Redeeming Justice

by Jarrett Adams

  * * *

  —

  Except I don’t.

  I mean to. I really do. But as I lie on my bunk that night, unable to sleep, a thousand thoughts pound in my brain: “How am I going to get through this? I don’t want to become a lifer,” and “How will I be able to understand this case? I only have a high school education. I’m not a lawyer.” I start to feel overwhelmed and exhausted. Not the kind of exhaustion that puts you to sleep. Something heavier, more lethal. A massive fatigue falls onto me. I feel so tired and weighted down that I can’t move. I will eventually identify this feeling as depression, but at this moment I feel as if my only outlet were to return to the mindless world that I’ve created for myself in prison. So I do. I do exactly the opposite of what Pops told me to do. For the next month, I burrow back into my hole, mentally. I shut everything out. I don’t go to church. I don’t call my family. I go back to the basketball court and run with the guys I don’t want to become. I lift weights. I play chess. I work my job as a cook. I don’t return to the law library and read Strickland v. Washington again. I don’t take notes. I don’t write a letter. I don’t think about my case. I just try to escape.

  * * *

  —

  The trap in the cell door springs open.

  “Adams, you got a visit.”

  I prop myself up on my bunk. “Me?”

  I have never had a visit before.

  “Yeah. Get your stuff.”

  “You have it wrong. Can’t be me.”

  “You got a visit. Let’s go.”

  I swing down off the bunk. I slip into my shoes, take a step, and shiver. We’ve hit early October, and the days have turned cold. I exhale and I see my breath. The guard leads me to the visitors’ area. I stop dead. My mother sits at a table, her hands folded. I shiver again, this time not from the cold. I step closer and take the chair across from her.

  “Mom,” I say.

  She looks up at me. She has aged ten years. Her hair has gone gray, and the wrinkles on her face and forehead have widened and increased. Her eyes seem small and shriveled above large creases of skin. I blink. She looks like my grandmother. I start to speak. I want to say, “What are you doing here?” but instead I picture her driving all the way from Chicago and I bite my lip. She’s come five hours to visit me for thirty minutes.

  “Mom,” I say again.

  Her lips quiver, she shakes her head, and she starts to cry.

  I don’t know what to say. I want to soothe her. I want her pain to go away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Mom, no, you don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

  She just keeps shaking her head.

  I take a deep breath. “I can’t believe you came all the way up here.”

  “I needed to see you. I needed to know you’re all right.”

  I realize then, to my shame, that I haven’t seen her in over a year.

  “I’ve been so worried,” she says. “Every time the phone rings, I jump. I’m afraid to take the call. I think it’s the prison calling to tell me something happened to you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She shakes her head again, then exhales to compose herself. I train my eyes over her face, aged, tired, looking at all those wrinkles, those lines of anguish, and I feel so—responsible. What have I done to her?

  She blots the tears rolling down her cheeks with a tissue she’s balled up in her fist. She tilts her head, points a finger at me, and attempts a smile.

  “You’re growing a beard,” she says.

  “Trying to,” I say. “Not succeeding so well.”

  She forces a laugh, then folds her lip and grimaces. I see then that her lips are cracked and dry. She’s dehydrated from constantly crying.

  We sit silently for a while, my mother’s eyes wandering around this room, this place—this surreal, impossible place with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent lights—and then she turns back to me and sighs.

  “I wanted to tell you Rovaughn lost his appeal.”

  “On the double-jeopardy motion?”

  “He got turned down. He has to go to trial again.”

  I take this in. And then something shakes me, like a tremor passing through my body. I feel as if my soul has been rearranged. I look at my mother and I say, “Mom—”

  “I know, Jarrett, I know.”

  “I will do better, I promise. I will write you, regularly, and I’ll call you and—”

  I lean in, fighting off my tears, and I say again, “I’ll do better.”

  She nods, and then her tears come again.

  We sit across from each other, in this stark, cold visiting area in Waupun Correctional Institution, my mother sobbing softly, my own sobs clenched inside my chest, swearing to myself that I will do better, that I have to do better. I realize then that by escaping into basketball, by losing myself playing chess, and by not fighting for my innocence, I am a coward. I vow from this moment on that I will fight for my freedom. I will fight for her.

  Our visiting period ends. A guard emerges from his spot in the shadows to bring me back to my cell. I say goodbye to my mother and watch her walk away, her shoulders slumped, her gait slow, a broken figure on the way out to her husband, my stepfather, waiting for her in the car. They will now drive five hours back to Chicago. The math destroys me. She will have driven a total of ten hours to see me. I choke back my tears, my throat tightening, and my head down, my eyes on the floor, I make myself a promise. I will go to work. I will claw my way out of this hole, this mental hole.

  I start with this. I never play basketball again.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, newly motivated, adrenaline roaring through me as if I’ve guzzled three Red Bulls, I go back to the law library and study Strickland v. Washington. I return the next day and read through a couple other Supreme Court cases, trying to get a feel for the language, the style, the flow of argument that the lawyers use. This library—this small, book-lined haven—starts to feel safe. More than that, surrounded by books, confronted with arguments, with logic, with strategic thinking, I feel that I’ve found a home inside this prison. I come to a decision. I have to figure out how I can spend as much time in here as possible.

  I talk to Pops. He has a way in. He tells me that judges in the state of Wisconsin require all inmates to earn their high school diplomas or the equivalent. He suggests that I take the test and apply to be a GED and HSED tutor. I decide to do that first chance I get.

  The next night, both of us in our bunks, Pops says, his voice weak, sputtering, “Did you write that letter?”

  “Nah, not yet.”

  I hear Pops rustling in his bunk, breathing hard, “Don’t you understand how important that witness is? You need to have the lawyer talk to him. He puts you with him—and her—in the smoking area afterward. He’s an eyewitness. He can save you.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I have to get on that.”

  In the morning, I fill out a pass and return to the law library. I settle in at a table across from an entire wall filled with books, and I begin to craft a letter to Gerald Boyle, Rovaughn’s lawyer.

  I rough out a first draft, then take several more days to get the letter right, trying to keep it short, without rambling. In the letter, I reintroduce myself to Boyle; then I say that I understand that Rovaughn is being tried again. I tell him there was a witness named Shawn Demain. I explain that we all hung out with Shawn in the smoking area after we went up to the young woman’s room, all of us, including her. I end by telling Boyle that he needs to call Shawn Demain as a witness. After crafting the letter by hand, I pay an inmate to use his old manual typewriter, peck out the letter with my nervous fingertips, then give the final version to my appellate attorney, who passes it on to Boyle.

  After that, time flits by, elusive,
blindingly fast, except on certain days, when time seems to stop. My nineteenth birthday comes and goes, feeling like both another regular day and a symbol of something out of reach, a piece of normalcy that has been cut out of my life. I now hate my birthday—I’ve spent two inside prison—and I dread holidays. Thanksgiving, always my favorite holiday, has become nothing more than a long, endless nothing. Christmas, New Year’s Day, are mere red circles on a calendar. My life here, caged, living not day to day but hour to hour, cannot—will not—ever be considered my normal. But I will never allow myself to become complacent again.

  I get the job as a tutor. I inform my boss in the kitchen that I will be leaving. He actually seems upset. “Man, you’re the best chef we have,” he says.

  A low bar, but in Waupun Correctional Institution you take any compliment you can get.

  * * *

  —

  One evening, while Pops is working at the law library, a guard rousts me from my bunk. “Moving you out,” he says.

  He leads me to another wing of the prison, to a single cell.

  “Welcome home,” he says, slamming the cell door behind me.

  They move inmates around all the time, so I have been half expecting this. Pops and I have been celled up for four months, longer than usual. I drop my stuff onto the floor and recall something an inmate told me in passing: “Don’t get too attached to your cellmate.”

  I remember now who said that.

  Pops.

  * * *

  —

  I start working with guys in the law library, helping them earn their high school diplomas. I’m struck by how many of them simply cannot read. The ones who can can’t comprehend or remember what they’ve read thirty seconds ago. I’ve interacted with some of these men, and I know they’re not stupid. In our failing educational system, they have simply been neglected and uneducated. I’m first appalled, and then I’m angry. Poor, Black, discarded. That’s these men. No wonder they turn to a life of crime. If you possess normal intelligence but come from a poor family in a tough neighborhood, what choice do you have?

  I’ve continued going to church and reading the psalms my aunts send me. I start to think these guys must ask themselves, at least subconsciously, the same thing I asked myself: “Where is God? I don’t see Him anywhere around here.” They don’t feel God. They don’t fear God, either.

  One night, after working in the law library, I thumb through the pages of scriptures, and I find myself reading and rereading Psalm 12.

  “Lord! Help! Godly men are fast disappearing. Where in all the world can dependable men be found? Everyone deceives and flatters and lies. There is no sincerity left.”

  Then I read a line that seems to speak directly to me.

  “The Lord replies, ‘I will arise and defend the oppressed, the poor, the needy. I will rescue them as they have longed for me to do.’ ”

  I know, of course, that I can’t rescue these men. But I can at least try to help.

  * * *

  —

  Rovaughn’s trial begins, and a frenzy of phone calls follows. I speak to my mother, my aunts, my attorney, all giving me updates. I’m desperate to hear how the trial is going. I long for a legal play-by-play. My attorney doesn’t attend the trial himself but arranges to have someone in the courtroom take notes and follow the proceedings.

  The jury comes back with an 11–1 verdict—to acquit.

  One juror short of unanimous, one vote shy of an acquittal.

  Close doesn’t count. The result means a hung jury. Rovaughn will go to trial a third time. But even from inside here, I feel the momentum shift.

  I bombard my attorney with questions.

  “Did Boyle talk to Shawn Demain before he called him as a witness?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Shawn Demain testify about the young woman’s behavior in the smoking area?”

  “A little bit. He mainly said that she didn’t seem nervous, or scared. He didn’t go into a lot of specifics.”

  “Did Boyle ask why she would socialize—why she would sit around smoking cigarettes with her so-called rapists—after her so-called rape?”

  “Not in so many words, no.”

  My frustration heats up. I need to write Boyle another letter. I need to spell out the details and ask Boyle to talk to Shawn Demain. Having Demain describe how we behaved with the girl afterward is crucial. I know that questioning Shawn Demain in depth is the key to Rovaughn’s acquittal, and by extension Dimitri’s and mine.

  I write a second letter to Gerald Boyle. I try to keep it short, but I can’t avoid certain details. I explain that Shawn was one of the first people we met at the party. I write how we played video games, how we all hung out together in the smoking area after we went up to the young woman’s room. I describe how she said we snuck up behind her, grabbed her, and pulled her into her room—all lies. I end by telling Boyle that he needs to talk to Shawn Demain so he can corroborate all these details.

  After sending this letter, I remember a few details I left out, specifically the young woman saying to us, “Act like nothing happened,” and asking her roommate, “Are you mad at me? Don’t be mad at me.” I compose and send Boyle a third letter.

  As a result, Boyle hires an investigator to talk to Shawn Demain. The gist of their conversation follows.

  Investigator: Shawn, did you see the guys in the smoking area at the end of the night, after they all went upstairs?

  Shawn: Yeah, I saw them all. Jarrett went upstairs after playing video games with me; then they all came back downstairs. The girl, too.

  Investigator: Did she seem scared?

  Shawn: No. We were all hanging out, sitting around, smoking.

  Investigator: Why didn’t you say this on the witness stand?

  Shawn: To be honest, I forgot. But I didn’t think I had to repeat everything I said before.

  Investigator: Repeat everything? What do you mean?

  Shawn: I wrote everything down. I gave you a three-page statement that I wrote.

  Investigator: We don’t have a three-page statement from you. We don’t have anything in writing from you.

  Shawn: I wrote it. I gave it to the officer who questioned me about that night.

  The investigator tells Boyle about Shawn Demain’s statement. Boyle then writes a pointed letter to the prosecutor, saying approximately,

  I am asking you, again, to turn over everything from discovery. Most notably, if you have any reports, notes, or statements concerning or written by this witness, Shawn Demain, I want them.

  Confused, the prosecutor contacts Sergeant Scout, the police officer who questioned Shawn Demain.

  “Why are they sending me this letter? What is this about?”

  “Let me check into that,” the police officer says.

  The next day, the police officer shows up in Boyle’s office with Shawn Demain’s three-page statement.

  “I must have misplaced this,” she says. “Guess it fell through the cracks.”

  Checkmate.

  The prosecutor dismisses all the charges against Rovaughn. My friend goes home. He never spends a single night in prison. Boyle’s excellent, expensive lawyering—and, I’d like to think, the three letters I write—set Rovaughn free.

  I’m jubilant. This case is cut and dried. Rovaughn has walked. Soon, I am sure, so will Dimitri and I.

  * * *

  —

  But we don’t.

  The prosecutor doesn’t dismiss the charges against us.

  He says that because our lawyers went for a no-defense strategy and didn’t call any witnesses, he doesn’t feel that we should be given a new trial.

  I’m blind with rage and then physically sick.

  “I don’t understand,” I say to this new court-appointed lawyer. “Why can’t they gi
ve us a new trial with the opportunity to go in front of a jury with this evidence, with Shawn Demain’s written statement?”

  “They’re saying that your previous no-defense strategy doesn’t allow any new evidence. That’s it. Can’t do anything about it. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? There were three of us. One of us just walked free. How can that be? How can that be close to justice?”

  “I don’t make the rules. Not my decision. We’ll keep fighting for the appeal—”

  I shoot out of my chair as if I’ve been ejected. “You do that,” I say.

  I signal to the guard that my visit has ended.

  I whip around and face this man who has spent the past year and a half doing exactly nothing on my behalf.

  “I’ll fight this myself from in here. I’m not giving up, because this isn’t right. This. Is. Not. Right.”

  The guard leads me back to my cell. He closes the door behind me. I stand in the middle of my five-by-nine cage, facing the blank wall. Suddenly the sheer sour emotion of defeat surges through me, pooling like bile in my throat. My legs buckle. It feels as if someone has sneaked up on me and clubbed me behind my knees.

  I collapse onto my bunk.

  9.

  Li’l Johnnie Cochran with the Glasses

  I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can barely move. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to help anybody with their GED. I don’t want to call my family, talk to my mother, or look at any of the scriptures my aunts have sent me. I can’t muster the strength or the focus to pray. I don’t even want to play chess. I just want to die.

  My mind runs the result of Rovaughn’s trial in a never-ending loop. What happened to Shawn Demain’s three-page statement? How could that police officer misplace it? She knew about it. She had to know about it. She gets Boyle’s demand letter, and suddenly the statement magically appears in her file? How could she get away with lying like that?

  I have the answer to that question, but the answer destroys me.