by Donna Hylton
I put out my arm and turn just in time to block a woman who was about to splash scalding water in my face. Just as I had to do at seven years old, I need to establish myself at this place as someone they should stay away from. Violence isn’t a part of my nature, but here, just like at every other stage in my life, I have to learn whatever it will take to help me survive.
The officers and doctor continue to let me try solutions to help me rest, but sleep only comes for a couple hours at a time at most. My mind turns and turns and turns with memories and anxiety and guilt—with trauma. When I do sleep, Selma has begun to appear to me through the tiny window inside my cell. Even though I know that in real life she’d never be able to fit through that space, her face peaks through and torments my dreams. Sweetie! Sweetie! What’s your name? If I’d turned and run like my instincts told me to do, things would be so different right now.
As I prepare for my trial, the kind correctional officer continues to look out for me. When my nightmares continue, she convinces one of her colleagues to send me again to the psychiatrist. “I’m going to trial soon,” I tell the doctor. “If I don’t get some sleep at night, I’m afraid I’ll go crazy.” He nods and writes out orders, handing them to the officer who will see me back to my cell.
Later that day, another nurse brings by a bottle of liquid medicine to my cell. SINEQUAN, it reads. TAKE 150 MILLIGRAMS BY MOUTH, THREE TIMES PER DAY. The taste is bitter, nasty, and the liquid numbs my whole mouth. I begin sleeping more—then too much… and then constantly. Even if I were to call Daphne to find out if there’s something better I could take, she wouldn’t be willing to talk to me.
After a few weeks in protective custody at Rikers Island, the officers begin to wake me at four o’clock in the morning to leave at 8 a.m. for pretrial hearings, as well as family court. Alvin is officially fighting for full custody of Adrienne, which causes me to fear for my child’s life. He is aggressive, impatient, and violent, especially under the pressure of responsibilities. He doesn’t have the right demeanor to raise a child, on his own or with anyone else.
The police shuttle me to the Bronx for our hearings where I’m trying to fight for custody so that I can at least have a say in where Adrienne lives. I’m drugged, exhausted, scared, and overwhelmed, and Alvin is so ruthless that my own attorney advises me that continuing to fight isn’t likely to get me anywhere. For my daughter, I refuse to give up.
One day in the midst of our battle, Alvin’s mother, Dorothy, accepts my call when I phone her. She has always been a supporter for me, as well as a wise and decent woman. She tells me that she promises that if Alvin gets custody, then she, not Alvin, will care for Adrienne. She also pledges that she’ll put Adrienne on the phone to speak with me regularly and will bring her to see me for frequent visits, no matter what happens with my trial. If I trust anyone from my past, it’s Dorothy. Still, I know Alvin. The sessions at family court continue, and I’m destroyed to learn my attorney was right: it seems I have no choice but to hand Alvin legal custody. Now, nothing about Adrienne’s safety is a guarantee. Giving in crushes my heart like a boulder landing on my chest. I have to find some way to continue to push to get her.
Each morning as the pretrial for my criminal case begins, I’m placed in a private holding cell for a few moments before the shuttle arrives to take me to court. There, as I force myself to stay awake, I overhear a conversation between two inmates nearby. “Who’s the judge for your case?” one asks.
The other responds: “Rothwax. You know anything about him?”
I do, I think. He’s the judge in my pretrial hearings.
“Yeah,” says the first. “In your cell, do you see a tree out your window?”
“No.”
“Don’t worry,” says the first. “If you get Rothwax, by the time you get out, there will be a full-grown tree there.”
I don’t know anything about the system, but that doesn’t sound good.
The public defender’s office assigns a female attorney to my case. She’s the first encouraging force I’ve met since this whole mess started. “Donna, don’t worry,” she says. “You’re going to get out of this. We know you didn’t kill anyone.”
I nod, so relieved she understands the truth that I want to break down and cry. I see her again at prehearing trials the next day, but then, the following day… I learn that another attorney has taken over my case. From this point, I get another, and then another. Each attorney has a different disposition and varying degrees of interest in learning the details of my case. The problem is further complicated by the fact that ever since I started taking the medicine to try to help me sleep, I can’t even stand. In my cell, I try to position myself by the door to listen to what the other inmates say about how to prepare for court and questions we should ask our attorneys, but I can barely keep my head up—the medicine has deadened me and made me confused. I ask a prison officer whether the doctor can permit me not to take the medication, but she says that I have to ask the court to make that decision.
It takes eleven months after the crime for all the pretrial and evidentiary hearings to play out. The attorney who will finally represent me at court is named Richard Siracusa, and I can see that he’s committed to my case and doing the best he can for me.
During this time, I learn more about the victim, Thomas Vigliarolo. He was a husband, a father, and a real estate broker who, along with Louis Miranda, allegedly sold shares in NYC condos and pocketed the money. I hear grisly details about what happened inside the apartment that I didn’t know because Rita and Theresa often didn’t want to speak about it when I returned from driving Miranda around. The other five—Maria, Miranda, Woody, Theresa, and Rita—are named as my co-defendants. My attorney, Richard, asks me whether I want to take a plea bargain of five to fifteen years by confessing to kidnapping. “No,” I tell him. “I want to go to trial. I didn’t kidnap or murder anyone—I want to tell them the truth!” I don’t realize that if the jury should happen to find me guilty, the sentence will be harsher than if I were to take the plea. Selma is the only one of us who’s wise enough to the system to accept the plea agreement. She’s sentenced with fifteen years to life.
Even though we other six are being tried together, we each have separate attorneys. Richard focuses solely on me, working hard to emphasize the fact that I was an accessory as opposed to someone who planned or willingly participated in any of this. My defense is duress and coercion, a phrase I will hear Richard say over and over throughout the trial. He explains that this is when someone is put into a position with imminent threat, participating only due to that threat. Richard tells the court that in fact, it’s because of my cooperation that they even found the body of Mr. V, as I’ve begun to refer to Mr. Vigliarolo in my mind. Mr. V’s business partners from Long Island didn’t even select me out of the lineup when the investigators asked who delivered the ransom note to them. Instead, they identified a woman who looked like Maria. Richard points out that I am the only one of us seven who didn’t inflict any violence on Mr. V, and after the police took forensic samples of my DNA, I’m also the only one of us seven whose DNA didn’t show up anywhere at the scene, and so the authorities could never place me there. Nothing, absolutely nothing—nothing came out to prove that I was involved in the murder.
I begin to fear that the court will suspect me of some kind of reverse-lie: I’ve confessed to being present when Mr. V died, but there’s actually no evidence that I was there. It should be easy for Richard to argue for my innocence… shouldn’t it?
I’m learning that nothing is sure in court. The judge for my state trial is said to be even harsher than Judge Rothwax: it’s Judge Edwin Torres, who wrote the 1979 crime novel After Hours. Judge Torres is in his mid-fifties, and everything about him is straightforward and no-nonsense, right down to how tightly he slicks back his hair. I’m intimidated by him, and on the first day of the trial, I throw up right in court. As maintenance workers come in to clean it up during an awkward break from the opening argu
ments, I keep my head down in humiliation—so out of my element in this world of court and crime. Throughout my whole life, I’ve never belonged. Can’t they see that I don’t belong here, either?
“What’s the problem with your client?” the judge asks, and Richard explains that I’m on medication to help me sleep. “Take her off!” Judge Torres says angrily. “This is not for this court.” He looks at me. “I don’t want to see you back like this again.”
That afternoon, the court sends me back to Rikers Island with documentation that I’m to be taken off of the Sinequan. “Do you want us to lower the dosage?” the doctor asks me.
“No,” I tell him. “I don’t want it at all. I’ve never been on medication. It doesn’t agree with me.”
Even off of the drug, I’m less in control of my own well-being here at Rikers than I knew. While I’ve been spending so much time in court, there’s a female captain officer at the prison who has grown jealous because her romantic partner, also a female captain, apparently has been showing me favor.
While I’m out, the captain who wants revenge on me enters my cell and hides a straight razor. A short time later, when there’s a cell search, officers find the razor in my space. I’m sentenced to the Bing—Rikers Island’s nickname for solitary confinement—for sixty days.
With this, and as the trial continues, I’m back to losing sleep. My mind spins with too much anxious activity. These nights, I crave family. I miss my daughter so much I think the longing could kill me. I wish for Dorothy just to show up with her here. I wish I’d had parents like the ones on TV: The Brady Bunch. The Partridge Family. The Cosbys. I know that my parents are never going to care about me, much less love me. I mean nothing to them.
The officer who occasionally asks about Adrienne sees what I’m going through and continues to talk with me, to look in my eyes and see my humanness. One day during my trial, she tells me something that I’ll never forget: “You don’t deserve to get a lot of time in prison—but don’t worry,” she says. “You have to have faith that your daughter’s going to be alright.” Even if neither one of us can know that for sure, it brings me some relief to hear someone say it. Maybe I’m really not such a bad person if this person cares enough to offer me some encouragement in my struggle.
I pray that the court and jury will see things the same way. My trial begins in February 1986, just a couple of weeks after Adrienne’s fifth birthday. The forewoman of the jury is a black woman who asks a lot of intelligent questions about the circumstances and the evidence.
Into the microphone, I tell the jury my truth. I tell the court what happened, and why: that under threat of my daughter’s life, I did what they told me to do. I acknowledge that I made a mistake by agreeing to a blackmail scheme, even though I didn’t understand at all that’s what it was. I tell them that Mr. V asked me to help him… and that I wanted to help him. I just didn’t know how to do that without putting my life and my daughter’s life in danger.
With each testimony, the trial grows more complicated. Rita and Theresa both testify against me, and some of my co-defendants’ testimonies conflict with the forensic results of the investigation. The one person who tries to help me during recesses and back at Rikers Island is Sr. Elinor, a Catholic nun who works in a program called the Women’s Advocate Ministry, visiting people in prison to advocate for legal justice on their behalf. She’s a strong source of support for me, and I appreciate the time and insights she gives me. I need any advocate I can get.
“Tell me about your childhood,” Sr. Elinor says. I hold back momentarily, not wanting any part of the trial to be about me. It’s Mr. V whose life deserves the attention. But Sr. Elinor explains that there’s a small chance this could help my case, so I begin to share some stories about my upbringing with her. I tell her about my mother in Jamaica and how I ended up in New York. We discuss Roy, why he might have treated me the way that he did… but that’s a question I’ll never be able to answer. There’s so much about Roy that’s a mystery. For the seven years I lived in their home, I knew very little about him and Daphne on a personal level. I offer Sr. Elinor the relatively sparse background about my adoptive father that I did learn over the years: I remember hearing when I was little that Roy was always different than the other children in his family, but I never found out what that meant. He once told me he served in the Korean War, but his older age leads me to believe that it was actually World War II. At times when I was very small, I would ask him his age, but he would never tell—he was very self-conscious about growing old. When he did talk about fighting at war, he told me that they would experiment with gasses on people. I’ve begun to think maybe that led to his mental instability.
He once shared with me that he believes he fathered a son with a German woman while he served in the war, which may also solidly support that it was not the Korean War he was part of. He said he never found out for sure whether she bore his child—but by the look on his face as he spoke about it, I could tell that deep down, he knew. “Don’t ever tell your mother I told you that,” he said. “She doesn’t know.” Daphne wasn’t able to have children, and I remember learning that only by chance. Otherwise it was a forbidden discussion. Daphne was ashamed of failure in any form—especially one so quintessential to the experience of womanhood.
Just as I did with the police following Mr. V’s death, I volunteer everything I know to Sr. Elinor in the event it could help my case. She relays information about my upbringing to Richard, my attorney, and encourages him to ask for the judge’s allowance to listen to background about my life. “Donna ran away from home at age fourteen for a reason,” Sr. Elinor reminds Richard. In turn, he tries to reason with Judge Torres, but the judge decides he won’t allow my personal history to be heard in the court.
During the trial process, the only other opportunity to share anything about my life takes place with the probation officer who’s working to prepare my presentence report. “Where were you born?” the probation officer asks me.
“Jamaica.”
“Jamaica, Queens?”
“No. Jamaica, West Indies.”
I notice that he writes the word allegedly to state my birthplace as Jamaica. Unfortunately, the only person in the world who has any record to prove my adoption from Jamaica is Roy Hylton. “What is this for?” I ask the probation officer.
“This is a report of a defendant’s personal history that the judge is supposed to take into consideration when they’re weighing the severity of the defendant’s sentence. And from now on, I ask the questions. You answer. You got it?”
I lower my eyes.
There’s a small handful of people connected to the case who tell the truth on the stand with sincerity. One of them is the waitress from the donut shop near Maria’s apartment. Another is a Nassau County police officer who drove me around after we were arrested. He tells the court that I was cooperative in assisting the police with information about the crime and says I was in over my head, not knowing whom to trust. On the stand, he states he doesn’t feel as though I should be blamed for all this—I didn’t even know the victim.
From start to finish, the trial continues for a month. On Wednesday, March 12, 1986—three hundred fifty-seven days after I first encountered Mr. V—the jury steps out of the courtroom to deliberate the verdict.
After many hours, they all file back into the courtroom. The forewoman explains that they have a strong consensus, but there are a couple of charges that they need the judge to clarify. “Could you again define duress and coercion?” she asks. Members of the jury look at me with a softness in their eyes. They seem to know that I was an accessory, and not an active participant. I agreed to a blackmail scheme, but I didn’t agree to anything else that happened. As I look around, I sense a feeling in the courtroom that we three girls didn’t intend to be part of Mr. V’s death. We were caught up in something we could not get out of.
Two more times, the jury leaves and reenters the courtroom for further clarification. Does this me
an that they’re not all in agreement about my involvement? Please, let them understand the charges and know that I’m not guilty of murder.
But finally, for a fourth time, they reenter the courtroom and take their seats in the jury box. The forewoman looks pained. She grips the wooden ledge of the jury box in front of her as she rises to read the verdict:
“On two counts of kidnapping in the first degree, Donna Hylton has been found… guilty.”
The room begins to swirl around me.
The forewoman continues:
“On one count of murder in the second degree, Donna Hylton has been found—”
I hold my breath—
“Guilty.”
What? I’m confused. In the moment, I’m present, but the dissociation comes quickly. I go numb—not numb without feeling, but numb with too much feeling. I didn’t kill Mr. V.
And then the second voice enters my consciousness: But you didn’t help him, either.
The verdicts of the other five are read, but the high sonic tone of shock continues to ring between my ears, deafening me against everything that’s happening around me.
Later, when I learn the verdicts of the others, I find that we’ve all been charged the same. The technicality is that Mr. V died during the act of kidnapping, which was a felony, and this is considered murder. When we receive our sentences, I learn that every single one of us has gotten twenty-five years to life. If I’d never said I was there, they wouldn’t have had any evidence to place me at the scene. It’s because I told the truth that I’m being convicted.
Twenty-five years to life. I’m twenty-one years old, and my life is over.
I don’t know yet that I’m about to discover real love, purpose, and strength for the first time in my life… and that the only person I’ve ever needed to learn to save is myself.