Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  Four years after sending off my first letter, I finally got a polite but terse response in the mail: Don’t write us anymore. We’ve got you on our list.

  I had no way of knowing then how long that list was: more than three thousand inmates a year write to ask for help from the Innocence Project, it turns out, and at any given time, they’re evaluating between six thousand and eight thousand potential cases. I had no idea where I was in line or what they were going to do next, but at least it seemed like I had escaped the flat-out rejection pile and made it into their “maybe” stack. There’s only so much you can do from inside prison to clear your name, and I’d lost contact with my old lawyer Mickey Steiman after the higher courts had turned down all his attempts to appeal my conviction. I didn’t have any civil rights organizations or celebrities crusading for my release, no fund-raising benefit concerts or even outraged friends and family demanding justice for Dewey Bozella. The vague note from the Innocence Project didn’t amount to a promise or anything close to encouragement, but it was the only flicker of interest I’d had in my case in years. I was pleased but tried at the same time not to let myself get too worked up about it. I’d known ever since I was little how hope can turn to hurt in the blink of an eye.

  I never pushed Trena to become my advocate—I wanted her to come to that on her own, if she was going to—but as time wore on, it got harder and harder for me to accept her choice to stay out of my legal battles, to be my wife instead of my warrior.

  “Do you really want me to come home?” I heatedly demanded one day. Plenty of friends of mine were in prison relationships where the women actually preferred to have their men stay behind bars. That way, they didn’t have to worry about them getting into trouble on the streets, or coming home drunk or high, or messing around with other women. If they were disrespectful or wanted to pick a fight, all the wife or girlfriend had to do was turn around, drive back out the prison gate, and go home. She decides whether to visit, and when they see each other, everything is about how hot she looks, and how much he wants her, and how grateful he is that she brought him the Snickers and cigarettes he asked for. You wonder what the story is on all those lonely-hearts prison groupies who seek out inmate romances? Control and containment, plain and simple. I knew damn well Trena wasn’t like that, but when we were foundering, my doubts threatened to get the best of me, and it was an easy button to push.

  “How can you even ask that?” Trena retorted, offended by my cheap shot. She had a daughter to take care of and didn’t have money to hire lawyers or private investigators, anyway. Her health was a constant worry, as well; she had had four operations while I was locked up, and her chronic stomach pain had put her on permanent disability. There was a period where things got so bleak that Diamond, then a teenager, was supporting the both of them on her minimum-wage paycheck from McDonald’s, turning it over to her mama each week without a word of complaint. Diamond had a purity of heart that filled me with both love and fatherly fear. With her high cheekbones, doe eyes, and tall, willowy build, strangers were always wondering if she was a model. Diamond is demure—Trena had raised her only child to have strong morals—but I worried about the wolves lurking in the shadows out there, and I wished I could protect her as she blossomed into a beautiful young woman. We had our father-daughter talks in a visiting room full of convicted rapists, killers, con artists, and thieves. When Diamond started dating and telling me about the boys she liked, I offered advice gleaned from the hostile street world I had known at her age.

  “First and foremost, you have to ask yourself: Is he good?” I told her. “Is he putting his hands on you? Is he treating you with respect? If he’s not respecting you, you don’t need to be around him. Is he taking away your dreams? Then step away. Don’t let him tell you what to do. If you’re ever in a situation that scares you, don’t you be afraid to come to your mother or me and we’ll handle it for you.”

  Diamond could only nod in agreement. She never shot back and said what we both knew she might have, if she had had that kind of mean streak: Why would I come to you for help? What could you do? From her lifetime of knowing me, I was, as a father figure, all talk. The ghost at the school play.

  If you want real irony, though, there’s this: from Trena’s point of view, the very same traits that made me a model prisoner also made me a difficult soul mate. After the Muslims steered me away from my street-thug mentality, I worked hard to learn to keep my emotions in check, to avoid confrontation, and to choke down hurt and anger. Boxing had given me discipline, and I had found an emotional outlet in writing, performing, and directing plays through a prison program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. Both those passions helped me to mentally scale the prison walls, to let my body and my imagination take over and fly me to a different place and a different life. But marriage doesn’t come with a referee or a script, and I couldn’t get the words or the footwork right anymore. After Trena had shined on one of our conjugal visits and after weeks of constant bickering, I impulsively petitioned for a transfer to another facility, wanting to flee the discord. I felt spiteful enough not to mention it to my wife.

  RIGHT AROUND OUR NINTH ANNIVERSARY, Trena had to undergo a partial hysterectomy, which put an end to our dreams for a baby. That same year, 2005, I came before the parole board for a second time. It was like an instant replay of the first hearing: the board demanded again that I admit guilt and express remorse for the murder of Emma Crapser. Once again, I proclaimed my innocence and got another two years tacked on to my sentence. I returned to my cell with the grim realization that I could easily end up repeating this Groundhog Day drill every two years until I eventually died behind bars. They were sentencing me to death two years at a time. I remember it was a Friday afternoon. Come Monday, an envelope from the Innocence Project arrived in the mail.

  “We have accepted your case,” the letter informed me. They were launching their investigation and would be in touch.

  Shit, it’s about time, I thought. There was no jubilation, no heart soar of hope. The stalemates with both Trena and the parole board had sapped whatever optimism I had left. I had worked myself into a mad funk. I was mad about everything. Too mad to even be grateful for the people who were on my side. I hated the way I could feel the anger seeping in, like a dampness in the walls. This wasn’t who I was or how I wanted to be, but neither prayer nor my small library of motivational books were helping this time. By that point, the prison-boxing program had been defunct for five years, so that outlet was gone. I’d completed so many programs and classes that I had a master’s degree already, and budget cuts meant there was next to nothing left to sign up for, nothing to distract my mind and keep it occupied on something other than the unfair hands life kept dealing me. The Innocence Project can never predict how long it will take to investigate and litigate a new case. Some are closed in a year, and others drag on for a decade. All I could do was wait, and pray, and fume.

  Even if I was scarred enough to hold my optimism in check, Trena surprised me with her excitement over the Innocence Project news when I showed her the letter. It seemed to provide an affirmation for her, and for the first time, she allowed herself to engage in the battle for my freedom. She asked questions, read the documents I had, and studied the old newspaper clips I had saved. It felt good to finally have her, heart and soul, on my side.

  Technically, Fishkill may have been considered easier time than Sing Sing, but to me, it was a whole lot worse. Many of the guys at Fishkill were finishing out their sentences, and I was constantly surrounded by conversations about who was going home and what they were going to do when they got out. They talked about all the steaks that they were going to eat, all the soft beds they were going to sleep in, all the nice cars they were going to drive, all the family and friends who were going to be waiting for them. Even with the Innocence Project working my case, my tunnel felt dark and endless, and I couldn’t see that kind of light yet. The Fishkill population was also younger, more arrogant. Inmates were
content to lounge in the dayroom and watch old Bullwinkle the Moose cartoons for hours. I couldn’t relate to them the way I could the old lifers at Sing Sing, the ones determined to better themselves, to find some sense of purpose and meaning even when freedom wasn’t on the table. And it wasn’t just the inmates at Fishkill who were cocky; the guards were just as bad. Even Trena bristled under their constant badgering during visitation: You’re sitting too close, you can’t kiss him like that, you need to go out and change because your bra clasp is setting off the metal detector.

  One morning, my long-forgotten transfer request suddenly came through without warning. Before I had a chance to tell Trena what was happening, I was an hour away and being processed into the small medium-security state prison in Otisville. She was furious at first, but did a complete turnaround once she laid eyes on the place. Otisville was an unimposing low-slung beige prison out in the sticks of Orange County, not far from the Catskills. The whole atmosphere at Otisville had a lazy vibe to it. Even the guards were laid-back. Trena showed up one time in sweatpants that clung like leggings, and the guards just waved her through with a friendly, “All right, Ms. B, just don’t wear those again!” There were no trailers, but the visiting room was smaller and calmer, and the overall peacefulness sat well with Trena.

  Not with me.

  The slow burn I’d been working up at Fishkill hit a fast boil in Otisville. It was like a damn criminal retirement home. Just like at Fishkill, nobody was doing anything there, and for whatever pent-up reason, I took the collective lack of ambition personally. The inmates all just watched TV, played cards, and napped the day away either stretched out on the gym floor or with their heads down on the tables in the mess hall. There was gym equipment, but it sat gathering dust. There was a track, but every year some dude would collapse and die just walking around it. One goddamn old man dropped dead of a heart attack one time when I was out there jogging. They brought the ambulance and trucks out and spent twenty minutes trying to make like he was alive and they were trying to resuscitate him, but we all knew he was dead the minute the poor bastard hit the ground. Truth be told, the whole place had a dead, spiritless atmosphere. I would wake up in the morning and go down the hill to work out, and my whole body changed as I went through my sets; there was no energy, no one to partner with so we could urge each other on, and I would get bored and quit. Pushing my body to its limits had always pumped up my mood before, but now even working up a good sweat was dragging me down, pulling me under so I could barely breathe. What the fuck am I going down there for? I would ask myself. I’m the only guy working out, hitting the bag, jumping rope. I can’t deal with this shit. There’s nothing here. This is horrible, man. I gotta get out of here. If I ended up in prison for life, it couldn’t be here, where the opiate dullness would slowly sap the strength from me, both mind and body. Crazy as it sounds, I began lobbying to get sent back to Sing Sing. I was used to being around activity and noise, I needed that engagement, the hivelike buzz of life. The prison bureaucracy quickly shut me down: you don’t go from medium security to maximum security unless you become a danger to others; we weren’t transferring junior colleges here. I would have to suck it up. There was no choice left. I got my certification to help the cooks as a sort of sous chef and started working in the mess hall. The job did little to take the edge off my restlessness.

  One day, I walked into the cafeteria in a storm-cloud mood and slammed the door purposefully, startling awake the men dozing with their heads on the tables.

  Yo, yo man, what you do that for?

  “Damn, man, you’re all killing me!” I bellowed. “Playin’ cards. Watching TV. I’m active, and I can’t be around people not doing shit!”

  My frustration was just the scab over the deeper wound of fatherhood lost. Lying on my hard bunk in prison’s relentless twilight, I let the familiar old self-pity swamp me. Damn, man, how am I supposed to deal with this shit? Everybody has a fucking legacy. I don’t have shit. Who the fuck does Dewey have as a legacy? Dewey has nobody.

  Faith didn’t even come into the picture. God didn’t have anything to do with this, as far as I was concerned. This was my issue. I put myself into my own prison, the walled-off world within, a personal lockdown that shut out everyone and everything else. Yeah, I might have been selfish, and I sure as hell didn’t mean to take it out on Trena, but I was reeling from the pain and I did. At the end of the day, I wasn’t sure that fatherhood was something I ever could get over, a dream I could give up. I love you, I love you, I love you. But I need time to think, I silently implored Trena. I didn’t want to turn my back on this woman, but I needed time to be by myself, to turn this problem over in my mind. What’s wrong with that? I argued with the invisible debate partner who’d lived in my head for twenty years and counting. I had pinned all my hopes on becoming a father to get through my bid. When I imagined myself exonerated someday, walking through the prison gates into the life that had been stolen from me, what I saw was a family waiting for me. And if justice was never served, and if I did end up spending the rest of my life in prison, fatherhood would at least give me one chance to leave something positive behind, to love unconditionally and be loved back that same way. It was my light. I couldn’t just turn it off and pretend it didn’t matter. Boxing had taught me to focus, to never back down. It had made me a man. But it was time to find a validation outside the ring, my identity beyond these bars. I wasn’t the same young punk who had entered Sing Sing. I was middle-aged now. I was maturing, but it wasn’t a natural process. I had no blueprint to go by, no lifetime of real-world experiences and relationships. Emotions were a minefield I had to map on my own, and I had to grope my way across in the dark on my hands and knees.

  After a while, I felt calm enough to take out my pen and sit down to write Trena a long letter. I told her I needed time to think this shit out, that this was something serious to me. That this was my issue. Can I live the rest of my life without children? I wrote. Nothing can make up for your own child, I concluded. Nothing.

  Trena was both wounded and furious when she read my words. Infertility had been testing our marriage for years by then, and with pregnancy now out of the question for her, she figured this was my way of kicking her to the curb for a younger girlfriend, that I was telling her to move on with her life and find someone nice who deserved her, because I needed to find someone who could bear my children. That I was ready to throw away the wife I had for the child I didn’t.

  She didn’t write back or show up on visiting day to confront me. When I tried to call—collect was the only way—she refused the charges. I kept trying, and she changed her phone number. My letters came back unopened. My life and future were as unresolved as ever, but Trena acted with a certainty that left no doubt in my mind: she’d had enough.

  THEN MY BID FOR FREEDOM SLAMMED INTO A BRICK WALL, TOO: Olga Akselrod, the attorney assigned to oversee my case at the Innocence Project, arrived for a visit one day in December of 2007. It had been two whole years since the Innocence Project had agreed to take me on, and I wondered what news she might be bringing. Maybe they’d found the scientific evidence to prove I’d been falsely accused and sent away for a murder I had nothing to do with and were ready to file a motion for a new trial. I was surprised when I walked into the visiting room and saw three young associates sitting with Olga. They all looked nervous as hell. We exchanged pleasantries, and I sat down. Olga cut right to the chase.

  “There is no DNA, Dewey. The state destroyed all the physical evidence in your case. I’m sorry.”

  The Innocence Project only took on DNA investigations. They were going to have to drop me. Olga rushed on even as I tried to absorb the devastating news.

  “It’s not over yet,” she said. They had spent nearly two years combing through police reports, interrogations, depositions, trial transcripts, and news reports surrounding the Crapser murder, and they were convinced of my innocence. So certain of it, in fact, Olga continued, that they did something almost unheard of w
ithin the Innocence Project: they went looking for a private law firm with the manpower, political clout, and deep pockets it would take to pursue my case pro bono. Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr had agreed to step up. A prestigious Park Avenue firm with a thousand lawyers on three continents, WilmerHale was as far out of my league as you could possibly get and still be in this solar system. These were Ivy League cats who advised presidents. They argued before the Supreme Court—and won. They had an international client list full of people who traveled by private jet and watched the World Series from VIP box seats. One of their partners was considered the father of Legal Aid. The firm’s pedigree might have intimidated me if I had known it at the time, but all I knew right then was that the three attorneys Olga had brought with her—two men and a woman, all in their twenties—were asking if I would let them look into my case. For free.

  Hell to the yes.

  “Art Regula,” I said first thing to my new lawyers. “He was the guy out to get me.” For the next three hours, I poured out my whole story, my words tripping over one another as I tried to summarize the thirty years since that Poughkeepsie detective had collared me on the street. Ross Firsenbaum, the WilmerHale junior associate who had convinced his bosses to let him take on my case when the Innocence Project approached the firm, was just twenty-seven years old, quiet and shy seeming, with fierce black brows that framed kind brown eyes. Ross scribbled down notes and tried to get a question in edgewise now and then, but I couldn’t stop rambling. It felt like I was in a dream and had to get my whole long story out fast before I woke up and this chance disappeared. After we got to know each other, Ross told me that all three of them had been stunned when they left Otisville, and the woman associate had cried most of the way back to Manhattan. “This is just step one,” Ross cautioned me before they left that afternoon, “and we don’t even know what two, three, and four are going to be yet.