Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  “Thanks. That means a lot.”

  “Still at the Trib?”

  “I am,” I say. “I’m actually researching a story about a case you worked on back in 1993. DeShawn Perkins.”

  “Remind me.”

  “He was sixteen, from Crown Heights. Convicted of murdering his foster parents and sister…”

  “Oh, yes,” she says, her voice lower. “Really horrible crime. The girl was, what, three?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Did anything about the case strike you as odd?”

  “Odd?”

  “DeShawn insists he didn’t do it. He says the detective coerced his confession. And I talked to his girlfriend at the time. She says she was with him all night.”

  “If I’m remembering it right, the case always felt weak to me. That confession was a big hurdle, though. We raised that he didn’t have an adult present, but his voice on tape saying he did it—that’s hard to argue with. At least back then. And they had a witness, I think.”

  “Do you remember anything about her?”

  “I remember thinking that she didn’t seem particularly trustworthy, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t telling the truth. Or at least what she thought was the truth.”

  “You worked on his appeal, right?”

  “Right. It was one of my last cases before I went to the DA’s office.”

  “He sent me some of the documents in his file but I’m wondering if there’s anything more.”

  “After the appeal we send everything we have to the defendant. What are you looking to write about?”

  “I’m working with the Center on Culture, Crime and Media on a wrongful conviction project. All the stuff that’s come out lately about eyewitness testimony and false confessions made me think there could be something there.”

  “Like I said, the case felt thin. It was such a heinous crime. Shooting a toddler in the face? DeShawn didn’t strike me as the kind of person who would do that. And I don’t think the cops did much investigating after they honed in on him. Try calling the precinct’s administrative lieutenant to ask if they can help you track down their file. I’ll make a call to my old office and see if I can locate what we had. I’ve still got some friends at the courthouse, too. They might have an old copy somewhere.”

  “Thanks. I really appreciate that.”

  “Are you looking to try and get the case reopened?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe?”

  “You should know, unless that witness recants, there’s probably not much you can do.”

  I almost add that I know one of the two original officers on the case and could seek his advice, but instead I just say thanks and tell her I’ll call her tomorrow. Why haven’t I called Saul yet? Typically, if you have a personal contact that might be able to illuminate something about a story you go straight to them. But going to Saul means going to my mother now, and I am not myself around my mother.

  We hang up, and since I still haven’t heard about a new assignment from Mike, I call the 77th precinct and ask for the administrative lieutenant.

  “Lieutenant Graves,” says a female voice.

  “Hi,” I say. “My name is Rebekah Roberts. I’m a reporter with the New York Tribune and I’m trying to get a copy of a homicide file from 1992.”

  “1992?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a long time ago.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Hold on.”

  I hold. She comes back.

  “You’re going to have to call the Department of Records down at One PP.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  I Google “NYPD Department of Records” and find a Web site with instructions for mailing in a request for documents, but no phone number. There are few things more obnoxious than government agencies and corporations that don’t list their direct contacts on their Web sites. I bet I’ve lost a week of my life searching online for phone numbers for city departments and public relations officers. I’m always clicking around, grumbling, thinking, I’m going to find the fucking number, you assholes, and when I do, I’ll be pissed and less sympathetic to your point of view than I would have if you hadn’t tried to hide it from me. After a few minutes, I give up and I dial the main NYPD switchboard to ask for the Department of Records. I am transferred.

  “Goooood morning, Records!” trills a man’s voice.

  “Hi,” I say, almost laughing. “How are you?”

  “I’m just great, how are you?”

  “Pretty good,” I say, thinking, happy people are almost always more helpful than unhappy ones. I introduce myself and tell him I’m looking for a homicide file from 1992.

  “Ah,” he says. “You got the wrong records room.” Shit. “You should probably call the legal bureau. They handle FOIL requests.”

  FOIL, the Freedom of Information Law, is wonderful in theory, but often useless in practice. There aren’t enforced rules about how long a department can take to “process” your request for information, and if they deny it, they don’t really have to explain why. You can appeal, but good luck with that. One thing I miss about Florida is the fact that my home state has some of the best open records laws in the country. Pretty much every government document is fair game. Even as a college reporter, I could call the Gainsville PD and get an incident report or arrest warrant e-mailed to me the day after it was filed, and often police departments would just post the documents on their Web sites as a matter of course. It’s paradise for a reporter. New York City, on the other hand, makes it as difficult as possible to get information as simple as whether a person was arrested or not.

  The nice man at Personnel Records transfers me to the FOIL office, where a less nice woman answers.

  “Legal.”

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m a reporter with the New York Tribune and I’m looking to get information about a 1992 homicide case. I’m hoping to get a copy of the original police file.”

  “The file? You mean the incident report?”

  “That,” I say, “and anything else that’s available. Witness statements. Evidence inventory.”

  “We won’t provide the report.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So, the file isn’t available?”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t available. I said we won’t provide the report.”

  Shoot me now.

  “What about the rest of the documents in the file?”

  “You need to talk to DCPI for that.”

  Fuck. The Deputy Commissioner for Public Information is the NYPD’s media relations arm and it is a complete black hole. At crime scenes, the DCPI officers stand sentry, blocking access instead of providing it. E-mailing a request to the office—which you are always asked to do—yields a response only about 50 percent of the time. And only about 50 percent of those responses actually include the information you’ve requested.

  The FOIL woman gives me DCPI’s e-mail address, which I already know by heart. I e-mail my request into the abyss.

  At two o’clock, Mike calls and tells me to come into the office to help with rewrite for the rest of the day. Three hours later, I get an e-mail from DCPI:

  You need to contact the FOIL office.

  I e-mail back: Already did—they directed me to you.

  Almost immediately, DCPI emails back: DCPI is the media office that focuses on breaking news. We are unable to accommodate requests for historic files.

  DeShawn wouldn’t call his case historic. He’s living it every day.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  July 6–14, 1992

  Rikers Island

  It wasn’t until he saw the newspaper article that DeShawn actually believed Malcolm and Sabrina and Kenya were dead. He signed the piece of paper the cop gave him, but instead of his foster parents walking through the door to take him home, two men in uniform appeared, slapped cuffs on his wrists, and walked him out the side door of the precinct and onto a bus bound for Rikers. Even that first night, awake in his cell, the screams and cries of hundred
s of boys bouncing off the walls, echoing through the bars, he thought maybe it was all part of a plan to frighten him into straightening up. He shuffled through the line with a tray at breakfast and threw his entire meal in the trash. At lunch, he spotted a copy of the Tribune lying open on the floor by a garbage can: “Psycho Son: Cops Nab Foster Kid in Brutal Triple Murder.” His knees buckled and he stayed there, kneeling, as he read the article that told him his family was gone.

  He used his phone privileges to call Toya, and by some miracle she picked up and accepted the charges.

  “You know I didn’t do it, right? I was with you all night.”

  “I know,” she said. But she didn’t sound sure.

  “I didn’t wanna get you in trouble, but I had to tell them I was with you. I’m sorry. I don’t know if they believed me, though. Can you call the police and say we were together? Can you call Michael? He was high but he knows we were there. I don’t remember the cop’s name but it was the precinct on Utica.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Me, too.” He wanted to ask her to come visit, but how could he? Some girls bragged about their boyfriends in lockup, but Toya didn’t date thugs. She respected herself. It was one of the things he loved about her.

  “Who do you think did it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. The paper said Ontario is okay, though. Can you ask around about where he is?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  A male voice broke in on the line. “Who’s this?”

  “I’m on the phone,” says Toya.

  “Who is this!”

  “Winston…”

  The line went dead. He called her back the next day. The recording announced a call from Rikers Island: “Will you accept the call?”

  “Fuck no!” said Winston. “Toya don’t want nothing to do with you. Call here again and I’ll report you for harassment. Add some rape charges to your murder rap, motherfucker.”

  For a week he waited, certain she’d sneak away and come see him, assure him she’d gone to the police and provided an alibi. He moved from his bunk to the cafeteria to the yard and back to his bunk with his head down, the bewilderment turning to fear, the fear like a fist in his throat, turning his blood thin, his muscles soft, his bones brittle. Where was Ontario? His brother was a mama’s boy, glued to Sabrina’s legs since the day he joined the family. Was he getting picked on—or worse—in a group home somewhere? Could they have put him back with his mother? The one who gave him the burn on his arm?

  And then, one afternoon, someone called his name.

  “DeShawn!”

  It was Freddie Anthony, the son of two parishioners at Glorious Gospel. Like DeShawn, Freddie had stopped going to church, but his mother and father were diehards. DeShawn hadn’t seen Freddie in probably two years. They were a year apart in school, and Freddie dropped out when DeShawn was a freshman. DeShawn didn’t know for sure, but he thought Freddie had gotten mixed up in a gang—one of the local crews affiliated with the Bloods.

  “Fuck, man,” said Freddie. “You look like shit.”

  DeShawn had been avoiding the metal plates that served as mirrors in the bathrooms.

  “What are you in for?” DeShawn asked.

  Freddie shrugged. “Possession with intent. But what the fuck, man? What even happened? Was Malcolm, like, doing something?”

  “No! I didn’t do it, Freddie. No fucking way.”

  “I heard you confessed.”

  “Bullshit,” said DeShawn, almost shouting. “That cop lied to me. Got me all mixed up. I got an alibi! I was with my girl.”

  “Fucking cops will do anything to close a case,” said Freddie. “But you up a creek, man. You got a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “They’ll appoint one, but you gotta get your alibi together. They’re not gonna play around on a triple murder. You should call Pastor Green. He helped me out some the first couple times I was in here. He might could help you get a better lawyer. Your girl talk to the cops yet?”

  “I don’t know. Her stepdad won’t let her talk to me.”

  “You gotta get on that shit. Fast. Longer you stay in here, the easier it is for everybody outside to forget you. They all thinking you blew your family away! If you didn’t do it, you need to call everybody you ever known. Get them to go to the cops. Get them to talk to your lawyer. Otherwise you’ll just be another murderin’ nigger that deserves the needle. You feel me?”

  DeShawn felt him. And Freddie’s talk woke him up. He called Glorious Gospel, and two days later, Pastor Redmond Green made the trip to Rikers.

  “I didn’t do it, Pastor Green,” said DeShawn as soon as they sat down. “You believe me, right? You gotta help me.”

  “The police have told me you confessed, DeShawn,” said Pastor Green. “They’ve told me they have a witness who saw you running from the apartment, carrying a gun, late that night.”

  “They’re lying!”

  “You didn’t confess?”

  “No … I mean, that cop, he tricked me. I thought … he said they were gonna charge Ontario. He said…”

  “Ontario? I don’t think so, DeShawn. I think the best thing for you to do now is plead guilty and try to focus on getting right with the Lord. You can still be forgiven. You can still do some good.…”

  “I didn’t do it, Pastor Green. You gotta believe me. I couldn’t do it. I love Malcolm and Sabrina. They’ve been nothing but good to me.…”

  “I know exactly how good they were to you, DeShawn. And how good they were to Ontario, and Kenya, and anyone else who needed anything from them.”

  DeShawn remembers that Pastor Green’s voice shook as he spoke, and that he had trouble making eye contact across the hard plastic table. The pastor had been part of DeShawn’s life for more than a decade. DeShawn knew the inside of the little storefront that Glorious Gospel occupied as well as he knew his home. He knew the mop bucket and cleaning supplies tucked behind the plastic curtain in the shower stall; the art supplies in plastic bins in the storage closet; prayer books and hymnals stacked neatly atop the folding wooden shelves along the far wall of the pastor’s tiny office. He knew that on Sunday morning, the sanctuary—which Malcolm told him had previously been a men’s clothing store—would smell like coffee and cologne, until it began to smell like the sweat the worshipers leaked as they swayed and sang, rejoicing in Jesus Christ, the saving of their souls, the forgiveness of their sins.

  “What about forgiveness,” whispered DeShawn.

  “Jesus forgives those who repent,” said the pastor. “Are you ready to tell the truth?”

  “I am telling the truth!” DeShawn slammed his hand down on the table, frustration and misery rising as rage inside him. How could Pastor Green think he was capable of murdering his family? What had he ever done but smoke some weed and swipe some cash? “I was with my girl! LaToya Marshall. Ask her! Please! I’m not lying!”

  Pastor Green stood up.

  “I’m sorry, Pastor Green…”

  “You need to be a man now, DeShawn. You made your choices and now you need to live with them. Though, Lord knows I don’t know how you will. Your church family will be here for you if you repent, but there is nothing we can do for you until you do.”

  * * *

  When he got back to Brooklyn after visiting DeShawn, Pastor Green called his wife from the church office and told her he would not be home for dinner. For two hours, he sat in the creaky leather swivel chair and cried like a child. Redmond Green had been surrounded by violence his entire life. He had seen his father choke his mother into unconsciousness in the kitchen of their apartment on Throop Avenue. Had heard her head slam into walls and her arms and legs tumble over furniture behind the door of his parents’ bedroom. He had watched his brothers and cousins join gangs and attack other boys in the neighborhood for walking on the wrong side of the street, collecting bats and chains and knives from school storage rooms and empty lots and kitchen drawers, suiting up for battle like soldiers before they
could properly grow a mustache. Uprising and anger was everywhere: on the streets, in the schoolyard, on the news. Assassinations, riots, war. Redmond avoided it all as best he could. Enduring taunts about being bookish or a Goody Two-Shoes was nothing compared to the terror that the violence—its perpetrators and its victims—conjured inside him. Once, when he was nine or ten years old, he saw a man stab a woman on a street corner, just blocks from where he would later open Glorious Gospel. Other people saw it, too. He remembers the groan the woman emitted when the knife went into her stomach a second time. He remembers the blood; that it ran down her bare leg and onto the sidewalk. He remembers the way the people walking by barely paused as the man tore the life from her. And he remembers that once he got home, out of breath from the fear and the running, his mother told him to mind his own business, and that the woman probably deserved what she got.

  When he was thirteen, Redmond’s oldest brother was shot to death in Manhattan. At twenty-one, he watched his mother die of stomach cancer, coughing blood into handkerchiefs and water glasses at home because she refused to “be anybody’s science experiment” in the hospital. Yet, after all of this, Redmond Green was not prepared for his best friend’s murder. Malcolm Davis, the only son of a city bus driver and a homemaker, moved from Harlem to Crown Heights in 1970. He’d earned a scholarship to Hunter College and graduated with a degree in psychology, then found a job at the Boys & Girls Club in Flatbush. Redmond Green, who was working at the program and attending seminary at night, was the one who hired him. Malcolm was single, and at a Labor Day BBQ in Prospect Park, Redmond’s then-fiancée, Barbara, introduced him to her childhood friend, Sabrina Carlyle. Sabrina was, as Barbara put it, “a prize,” and Redmond knew he’d be in hot water if he encouraged an introduction to anyone who would break her heart or treat her wrong. But after a few months of working together, Redmond was convinced of Malcolm’s good character. And he wasn’t surprised when Malcolm and Sabrina were married less than a year after meeting. It was as close to love at first sight as he’d ever seen. Sabrina was confident and beautiful. Tall and slim and stylish, she did some modeling in high school but quit, Barbara told him, after one-too-many photographers asked her to model nude. Sabrina put herself through secretarial school and got a job with the city, hoping the stable profession would put her in a position to meet a reliable man. Because all Sabrina Carlyle had ever really wanted was a family of her own. Her father, a barber, died of a heart attack when she was eight. Her mother began drinking and didn’t stop until her liver failed when Sabrina was seventeen. She lived alone in their Flatbush apartment for most of her senior year, skirting child welfare authorities until her eighteenth birthday. The money from modeling paid the rent, and she ate lunch at school and dinner at friends’ houses. Sabrina used to tell Barbara how much she envied her noisy, full life, sharing two bedrooms with four siblings and two engaged, if harried, parents. When she wasn’t pregnant a year after their wedding, Sabrina began to worry. After two years, she went to the doctor and discovered that she had an abnormally shaped uterus and would never bear children.