Justice Delayed (Innocent Prisoners Project)

by Marti Green

Susan nodded. Then, with trembling hands, she held the door open wide for them.

  The two men entered the living room, and Thompson asked, “Is your husband home?”

  “He went in to work. He didn’t want to; he wanted to wait with me. But I made him go. We were making each other more nervous together. Have you found Kelly? Do you know where she is?”

  Thompson’s voice lowered. “I’m sorry to tell you, Mrs. Braden. Kelly is dead. Her body was found at Wilson’s Creek.”

  The walls of the room crept closer and closer; the air felt heavier and heavier. Susan couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, as darkness descended over her. And then there was nothing. No light, no sound, just emptiness.

  Moments later—or was it longer?—the light crept back in. A dark mass huddled over her body, now lying supine on her living-room carpet. “Mrs. Braden, can you hear me?”

  It was the detective. She remembered his voice. She remembered him saying the unthinkable. Kelly, her beautiful Kelly, was dead.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?” Lisa asked Jenny. The little girl had finally awakened that morning. Her speech was still fuzzy, her voice soft, but again, Dr. Burton had reassured Jenny that was to be expected. “Why are you crying?”

  Jenny had just hung up from her sister’s call, the call she’d dreaded receiving. Through her sobs, Susan had told her Kelly was dead. Murdered. Susan was meeting Carl at the morgue, she said, where they would have to identify her body. Jenny wished she could be by her sister’s side, hold her close, and try to console her, even though she knew if it had been Lisa, she would be inconsolable. But she wouldn’t leave Lisa. Not until she was home safely. If she would ever feel their house was safe anymore. Todd had already arranged to have a security system installed. No window in the house would ever be left open at night again, no matter how clammy the evening.

  Jenny hadn’t wanted to question Lisa yet. Better to wait until she was stronger, she’d thought. But now that she was awake, now that Kelly’s body had been found, the police were certain to be back at the hospital, asking her daughter the inevitable questions. She wiped her eyes dry with a tissue, then picked up Lisa’s hand and asked, “Did you see who did this to you? Who hit you in the head?”

  Lisa’s spoke something so softly, Jenny couldn’t make it out. She leaned in closer to her daughter.

  “Who was it, sweetie?”

  Lisa whispered into her mother’s ear, “I think it was Jackie.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  2016

  As she’d promised Bruce Kantor, the director of the Help Innocent Prisoners Project, Dani Trumball had returned to work three months after Ruth Emma was born. She’d handled only appeals, though, and usually only where DNA was available to prove her client’s innocence. It was the kind of work a junior associate would normally handle, not someone with Dani’s experience or impressive win record. But Bruce had been willing to accommodate her in exchange for her promise that she’d return to handling cases from their outset once Ruth turned one. And that happened two days ago.

  Dani began reviewing letters from inmates seeking help from the project—or HIPP, as the staff called it. All, of course, were assertions of innocence. Dani knew that convicted felons rarely admitted their guilt, and those who did often tried to justify the crime. She’d become expert at recognizing the pleas of those who truly seemed innocent, but whether or not they were could be determined only after HIPP began an investigation.

  There were dozens of letters on her desk from inmates throughout the country. Although HIPP’s office was in Manhattan’s East Village, there were no geographical boundaries for their services. Their mission was to help overturn convictions of men and women they believed were wrongfully convicted, imprisoned anywhere in the United States. She was stopped cold by the third letter. It wasn’t from a convict or his family member. It came from a guard at a prison where the inmate was incarcerated on death row. Dani leaned back in her chair as she read his letter.

  I’m a guard at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, and I’ve been assigned to death row for the past eighteen years. Jack Osgood is one of the inmates here. Whenever I’ve asked him about what he did, he’s always answered that he doesn’t know why he’s behind bars. When I say to him, “You killed a girl,” he’s always answered that he’d never do such a thing. Of course, a lot of guys say that, but Jack is different than most. Mentally retarded is what we’d call him back when I was in school. Now, they don’t use that term so much. But it fits Jack to a tee.

  Now, he’s just been sitting here in prison all these years, with a death sentence hanging over him. At first, his mother came to visit, but I heard she died, and nobody’s visited him in at least eight years. It seemed like the state had forgotten about him, but a death warrant’s now been signed, so his execution will happen real soon. That’s why I’m writing. In Georgia, we’re not supposed to execute a prisoner who’s retarded, and I believe Jack is. But there’s nobody around anymore to speak up for him. I’m hoping you will, but you have to do it quickly.

  Yours truly, Paul Dingell

  Dani couldn’t help but think of her son, Jonah, as she read the letter. He, too, was intellectually disabled, although at the high end of functioning, as a result of a condition known as Williams syndrome. What if he were falsely convicted of a crime and she and her husband, Doug, were no longer around to help him? Could he fight for himself? She thought not. He was always too eager to please, and that would hurt him.

  She pushed aside the other letters on her desk. She’d found her next client—Jack Osgood.

  Dani did what she always did first—she turned to LexisNexis to read about Osgood’s case. Although the trial transcript was rarely online, the appellate decisions usually were, and those provided her with a good synopsis of the case. Jack had been convicted of the strangulation murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Kelly Braden. According to the prosecution, on a night Kelly had been sleeping in her cousin’s room, Osgood climbed up a ladder to the second-story bedroom, struck Kelly’s five-year-old cousin, Lisa Hicks, with a baseball bat, and carried Kelly out of the house. The prosecution postulated that he’d choked Kelly enough to cause unconsciousness first but didn’t kill her until hours later. There was no evidence of sexual abuse.

  The prosecution had relied on three primary pieces of evidence. The first, and most damaging, was an identification by Lisa Hicks of Osgood as the one who’d struck her. The next was a bite mark found on Kelly’s arm that an expert testified matched Osgood’s teeth. And finally, although many neighbors testified they’d often seen Osgood with a bat, when the police arrived with a search warrant, the bat was missing. Three weeks later, two teenagers found a bat with Osgood’s initials carved on its handle and traces of blood on the shaft hidden in shrubbery near a marsh. Forensics identified the blood as matching Lisa Hicks. The police had enough to arrest twenty-three-year-old Jack Osgood, and the jury had enough to convict him and impose the death penalty.

  When she finished reading the appellate decisions, Dani sat back in her chair. The testimony of a five-year-old, awakened in the middle of the night and struck with a bat, didn’t seem especially reliable to her, but she’d have to wait to read the transcript to learn more about the identification. And the scientific reliability of bite marks was the subject of considerable and increasing controversy. Osgood had claimed that he’d misplaced his bat, that he thought he’d left it behind after watching a pickup softball game, but when he went back to the field, it wasn’t there. Clearly, the jury didn’t believe him.

  But what was most evident to her from the rulings was the absence of any discussion of Jack’s intellectual capabilities. That seemed strange. Even before the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling that barred executions of those with an intellectual disability, Georgia had banned such executions, four years before Jack’s conviction. So why hadn’t Jack’s lawyer raised that issue? Was the prison guard’s assessment of Jack’s intellectual ability faulty? If she had more time,
she’d put the guard’s letter aside until she heard back from Jack’s trial lawyer. But there wasn’t time. Tomorrow, she’d head out to Georgia.

  Dani lay on the living-room couch in her Bronxville home, entwined in her husband’s arms. It was 9:00 p.m., what they called “honeymoon hour,” the sacrosanct time set aside every evening for each other. Both Jonah and Ruth were fast asleep. After almost nineteen years of marriage, she still loved her husband as strongly as she had during the first heady days of their courtship. She knew how lucky she was. Too many of her friends’ marriages had fallen apart or had been relegated to business partnerships, maintained for the sake of children or financial considerations.

  “So soon?” Doug asked, after Dani told him of her next day’s trip. “I guess I thought it would be a while before you began traveling again.”

  “Me, too. But this one’s time sensitive.” If Dani were being honest, she’d admit that she missed being on the road, meeting a potential client for the first time and trying to assess whether she believed his claim of innocence. She missed the adrenaline rush she got when she uncovered that crucial piece of evidence that convinced a court her client had been wrongfully convicted. But she also knew she wasn’t really shielding Doug. She was protecting herself. Because admitting that meant she was pulled toward something that took her away from her children. And acknowledging that was something that made her uncomfortable.

  “You taking Tommy with you?” Doug asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I guess if I were a different kind of man, I’d be jealous of him. Sometimes it feels like you spend more time with Tommy than me.”

  “Well, maybe if Tommy weren’t so devoted to Patty, you’d have cause,” Dani said with a smile.

  “Seriously, can’t someone else in the office take this case? There must be someone in the tristate area begging for your services.”

  Dani knew very well there was. There were far more inmates seeking HIPP’s assistance than there were staff attorneys available to represent them. Each week she’d go through the new letters that had arrived and sift through the pile to choose the lucky few who’d get the golden ticket—a HIPP attorney in their corner. Each week she’d send back letters to those whose pleas seemed genuine but were turned down nevertheless because there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to help everyone.

  “This man—I think I’m meant to represent him.” Dani hung her head down. She knew it sounded foolish. Yet, as soon as she’d read the guard’s letter, she’d known this would be her next client. She just hoped that when she met him tomorrow, she walked away with the belief that he was innocent.

  CHAPTER

  3

  It had been a crisp late-September morning when Dani left her home, the type of perfect day that made New Yorkers forget the area’s steamy summers and snowy winters. Tommy Noorland had met her at LaGuardia airport. He was the investigator at HIPP whom Dani worked with exclusively. He was older than she was by almost ten years, but with his fit body, his wavy, dark hair, and the handlebar mustache that gave him a rakish look, he seemed years younger. When she’d started there almost eight years ago, she’d only worked on appeals, so by the time the case came to her, the investigation was complete. There were a number of investigators who worked for HIPP, but since she’d started handling cases from the outset, Tommy had always been her go-to guy for ferreting out the facts. During his ten years as an FBI agent, he’d developed instincts and skills that were always spot-on. And if he couldn’t dig up the evidence on his own, he had a network of former colleagues he could call upon.

  After they landed in Atlanta, she and Tommy exited the airplane terminal, and she was hit by a mugginess that she’d thought should be finished by now. It’s still the South, she had to keep reminding herself. They retrieved their rental car and headed to Jackson, Georgia.

  An hour later, they pulled behind the state prison gates to the parking lot. She’d been at the same prison only a year and a half ago, to watch a man put to death. The man wasn’t her client. Instead, he’d confessed to a crime for which her client had been awaiting the needle. She and Tommy showed their IDs to the guard at reception, then were led to an attorney interview room. As they walked down the prison hallways, their walls painted a drab gray, she heard distant shouts and smelled pine-scented disinfectant—both of which her senses were accustomed to from visiting prisons throughout the country. They got settled in the sparse room, empty but for four chairs—one side with three, the other only one—and a beat-up metal table, bolted to the floor.

  Just five minutes later, a large man, at least six four, with hands cuffed and feet shackled, shuffled into the room. Before the guard who escorted him left, he locked the shackles and handcuffs to a ring on the floor.

  Osgood stared at Dani with large green eyes that seemed to sag into his fleshy cheeks, just as his whole body seemed to sag when he sat down. He clasped his hands tightly together. His brown hair had started to thin, and his pasty-white complexion was typical of men who’d been imprisoned for decades.

  “Jack, my name is Dani Trumball. I’m an attorney with the Help Innocent Prisoners Project in New York City. And this is Tom Noorland. He’s an investigator in our office.”

  Osgood had a confused look on his face but remained silent.

  “One of the guards here, Mr. Dingell, asked us to come meet with you. Do you know why you’re in prison?”

  Osgood cast his gaze on the table, then mumbled, “They said I hurt Kelly. But I wouldn’t do that. She was always nice to me.”

  “Do you remember your trial?”

  Osgood raised his chin. “It was a long time ago. I remember some of it. Not everything. I remember when the jury said I was guilty.”

  “Well, at that trial, Kelly’s cousin said she saw you in her bedroom, standing over Kelly’s bed. Maybe you just wanted to get closer to Kelly, and you didn’t realize you hurt her. Is that possible?”

  Now Osgood shook his head vehemently. “I would never hurt Kelly. I would never hurt anyone. That would be wrong!”

  “Your bat had Lisa’s blood on it.”

  Osgood scratched his head, and his eyebrows knitted together, as he seemed lost in thought. “I remember,” he finally said. “When the policeman came to our house, I couldn’t find my bat. Mama thought maybe I left it at the ball field, after the game, but I went back there, and I couldn’t find it.”

  Had this giant of a man accidentally killed Kelly Braden and blocked it from his memory? Or, had he knowingly knocked out a five-year-old girl, carried Kelly away, then coldheartedly murdered her? Or, was he actually innocent? Dani’s assessment would have to wait until she completed her investigation into the crime. Part of that investigation would include having a psychologist give Jack a battery of tests to determine his intellectual functioning and personality profile. But first, she’d probe a little herself.

  “How much school did you have?” she asked him.

  “I went to high school.”

  “Did you graduate?”

  Once again, Jack looked down at the table. “I didn’t do so good on tests,” he answered, his voice low.

  “When did you leave school?”

  Jack looked up in the air, as though he could pull down the answer from the ceiling. After a while, he said, “Maybe sixteen? My mama said it was enough for me, and it would be better for me to work.”

  “And did you find a job?”

  Now Jack smiled. “I worked for Mr. Bennett, at the A and P.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “I swept the floors and cleaned up spills. Sometimes he’d let me stock the shelves, if he told me first where to put the things.”

  “Did you work there until they sent you here?”

  “Uh-huh. Mr. Bennett liked me.”

  Jack spoke his responses in a slow, deliberate manner. Whether he met the state’s definition of intellectually disabled would have to wait until the testing was completed. But Dani had seen enough students in Jonah�
�s school, which specialized in treating children with various disorders that led to cognitive difficulties, to appreciate that Jack was, at the least, “slow.”

  “I’m going to look into your case, if that’s okay with you. And if I think you’re innocent, I’m going to try to get you out of here. Would you like that?”

  Jack smiled, the first one Dani had seen since he’d sat down. “I want to go home.”

  Dani patted his hand.

  “Would you ask my mama to visit me? She hasn’t been here in a really long time.”

  Dani’s mouth dropped open. Hadn’t Jack been notified that his mother had passed away? Surely, he would have been told. Perhaps he had, and over the years had forgotten. In any case, it wasn’t her place to tell him. At least not yet. Not until after their investigation confirmed his assertions that he was innocent. Then he’d be officially taken on as a client. Then, she’d tell him the truth—that the one person who’d loved him unconditionally was gone. That if Dani was successful in obtaining his freedom, he would be on his own, all alone.

  “What do you think?” she asked Tommy as they drove to the airport.

  “Are you asking whether I think he did it, or whether we should take the case even if he did because he’s disabled?”

  Dani knew how Tommy felt about the death penalty. He was all for it—as long as the inmate was guilty. It was one of the things they differed on. She’d seen too many mistakes to be comfortable with the irreversibility of putting someone to death. Sometimes the truth came out early, sometimes not until decades later.

  “If you think he did it.”

  “Don’t know whether he did or not, but he sure seems slow,” Tommy answered as he pointed to his head.

  “Not so slow, though, that he wouldn’t remember killing a girl. And he didn’t strike me as cagey enough to lie about it.”

  “Maybe. For once, I’m inclined to agree with you. His body language didn’t say to me he was hiding something. Still—I’ve been wrong before. So have you. If we decide he’s guilty, you’ll drop his case, right?”