Wrongful Conviction

by Rachel Sinclair

  I reached over to her hand, putting my hand on top of hers. "Listen, I don't pretend to be able to answer those questions for you. I can tell you that I feel that your son does have a chance to get out of prison. I saw enough mistakes in the transcript that I do think that if I do a stellar job with this appellate case, he has a good chance to walk free. If I can get his conviction overturned, he might get another trial. I'm also trying to find the person who really did this, so that maybe if Jamel does have another trial, he’ll be acquitted. If he has another trial, I'll be his attorney and I won’t make the same kind of mistakes that his other attorney did.”

  "I don't believe you,” Aisha said. “I'm so sorry. I don't want to tell you that. But I talked to some friends of mine, and they have sons that are also imprisoned, and they all told me that they’ve been trying to get their sons out of prison, and they can't. They have never actually had an appeal, because they can't afford a lawyer, but their sons have tried to write their own appeals behind bars. Nobody has the money for legal representation around these parts. I mean, when Jamel told me that you’re taking his case for free, I just couldn't believe it. I just hope that you're not wasting your time. You seem like such a nice man.”

  "I am a nice man. But, more than that, I really believe in your son's case. And, to be honest with you, it just didn't make sense to me. It didn’t make sense that a kid like that would be able to scale such high walls to get to this Felicity person.”

  She nodded her head. "I know. That didn’t make sense to me either, but I was sitting there at the trial the whole time. I missed a lot of work to attend his trial, because the trial went on for weeks. Weeks that I had to take off work and did not get paid. I was about to be evicted from my apartment, and I did lose my car. I have to ride the bus everywhere now, but it was worth it to make sure that my son knew that I was right behind him the entire way. But you're right, nothing in this case made sense to me either.”

  I looked at her and saw in her face that she was starting to feel the essence of hope. Her eyes were brighter than when I first met her – when she answered the door, there wasn’t a light behind her brown eyes. Now, I saw that light, although it was only a flicker. Her posture was just a tad bit straighter. She looked me in the eye, whereas, when she first answered the door to let me in, she was looking down at my shoes.

  I knew that I could not let this woman down.

  I swallowed hard. “Ms. Jackson,” I began.

  She waved her hand at me dismissively. “Aisha, please,” she said with a big smile on her face. I noticed that her smile was genuine and beautiful – her teeth were perfectly straight and her entire face lit up when she smiled.

  “Aisha, I really don’t want you to think that this is a slam-dunk. It’s anything but. Very few cases get overturned – only about 12% of all cases on appeal are reversed in some way. It’s going to be a long road. Even if the appellate court reverses, it will probably remand it back to the trial court, which means that the trial court will get another crack at the case. That means that the entire thing is going to start all over again, with the same witnesses and the same judge and all of that. A different jury, of course, and that just might make all the difference.”

  Aisha nodded her head. “If there’s a different jury, does that mean that at least one black person is going to be on it?”

  I blinked my eyes. For some odd reason, I wasn’t aware that there wasn’t a single black juror on this case. I internally kicked myself. That was the first thing that I should have looked at. Instead, I was just studying the trial transcripts, looking for any kind of prejudicial errors and looking at how poorly the attorney did with the case.

  I suddenly felt my breath get labored. I knew that a United States Supreme Court case had just come down, settling this very question. In that United States Supreme Court case, Flowers v. Mississippi, the Court applied the Batson test. Batson v. Kentucky established in 1986 that a state may not use racially discriminatory reasons for peremptory challenges to jurors. In Flowers, the Supreme Court decided that all the black potential jurors had been eliminated by the prosecutor because of discriminatory intent. I was going to have to review that case more closely, because I had just skimmed it, but I remembered that the Court looked at the fact that the potential black jurors had been stricken after having been asked many more questions than was asked of the white jurors, and that one black juror, in particular, had been stricken for reasons that other white jurors were not. I believe that the prosecutor made the excuse that the black juror worked at Wal-Mart, where the defendant’s father also worked, and that she knew several defense witnesses. Other white jurors also knew people in the case, but they were not stricken by the state.

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “Yes, if there is a new trial, there will be other black people on the jury.” I shook my head as I realized that I might not succeed on a Flower/Batson argument if the trial attorney, Jim Stack, did not object to there not being any black jurors. I knew that he probably didn’t object, which meant that the issue would not have been preserved. Still, I was going to have to request the voir dire and see exactly why it was that no black jurors were impaneled on the case.

  “That’s good,” Aisha said with a shake of her head. “Oh, lord, I couldn’t believe that no black folk managed to get on that jury. I don’t know what that idiot attorney was thinking, letting the prosecutor get away with striking every single person of color.”

  “Every person of color was stricken?”

  “Yeah, every one. There not only wasn’t a black person on the jury, there wasn’t a Hispanic or Asian or any kind of brown person, either. They were all lily white. Lily white and looking for blood from a poor black kid.”

  Well, that was interesting. I knew that in the Batson case and the Flowers case, the issue was that no African-Americans were on the jury. But in this case, everybody on the jury was white. Yes, apparently the attorney didn’t object, but, as far as I was concerned, that was one more leg on which my ineffective assistance of counsel claim could stand.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about the case?” I asked her. “Anything that stood out to you at all?”

  Aisha looked at the ceiling and then looked back at me. “No, I don’t really know what to say. I mean, I was there the whole way, and I couldn’t believe the things that were being allowed in by that idiot Jim Stack. But you can probably look at the trial transcripts and all that and you can see how bad he was.”

  It certainly was interesting that the jury was all-white. But was I going to be able to make any kind of hay with that fact? I was simply going to have to try. Objection or no objection for the record, I was going to have to try.

  I looked over at Aisha and saw that she was hanging her head again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I started to have some hope that you can save my boy, but now, I just don’t know. I don’t want to ever start to think that Jamel is going to be out of prison, because hope is a killing thing. It’s more killing than despair, if you want to know the truth. With despair, you know it. It’s a feeling that you’re familiar with. You make your terms with it, and you go on with your life. But if you got hope…well, if you got hope, then you suddenly have something to lose. You lose that light, that little bitty light that you allow into your bedroom at night. You start to depend on that light, and when it goes out, and everything is dark again, it’s…”

  Her voice trailed off and then she looked out the window again. The black and white cat, apparently sensing her mistress’ sudden mood shift, decided to come over and comfort her. The enormous feline leaped down from the kitty tower onto the floor and then jumped up on Aisha’s lap. It started to purr and rub her face on Aisha’s arm, demanding that Aisha pet her. Aisha absently started to stroke the cat, her face a faraway mask. Just like she had said, she dared not think that anything would come of this appeal. There would be nothing more devastating, I would imagine, than for her to believe and hope that she would see her son again in her home, that Jamel wo
uld one day be a free man, only to realize that the appeal didn’t do any good. I knew that the statistic of 12% was running through her head. It had to have been. The odds were against us, full stop, and both of us knew it.

  “Well,” she finally said. “I have to get ready for work. I have my Wal-Mart shift in a half hour, and I’m going to be late as it is. Especially if the bus runs late, which it often does.”

  “Please, I’m the reason why you’re running late. I would like to give you a ride to work.”

  “No, I couldn’t put you out like that,” she said.

  “You’re not putting me out,” I said. “Please, I would like to do that for you.”

  “Well, if you’re sure-“

  “I’m sure.”

  The smile was back. But, unlike before, I could see the wariness behind the smile. The pain. The sleepless nights and the loneliness. The unbearable feeling that she had hopes for her son. Hopes and dreams that he would get married, give her grand-babies, have a good career and a home of his own. The same hopes that any mother would have for her child. All those hopes were gone. Dashed by an incompetent attorney and an uncaring court.

  Of course, she had been beaten down by life, long before her son was convicted for raping Felicity. It wasn’t just the rape at the age of 15, and having her son through that rape. It was so many other injustices. Each aggression that was shown towards her in her life formed the cracks on her 33 year old face, which made her seem older than her years.

  She disappeared into the bedroom, and the black and white cat decided to grace me with its presence. I pet it absently while it purred and made bread on my lap. I looked at the clock and knew that there wasn’t much time for me to get Aisha to work on time. What would happen if she was late? Would she get a demerit? Would she be fired? What?

  She came back out in a few minutes, dressed in a blue Wal-Mart frock with a white shirt underneath and khaki pants. “Thank you again for taking me to my job,” she said. “I got a supervisor, she don’t like it when folks are late. I had to take so much time off for Jamel’s trial, I don’t think that I have much goodwill left at that store. You really saved me.”

  I smiled and put my arm around her instinctively. “It’s my pleasure,” I said.

  The two of us drove to her store, which was only about 10 minutes away, and Aisha looked at her watch before getting out of the car. “Thank you very much, Christian,” she said. “I know, I know, I shouldn’t have hope. Hope is for other people. But God bless you anyway.”

  She kissed me on the cheek and then got out of the car and went into the store.

  My heart was heavy as I drove away from her Wal-Mart. What had I gotten myself into? I bonded with this woman. I felt her pain in my heart.

  If I lost this case, I would be that much more devastated now.

  Chapter 8

  Felicity

  Felicity McDaniel looked out her window warily. She had been getting death threats lately, and she knew that her bodyguard might not be able to save her the next time. She took a deep breath, knowing that she was really the only person who kept her secret.

  She knew who had raped her. She knew it, and she couldn’t tell a soul about who did it. If she did, she knew that she would be a dead woman.

  It was hard for her, sitting at the trial for Jamel Jackson, knowing that the poor kid was innocent. She wanted, so many times, to shout out loud to the judge that he was presiding over the wrong case. She wanted to shake the jury, brain the lame defense attorney who was drunk on the job. Nobody knew that he was drunk, but Felicity did. She had grown up around enough alcoholics to know the signs. The too-long bathroom breaks that that lame Jim Stack took, the “water bottle” that he drank out of that Felicity knew was filled with straight vodka, the red face and bulbous nose on the man, the sweet smell on his breath that was masked by his cinnamon gum. Oh, he was a good one, though. He didn’t stumble over his words, his eyes weren’t bloodshot and his gait was sure. She was an expert on the tell-tale signs, though, because her father was a drunk and he did all the same things that this Jim Stack did during the trial.

  Yet, she was afraid to go to the judge with her suspicions about Jim. She was afraid to do anything that would derail the proceedings, because she was warned that if she did, she would be a dead woman.

  And she knew for a fact that the real rapist would kill her. He was an enormous man, powerful and angry all the time.

  She was sick, absolutely sick to her stomach when that poor Jamel was convicted. She wanted to shake that damn Jim Stack, pummel her fists into his skull and force him to actually give that kid a decent defense. She just couldn’t believe that he didn’t do anything for that kid at all. Of course, her rapist was happy when Jamel was convicted for what he did. He was thrilled, because it meant that he got away with it.

  She touched her face where she could feel the faintest of scars. It wasn’t really there anymore, for she had had the best plastic surgeon in the world work on her. She didn’t really have a choice in the matter when she was unconscious and the plastic surgeons were working on her, but, when she finally came-to, she knew that she had to have Dr. Matagari finish the job. He was known to be the best. He had worked on friends of hers in the industry, and they always were very happy with his work. They all said that he made them look refreshed, as opposed to plastic, and he never drastically changed a person’s face, like what had happened to Kenny Rogers under the knife.

  The fact that she looked like herself again after what that monster had done to her was a cold comfort. She had seen pictures of what she had looked like in the hospital when she was brought in, before the swelling had gone down enough that the doctors could work their magic, and she was still appalled at what she had seen in those pictures. One of her eyes was completely closed with a huge lump of swelling over it. She looked like Rocky Balboa after he went 10 rounds with Apollo Creed and his trainer had to slit his eye open with a razor. Her other eye was bruised and was a deep black, while her mouth was slit so that she looked like The Joker. Her entire face was swollen, for that matter. In looking at the pictures, she was surprised that she fared as well as she did.

  Yes, she looked like herself again, whatever that meant. She never felt that she was attractive, even though everybody else always told her how beautiful she was. She thought that she was more interesting-looking than anything else. Her eyes were too close together, her nose was a tad too long, her lips were just a smidgen too wide. She was too gangly, too bony, too tall. Of course, the fact that she didn’t have cookie-cutter looks helped her immensely when she first started modeling. She didn’t even have to go to the modeling cattle calls that other girls did – a scout found her one day when she was sitting outside a coffee shop with her dog. The scout decided that she was the future face of Cover Girl, and, before she knew it, she had made a household name for herself in the magazines. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition cover soon followed, and, after that, came the movies.

  She surprised herself about how much she enjoyed making movies. She figured that she would hate it, much like she hated all the time that was spent on hair and makeup before a photo shoot. Nothing drove her more crazy than to have to just sit there while this person blew out her frizzy hair so that it was smooth as silk, while that person fussed over her with various brushes and wands. She would do a shoot, then have to sit in that damned chair for another three hours for a different shoot. It was all the ninth circle of hell to her, but making movies, that was a different thing. She was a natural at it, and, before she knew it, she was being nominated for Emmys for her work on various Netflix movies. She even made feature films, mainly indies, because she found the independent movie scripts to be just so much more fulfilling than the big studios, but she also made quite a few big studio films.

  And, if it weren’t for the monster who attacked her, she would have to say that she had lived a charmed life. Everything fell into her lap. She didn’t have to work for much of anything. Her modeling career, her acting
career, all of it.

  But what had angered the monster, she didn’t dare speak his name, even to herself, because speaking his name, even in her head, somehow conjured him up for her, and terrified her, so she simply had to refer to him as “the monster,” was that she was secretly a lesbian. She had had men over to her house, mainly because she wanted her neighbors to think that she was some kind of a loose woman with the men, and they would leave her alone, but she really preferred women. And the monster couldn’t handle that one.

  “You like women?” he had asked when he persisted in asking her out on a date, time and again.

  “Yes, I do,” she had simply said. “Trust me, when I reject you, it’s nothing personal. I mean, look at you. You’re gorgeous. Anybody would like to go out with you. Anybody who’s into men, that is, which I’m not. So-“

  At that, he slapped her for the first time.

  "Don't lie to me, bitch. I know that you see a lot of guys over here. You think I'm stupid? I'm not stupid, I know for a fact that you have guys over here all the time, you fucking whore.”

  Felicity was terrified of him, from that point on. But, no matter what she did, she just could not get rid of him. Nothing worked to deter him. She took out a restraining order against him, but that didn't work, because he was too well-connected. He would literally violate a restraining order and come to her house, and nobody did a thing about it, because of who he was. He was never going to get arrested for anything he did. Once Felicity found out exactly what kind of monster he was, what he'd been doing over his life, all the women that he had raped, and left for dead, and he had never been arrested for any of it – Felicity knew who she was dealing with. He was like the Mercury man in the Terminator movie - no matter what people tried to do to him, he always reconstituted himself and came charging right back.