her grandfather passed away just a couple years after Trena and I married. He and Trena had rented a two-bedroom apartment together to split expenses, figuring they could make ends meet with his Social Security check and her child support. When he got cancer, Trena had taken care of him, even though chronic, debilitating stomach problems were starting to take a toll on her. Once her father was gone, though, Trena could no longer afford the place on her own, and she ended up in a cheap one-bedroom unit with Diamond, mother and daughter sharing the same double bed they always had.
I SUPPOSE MOST PEOPLE SAY THIS, but our marriage started out strong and beautiful. We were young and vibrant and were that certain our love could overcome every obstacle that my imprisonment put in our way. Trena would come to Sing Sing three times a week, happy-go-lucky and eager to take care of me, even if it meant just heating up a frozen cheeseburger in the visitors’ microwave. We would sit and read my Qu’ran and her Bible together. Faith was the compass in both of our lives, and we saw it as a common denominator despite our different choices. Conversion wasn’t on the table. I let Trena be Trena, and she let me be me.
But prison has a way of killing the spirit between two people, no matter how strong faith itself is. The days and months and years go by, and you have to watch the person you care most about in the world grow tired and stressed out and age before your eyes because of you and your position, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It was that powerlessness that got to me and ate away at me from the inside. Worst of all was watching from the sidelines as Trena’s health deteriorated. Sometimes her stomach hurt so much that she would double over in pain. She was sent from specialist to specialist, test to test, and nothing seemed to help. “I’m missing so much work, I’m going to lose my job, and then what?” she reluctantly told me. It was clear that she could no longer work full-time, but qualifying for disability was a long, red-tape nightmare. As Trena grew more depressed, I started to shut down, too. I was a master of hard-core survival, but I had none of the coping skills you need to keep a relationship alive. I didn’t want to hear about the car breaking down and Trena almost getting into an accident, because there was not a damn thing I could do about it. I couldn’t do shit about mechanics taking advantage of her, and I couldn’t handle the frustration of not being able to stand up for her. I couldn’t comfort her when worry kept her awake at night. Even little things tore me up inside, like listening to Trena tell me how hard it was to carry the laundry up and down the stairs. Trena took my lack of response as indifference and a lack of empathy, but trying to explain how inadequate I felt would only have deepened my shame. An emotional wall more foreboding than any prison fence sprang up between us. There were times when I could tell she needed a break from coming up to the prison. “Get out of here,” I told her. “Get the fuck away for a while.” When you looked at it in the harsh artificial light that Sing Sing cast, Trena and I weren’t in this together at all: I didn’t have to worry about having enough money to feed my child or pay for whatever medicine I needed; I never had to wonder whether I would have a roof over my head next week or next month. I was the state’s problem. But Trena, by the vows I had taken, was mine.
And I was failing her.
When we had first gotten married, Trena and I decided to start trying to have a baby as soon as possible. With our first conjugal visit a whole year away, Trena had elected to have surgery to remove benign fibroids to improve her chances of getting pregnant, given the limited time we were allotted for trailer visits. Both of us are crazy about kids; other inmates’ children would always run up to me in the visiting room and wrap themselves around my legs or beg me to pick them up, and Trena was a magnet, too. I could see what a wonderful mother she was, and nothing made me happier than the idea of becoming a father. I wanted to know what unconditional love felt like, to give love and be given it in return. I wanted to coach a Little League team, attend a dance recital, say prayers at bedtime, unwrap presents on Christmas morning. I wanted to watch my son or daughter graduate from college, be successful in life, get married, and bring home a grandchild for Trena and me to spoil. The promise of having a child made the future seem real. It was after one of our first trailer visits, in 1997, that Trena visited Sing Sing, her eyes sparkling.
“I’m late,” she announced.
“You mean we could be having a baby?” I asked. The excitement carried me away and for days, I just lived inside my head, happily fantasizing about the child—my child—coming into the world. Just the thought of parenthood made every breath I drew in my stale cell sweet and pure. When Trena got her period, I fell into such a deep funk that Trena didn’t dare tell me when she thought she might be pregnant again. Years later, she would admit that it was easier to weather the false alarms alone than to watch my hopes rise and fall like that again.
Her gynecologist assured Trena that her eggs were fine, and the fibroids, which had grown back, were not an issue. She never told her doctor why it was that her husband never came with her to any of her appointments.
“Dewey, it may be that you can’t have children,” Trena finally ventured. I didn’t want to hear that at all; I suppose no man does. The suggestion felt like an attack on my masculinity, and I refused to even discuss the possibility with Trena. It’s not like there are any fertility clinics in the prison system anyway, so the state of my reproductive system was a moot question. We would just have to keep trying and keep praying.
Recollecting that long, troubled stretch of our marriage hurts even now, years later, and it feels like an ache that has become a permanent part of me, a hole in my heart that will never heal. I wish I had taken that blow like a fighter, but I didn’t. I crumpled in anger and pain, and I came very close to ruining the one good thing that had happened in my life: I pushed Trena away when we needed each other the most. When she underwent exploratory surgery for her stomach problems, the reality of our prison marriage hit her hard—she was married, but she was alone. I couldn’t hold her hand before she was wheeled into the operating room, or smile and reassure her I’d be waiting right there when she got out. I couldn’t comfort her in the middle of the night when the pain felt like daggers in her gut. I couldn’t take care of Diamond when her mother was sick. Dwelling on what I couldn’t change, on who I couldn’t be because I was locked up, served no purpose, so I did what I’d conditioned myself to do after close to two decades in prison: I pushed the humiliation into a mental lockbox. Trena read my fear as a lack of compassion. “You think it’s a form of weakness,” she concluded. It wasn’t just the baby issue, she argued. She also felt that I had all but brushed off her father’s death, and I had offered little comfort as she grieved. “I only know what I know,” I told her. “I am what I am.”
I WAS STILL TWO YEARS AWAY FROM MY FIRST PAROLE HEARING when I overheard some guys in the yard talking about something called the Innocence Project. They said that volunteer lawyers were getting freedom for the wrongfully convicted, even for some on death row. I headed for the prison law library, hoping to find out more. Since none of the congressmen I’d written to or organizations like the NAACP had answered my pleas for help, the Innocence Project might be a new avenue for me to explore. In the library, I asked the law clerk if he’d ever heard of them.
“They do DNA testing,” he told me.
“What do you mean, DNA?” I asked.
The science of extracting and matching DNA hadn’t even existed in 1977 when Emma Crapser was killed, but I knew from the police files that during my first trial, my attorneys had obtained evidence recovered from the crime scene, including the chisel and cloth and other items used to strangle the victim, which could potentially hold biological proof that I wasn’t the killer. William O’Neill told the jury during my trial that DNA evidence had been recovered, without saying it hadn’t been tested, or that there was no DNA proof in han
d linking me to the murder. It was courtroom theatrics: the prosecutor didn’t need any scientific proof when he knew that sly innuendo alone would convince the jury. He just let the jury falsely assume that the samples must have been linked to the accused, because why else would O’Neill have brought them up?
The Innocence Project was founded by Barry C. Scheck and Peter Neufeld at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City in 1992. Scheck became famous a couple of years later as a key defense witness in the O.J. Simpson trial, where he cast doubts on the police and laboratory mishandling of DNA evidence that allegedly tied the football Hall of Famer to the murders of his estranged wife, Nicole, and Ron Brown, a waiter friend who had dropped by her town house that night to return a pair of sunglasses Nicole had left at a neighborhood restaurant. Like the rest of America, everybody inside Sing Sing followed the Simpson trial on television like a daily soap opera. People were all comparing their case to O.J.’s. We were all rooting for the Juice to get cut loose. We assumed that the L.A. police were railroading him because they had proved themselves to be racist thugs in the beating of Rodney King. The white minority and Aryans inside Sing Sing knew to lie low during the Simpson trial, and when he got acquitted, everyone applauded and whooped for joy. I felt as if I had gotten a chance to see and understand real law: if I had the money O.J. did, I’d have gotten out. My innocence didn’t count anywhere near as much as my ability to fight for it.
In the decade since the Simpson case, DNA testing had gotten progressively more advanced and precise. Since I had exhausted all my appeals, the Innocence Project looked like it might be my last resort. I knew I had never been in Emma Crapser’s building and had never met her. There was no way in hell I could be linked by any DNA evidence to the crime scene or the victim. Maybe a forensic heavy hitter like Barry Scheck could help provide the biological proof that would exonerate me. All it would take was just one righteous crusader to fight for me and fight for the truth. I dug up an address for the Innocence Project and began writing them letters, imploring them to take on my case. I filled page after page with my story, writing it out in my neatest longhand, only to do it all over again the following week when I hadn’t heard anything back. I vowed to keep writing until I had an answer.
I HAD MY FIRST PAROLE HEARING IN JANUARY 2003. I waited for the board to review my file and take note of twenty years of good behavior, of all the certificates I had earned in an effort to improve myself, of my too-brief but glorious prison boxing career. There were three parole commissioners. They asked if I was sorry I had killed Emma Crapser. I felt my chest tighten. I knew they wanted to hear me express remorse. I knew that one lie might be my ticket to freedom, same as it had been when the district attorney had dangled his deal in front of me while the jury was deliberating during my second trial. I hadn’t changed my mind or my heart since then. Truth is truth.
“I can’t say I’m sorry for something I didn’t do,” I replied. “I’m innocent.”
You could tell whether you got parole by the thickness of the envelope that came in the mail a few days after the hearing. Guys would feel it before opening it. Thick meant the papers for appeal were inside and you got hit; thin meant you were going home. Mine was thick. I opened it and read the verdict. My fate was sealed in five sentences:
Parole is denied, hold 24 months. Next appearance 01/05 Board.
Reasons: After careful consideration of your file and personal interview, parole is denied. The instant offense represents a serious escalation of your prior criminal activity, during the course of the instant offense, you caused the death of another human being, note is made of your positive institutional record, however, your release at this time would deprecate the serious nature of your crime and undermine public confidence in the Criminal Justice System. Commissioners concur.
I was pissed off. I threw the letter down, then filled out the appeal papers, praying something would pop up in my favor. Nothing did, and the appeal, too, was denied.
Trena and I had been careful not to build up our expectations or to invest too much emotional coin in the daydreams we had, nearly ten years into our marriage, of finally setting up a real life together as husband and wife. But I could tell she was crestfallen. “If they want me to tell them I did it,” I warned her, “then I’m going to die in prison.” She nodded sadly in agreement but held fiercely to her own faith in a power greater than the justice system.
“Don’t give up,” she urged. “Keep fighting! We’re going to get you out of here.”
She still hadn’t looked at the file I had tried to show her when we first met, but I had tucked occasional clippings or bits of documentation into my letters to her every now and then, hoping to pique her curiosity.
10
PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT BOXING usually think that brute force is what wins a fight, but that’s only the half of it. How much you can take and whether you stay standing are just as critical as how hard you can hit. Every blow teaches you something about your opponent. It doesn’t matter whether you lose or how beat-up and bloody and weary to the damn bone you are: as long as you pull yourself off those ropes, you finish a stronger man than you were when you stepped into the ring. No one ever knocked me out. No one.
Not long after my parole was denied, the state changed my status, deciding that I wasn’t enough of a threat to warrant maximum security and should be transferred from Sing Sing to a medium-security prison. I ended up in Fishkill, which was only a few minutes’ drive from Trena’s apartment. If either of us thought the change in environment and closer proximity to each other would improve things on the personal front, though, we couldn’t have been more wrong. We argued and sometimes went for days—seventeen, once—without speaking, each of us convinced there was no way the other could possibly understand where we were coming from or what we were going through. There was a lot of truth in that, too. I always thought marriage meant your troubles were shared, your load lightened, but prison has its own algebra, and struggles get multiplied—not divided—by two. Trena and I retreated to our separate corners, trying to catch our breath.
Our turn came around for a trailer visit at Fishkill, and Trena stayed away. A knockout punch. Throwing that kind of shade was the worst kind of rejection, and from my humiliated perspective, it seemed like the ultimate power play. By leaving me alone in my cell, she all but told me that I may be her husband, but at the end of the day, I was still just inmate 84A0172. A lot of our difficulty revolved around not being able to conceive. Trena complained that I was selfish and cold. I had pinned all the blame on her for not having a baby, not appreciating all the doctors’ visits, lab tests, and surgeries she had gone through alone in the effort to conceive. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get across how much fatherhood mattered to me, that it wasn’t just some blown-up macho pride doing a number on me. Maybe you have to have lived most of your life unwanted to even feel a want this deep. I figured she didn’t care as much as I did and even thought that she couldn’t, because she already had a child. My life had been marked by sorrow and disappointment at nearly every turn, and I learned in prison how to create my own positive, to start from emotional scratch and raise myself to become the man I wanted to be. But this obstacle seemed insurmountable. How had my excitement and yearning to be a father, to offer up my heart as wholly as any human being can, turned into something so bitter and lonely? I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening to Trena and me. Rocky as our marriage had become, I knew our only chance of making it was if we could be together. Getting out of prison, becoming a free man, wasn’t just some dream, some fantasy movie to flick on in my imagination to make the miserable hours pass more easily. It was my vocation. My job. I couldn’t afford to slack off and wallow in self-pity. Each week, I wrote another letter to the Innocence Project.
Stand Tall Page 13