Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  “Just get me your boss, please. Tell her Judge Theresa Sanchez is here.”

  The clerk disappears and Judge Sanchez turns to me.

  “The incompetence is un-fucking-believable. Please tell me you brought DeShawn’s file.”

  “I did,” I say, digging into my bag. I open the manila envelope and pull out a letter explaining that the prosecutor’s file on DeShawn’s case was not available because it was in storage in a warehouse that caught fire in 2001. The letter is signed by the Kings County Clerk, Chris Hancock, and dated April 2010.

  “I can’t wait to see how they explain this.”

  “Me, too,” I say, thinking, if nothing else, this might be a story in itself. How many other people are being told their files were destroyed?

  After another minute, the clerk returns with a woman who looks about eleven months pregnant. Her arms and legs are tiny, but her belly is shocking—it’s hard to figure how she’s upright.

  “How can I help you?” she asks.

  “My name is Judge Theresa Sanchez, I run the Brooklyn Community Court. This is Rebekah Roberts with the New York Tribune. We’d like to take a look at a case file from 1992.”

  She sits down at the computer. “Do you have a case number?”

  Judge Sanchez turns to me. I read the case number off the letter DeShawn sent me and she types it in. Click click click.

  “Your assistant here said that everything pre-1995 was destroyed in Sandy,” says Judge Sanchez.

  “Much of it was.”

  “But what’s odd,” I say, “is that the man whose file we’re looking for was told back in 2010 that his paperwork was destroyed in 2001 in a warehouse fire.”

  “Obviously it’s not possible for both things to have happened,” says Judge Sanchez.

  “Obviously,” says the clerk, not the least bit rattled by Judge Sanchez’s indignation.

  “The clerk who signed this letter was named Chris Hancock,” I say. “Is he still here?”

  The clerk shakes her head. She’s still looking at the computer, scrolling with a mouse. Finally, she speaks. “It’s possible that this file is in our basement storage.”

  “Unbelievable,” says the judge.

  “I said it’s possible,” says the woman, looking up. “We have had files destroyed in both fires and flooding. And prior to 1997, very little was computerized. This may never have been properly entered into our database, which may explain why it has been difficult to track down.”

  Judge Sanchez isn’t having it.

  “What a reasonable excuse,” she says. “I’m sure the people sitting in prison being told their files are gone will be pleased to know how difficult your job is.”

  “Would you like Andre to show you to the storage room?”

  “That would be wonderful,” says Judge Sanchez. “And can we get your name?”

  “My name is Anna Brannon.”

  I write that down.

  “Did you replace Chris Hancock?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  Andre walks us to the elevator bank and escorts us to the basement of the courthouse. We follow him down a long hallway and through an unmarked door.

  The cardboard file box with DeShawn’s case number scrawled in Sharpie on the side is smashed beneath a much heavier box. I pull it down and Judge Sanchez and I walk toward the front of the storage room to a desk that looks like it hasn’t been occupied in a decade. The files inside don’t even fill half the box. It’s kind of unreal to think that this measly pile of paper is everything the state had on DeShawn—and it was enough to take his life away.

  We start pulling files and comparing them to the paperwork DeShawn sent me. I open one unmarked manila envelope and find two things inside: a police report and a Ziploc bag. According to the typed summary on the police report, Malcolm Davis came into the 77th precinct on June 2, 1992:

  Complainant alleges that his family is the victim of vandalism, specifically the word “SNITCH” spray-painted on his front door.

  “Check this out,” I say, handing Judge Sanchez the report. As she reads, I open the Ziploc bag: inside are three envelopes. One, postmarked June 14, 1992 in Brooklyn, is addressed to Malcolm Davis at the apartment on Troy; there is no return address. The other two were not mailed, apparently. I open the postmarked envelope and unfold the piece of paper inside. Just as DeShawn described, the text is made up of letters cut out from magazines: YOUR FAMILY WILL SUFFER.

  “Look at this.”

  The judge looks up from the police report.

  “What the fuck?” She reaches for the paper, then stops. “Put that down.”

  I do.

  “We didn’t have any of this.”

  “When we talked on the phone, DeShawn said somebody was threatening his parents. He said they were getting hang-up phone calls and letters like this. But he said his original defense attorney told him the cops never found any.”

  “Well, clearly that’s not true. Jesus. Jesus! They just didn’t turn this shit over. We need to get these letters tested for fingerprints, first of all. And DNA. They might be able to find something from whoever licked the envelopes.”

  “What about the police report? You didn’t have that?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Sandra Michaels prosecuted this case,” I say, my voice low.

  “Yes, she did. Un-fucking-believable. Honestly, I wouldn’t have expected this from her. I thought she was a straight shooter.”

  “Do you think it’s enough to get the case reopened?”

  “It might be,” she says. “It should be.”

  I pull out my cell phone. “I’m gonna get pictures,” I say. “Just in case.”

  “Oh, I am not letting this shit disappear,” says Judge Sanchez, pulling out her own phone. “One of my best friends is still a prosecutor. She does sex crimes. I’ll have her send someone down. We will not leave this box until it is safe in her office.”

  “You’re sure you can trust her?”

  “Absolutely. We grew up together. She’s gonna hit the roof. Especially once she finds out I’ve got a Trib reporter with me.”

  I take photos of the first letter, the envelopes, and the police report, then follow Judge Sanchez and a clerk from her friend’s office back upstairs. Her friend, ADA Felicia Castillo, is in court, but she’s told her clerk to let us wait in her office.

  “I wonder how many other cases Sandra Michaels withheld evidence on,” I say.

  Judge Sanchez shakes her head. “They’re going to have to look back at everything. Two decades of convictions. What a shit show. This could end her career.”

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “No,” she says. “Not that. But I’m on the record saying we didn’t have any of what’s in that file. The letters and the report, I mean.”

  Felicia Castillo returns to her office at a little past noon.

  “Whose case was it?” she asks Judge Sanchez.

  “Sandra’s.”

  Felicia doesn’t even attempt to hide how the news makes her feel. She drops into her seat.

  “I don’t know what’s worse,” says Judge Sanchez, “that she withheld all this from the defense, or that this office has been telling the defendant that the files we just found in about five minutes were destroyed more than a decade ago.”

  “None of it’s good,” says Felicia. She’s staring at the box like she’s never seen one before. For a moment, no one speaks, then Felicia comes out of her trance and looks at me.

  “This meeting is off the record,” she says to me. “I have to figure out what the fuck is going on.”

  “Okay,” I say. “But I’m obviously going to want a comment from Sandra Michaels.”

  “Are you planning to run this tomorrow?”

  “Maybe,” I say. I need to talk to Mike, but my guess is he’ll want copy immediately. This morning, DeShawn’s story was just a possibly interesting feature idea that could pad Mike’s pitch list at a meeting. Now, it’s the center of a legit scoo
p on a powerful woman whom everybody in the city is already talking about. Was it just Sandra Michaels who withheld evidence? Or was that how the Kings County DA did business back then? How many DeShawns are there?

  “I’m due back in court at one,” says Felicia, looking at her watch. “I’ll have someone call you.”

  Outside the courthouse, Judge Sanchez tells me to call her if I don’t hear from the DA’s office by tomorrow.

  “Can you get in touch with DeShawn?” she asks.

  “He has to call me, I think. But I’ll try the prison and see what happens.”

  “He’s, what, forty years old now?”

  “Almost,” I say.

  “Un-fucking-believable,” she says again, raising her hand to hail a cab. “I don’t know how a guy like that doesn’t go completely insane after all this time. Maybe that’s why so many of them get religious. Let go and let God. Me? I’d wanna burn it all down.”

  * * *

  Ninety minutes later, I’m with Mike, Gary, and Larry Dunn—the paper’s longtime police reporter—in Albert Morgan’s office on the eleventh floor of the Trib building. The Trib’s leadership structure is absurdly male. There are plenty of female reporters, but almost no one making editorial decisions has a vagina. I wonder, standing there, if it’s because the boys like it that way, or if they’ve actually tried to get women on board but they’re smart enough to know what this place will do to them long-term.

  “I hear you have another scoop for us, Rebekah,” says the managing editor from behind his enormous desk.

  “I do,” I say.

  “And it doesn’t even involve Jews,” says Mike.

  I decide it is not the time to mention that Henrietta told me the man who paid her to lie was Hasidic. For one, I don’t think it’s immediately relevant to the Sandra Michaels angle of the story. But even more, that particular piece of information feels dangerous. I’ve done a lot of reporting in the haredi world in the last two years and, frankly, I’ve never come across—or even heard about—anyone cold-blooded enough to behave the way Henrietta says this man did. Not that it’s not possible. I just know how cavalier the Trib can be, and the last thing I want to do is start a rumor that incendiary based only on the word of an admitted liar who won’t go on the record.

  “Do we have a comment from Michaels on this?” asks Morgan, after I’ve briefed him on DeShawn’s case and the evidence Judge Sanchez and I found.

  “No,” I say. “I literally just came from the courthouse. I’m waiting on a call.”

  “Gary, can you spare one of your reporters?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get somebody calling defense attorneys. See if anyone else ever accused Michaels of anything like this.”

  Gary nods.

  “Tell him about the eyewitness,” says Mike.

  “She told me—off the record—that she lied.”

  Morgan raises his eyebrows. “Good work, Rebekah. Are you still freelance?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Gary, aren’t you hiring for your desk?”

  Gary avoids looking at me. “We actually just brought Jack Owens on…”

  “Who?”

  “He, um, he’s been here about six months. Columbia j-school.”

  “Hm,” says Morgan. He moves on. “So, we’ve got two parallel stories. There’s DeShawn’s case with the lying witness, and there’s the Sandra Michaels-withholding-evidence story. I want to focus on Michaels. It has implications for Kendra Yaris, and that’s what’s trending now. If she didn’t turn over evidence in this case, how many other cases did she withhold on? Is she still doing it? What else is she doing? Does the NYPD know? Are they colluding?” I start scribbling, thinking, those are questions you could spend three years trying to answer. “Write up what you have and get it to Mike. I want our first story to run tomorrow. If we can get it online earlier, even better.”

  The last time I was in this room, I was terrified. I’d made a couple really big mistakes and was pretty certain I’d lose my job. Today, I feel differently.

  “I can get some of those answers,” I say, “but it’ll take a couple days. There’s not a huge rush. No one knows I was looking into this case. The missing evidence—that’s totally exclusive. Plus, I can’t call DeShawn. He has to call me. If we could just wait until tomorrow I might be able to—”

  “No,” interrupts Morgan. “Michaels could call somebody at the Times who’s sympathetic and get her side of the story out first. This is too big to sit on. We can fill in the holes later. This story is going to get picked up, and I want every news outlet in the city to have to say, ‘as first reported by the New York Tribune.’”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  When I wake up the next morning, my article is online. It doesn’t get top billing (that goes to the cover story on a round-up of arrests after a man dressed as Cookie Monster and another dressed as Elmo got into a brawl in Times Square), but it’s number three on the site, with a red banner reading TRIBUNE EXCLUSIVE atop the headline:

  SANDRA MICHAELS ACCUSED OF WITHHOLDING EVIDENCE IN TRIPLE MURDER

  by Rebekah Roberts

  The woman many expect to be the next Brooklyn DA is accused of withholding critical evidence in the triple murder trial of DeShawn Perkins, a teen convicted of killing his foster parents and sister in 1992.

  “It’s a disgrace,” says Judge Theresa Sanchez, who was Perkins’ appeals attorney.

  Perkins was 16 years old when he was convicted of shooting Malcolm and Sabrina Davis, and 3-year-old Kenya Gregory, on July 4, 1992.

  Sandra Michaels had been with the Kings County DA’s office less than a year when she prosecuted Perkins. She won praise for putting the supposedly violent teen behind bars.

  And she may have cheated.

  Buried in a case file in the Kings County Courthouse basement, the Trib found bizarre letters sent to the victims in the months before their deaths, and evidence that family’s home had been vandalized.

  But none of this evidence was ever turned over to the teen’s defense attorneys.

  Perkins is now 38 years old, and has spent more than half his life in prison.

  “I did not kill my family,” Perkins told the Trib.

  Perkins retracted his original confession, which he says was coerced and made without an adult present. But the jury believed the witness—an admitted crack user and prostitute—who said she saw him leave the scene of the crime.

  Other than that, Sanchez says the case against him was “thin.”

  Perkins has been stalled in his quest to have his conviction overturned because the Brooklyn DA’s office told him his case file was destroyed in a 2001 fire.

  But when a Trib reporter requested the file on Wednesday, she was told it was destroyed when a Red Hook storage warehouse flooded during Super Storm Sandy in 2012.

  Neither was true.

  The file Perkins wanted was in the basement of the Kings County Courthouse—along with the missing evidence that might have freed him.

  Richard Krakowski, the spokesman for the Brooklyn DA, says the office is investigating the situation.

  Judge Sanchez, who now presides over the Brooklyn Community Court, has vowed to get the case reopened.

  “What else are they hiding?” asks Sanchez. “How many people are sitting in prison because the prosecutors lied?”

  With DA Stan Morrissey undergoing treatment for cancer, Sandra Michaels is now running the office. She is currently under pressure to indict NYPD Detective Jason Womack in the shooting death of Kendra Yaris.

  The Trib was the first to report that Womack has a history of use-of-force allegations.

  Attorney Andrew Perlstein, who represents Yaris’ family, told the Trib that he isn’t surprised the DA’s office is accused of withholding evidence in a case against a young black man.

  “Even in supposedly liberal New York City, black defendants and victims simply don’t get real justice,” he said.

  “If Kendra Yaris had been white, her killers w
ould have been indicted immediately, without a doubt.”

  Additional reporting by Jack Owens

  No one ran the quote from the Yaris family attorney by me. Apparently Jack couldn’t find anybody who had accused Sandra Michaels of tampering with evidence, so they just decided to throw in a link and a nod to the story that’s currently getting the most clicks on the site. Just as bad, Mike added that the witness against DeShawn was a drug addict and prostitute, which wasn’t necessary and will likely piss off Henrietta and make it harder to convince her to go on the record. It would be awesome to work for an editor I could trust.

  My phone rings at 9:00 A.M.

  “This is Rebakah,” I say.

  “Hold for Mike.”

  I hold.

  Mike comes on. “Sandra Michaels is doing really well on the site. We need a follow for tomorrow. Have you heard from the kid?”

  “DeShawn? No. Hopefully he’s not pissed we ran the story without checking with him.”

  “Try to get in touch,” says Mike, ignoring my concern. “Call the prison. And go down to the courthouse to see if you can corner Michaels. We need a comment from her. Larry’s gonna look into the precinct, see if there were shenanigans there around the same time. Call me back at noon so I can give an update at the meeting.”

  “You made some changes in the Michaels story,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Henrietta isn’t going to trust me if I called her a crackhead in the paper.”

  “You said she was a crackhead.”

  “I said it but I didn’t write it. Can you ask me next time before you make changes like that? Please?”

  “I can’t run every edit by you, Rebekah.”

  “I’m not asking you to run every edit by me.”

  “Fine. Call me at noon.”

  I’m pretty sure I just made the situation worse. I call the DA’s spokesperson and leave a message requesting an interview with Sandra Michaels. Just after I click off, my phone rings with a blocked number.

  An automated voice says, “You have a call from the Coxsackie Correctional Facility. Will you accept the charges?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Rebekah?”

  “DeShawn?”