Wrongful Conviction

by Rachel Sinclair

  Of course, she was a highly regarded actress, so she figured that maybe she could try to use her power in the industry to make sure that he left her alone. Felicity was stunned to find out that her power and prestige in the industry meant absolutely nothing. Nobody was going to protect her, because again, he was just too important.

  Or, as one studio head had put it to her – "you'll just have to put up with it. Sorry, nobody is going to do anything about him. He’s been a problem for years, and he’s going to continue to be a problem. You’re just going to have to find a way to deal with it. Unless, of course, you want to commit professional suicide. If that's your bag, then be my guest. Just don't ever say that my fingerprints are on any of it.”

  "Thanks a lot, Alex ," Felicity said to the studio head whom she had spoken with about the monster. "I knew you would be on my side.”

  He just shrugged his shoulders. "I'm on the side of keeping my job. Period, end of story. And if you cross that guy, you’ll be on the street. Again, if that's your bag, I say go for it. As for me, I'm not going to be on the street with you. You can go ahead and ask around, ask anybody you want to help you. Nobody will.”

  So, the upshot was that Felicity had to put up with the monster constantly coming over to her home, unannounced, and threatening her. Most of the time, he did leave without laying a hand on her. But there were other times when she had to have sex with him, because it was either that, or he was going to rape her. She figured out that actually pretending that she was into him was one good way of actually placating him just a little bit, just enough that he would not harm her physically. She figured that that was the lesser of the two evils – either have sex with him, or have him beat and rape her, if she refused.

  It was excruciating for her to do that, however. It was excruciating for her not just because she couldn't stand the sight of him, even though he was extremely handsome. Classically handsome, tall and broad and built, with big dark eyes, black hair, chiseled face, and huge dimples. And a huge something else, too, which actually was not a good thing in her case, because she didn't want that in the first place. He usually took it from her when she was not wet for him, so the pain was excruciating.

  Despite the fact that he was a walking Calvin Klein model, with an eight pack, she could not stand the sight of him. It was like when she always read about how Satan would appear when he came to the earth - he would appear as a beautiful angel, because that's what he was up in heaven. He wouldn't have horns, or a tail, he would not be ugly, or fulfill any of the stereotypes that Hollywood foisted upon the unsuspecting public. No, when Satan finally appeared to the world, he would appear just like this monster does.

  For a while, Felicity actually was convinced that he was Satan. He just seemed to be so invincible, so impenetrable. It seemed to Felicity that there was nothing that was going to bring him down.

  Unfortunately, because of what happened to her, with him beating her and leaving her for dead, raping her like that, Felicity had been unable to work. She felt that that was career suicide anyways, because if you don't work steadily, people forget about you. That was the ironic thing about this entire ordeal – she didn't want to make any waves against him while he was harassing her, coming over and beating her, and raping her, so she took the studio head’s advice, and did not go public with what he was doing. Now she wished that she had done that, even if it meant certain death for her. She should have been brave enough to go ahead and tell the world what she knew about him, instead of letting poor Jamel go to prison for what this man did. If she would've just had a bit of courage, none of that would've happened. Not that she thought the monster would ever go behind bars, for she didn't dare hope for that. But, at least, there would be the chance that he would be publicly humiliated for what he was doing, not to mention what he had done to women over the years.

  But now, it was too late. She started to obsessively find out what it would take to win an appeal when a kid is duly convicted like Jamel was in a court of law. She realized that the odds were extremely long that Jamel would ever see the outside of the prison wall, only 12%, and, even so, it didn't matter that he was factually innocent. She had her chance to testify in court against the monster, and on behalf of poor Jamel, but she didn't do it when she had the chance. So now, it was what it was. One life was devastated, well, no, that wasn’t necessarily true. It wasn't just Jamel's life that had been devastated, but the lives of everybody around him, everybody who cared about him. It's never just one life that is devastated when something like this happens. The blast radius can go for miles. But she had to try not to think about that. If she really got down in the weeds and thought about all the people who were hurt by what happened to her at the hands of the monster, she would never be able to sleep again.

  Not that she was sleeping now.

  Chapter 9

  Christian

  Once I found out from Aisha that there were no blacks or people of color on the jury against Jamel, I knew that I had to go and speak with Jim Stack. So I made an appointment with him. He was no longer at the public defender's office, but was in private practice, no doubt taking people's money, and not delivering anything to them. After all, he didn't deliver anything to Jamel - why would he start being a good attorney now?

  When I made an appointment to see him, he knew exactly what I wanted from him. Obviously, because I was sure that he knew about the appeal. I expected him to be defensive when I called him, and to shut me down, but he was not.

  "I have an opening tomorrow at two on my schedule, you can come to my office then.”

  So I found myself going to his office in Studio City. He actually had a storefront, and, as I looked in the window at his suite, I realized that he probably was not doing very well for himself. I walked in, and there was a metal desk that was in the middle of the room, and a couple of threadbare couches in the waiting area. Other than that, there was not really a whole lot in this office. I looked to my right, and I saw that Jim was talking on the phone in his small office, and, from the other office just down the hall – it seemed that this suite only had two offices – I could hear somebody screaming at the top of his lungs at his computer. He was cussing at it, saying every word he knew at the computer, as if the computer was going to start working magically because of his words. While I definitely could relate to his frustrations, as anybody who owns a computer could relate, I definitely could not relate to screaming and yelling at the top of my lungs at an inanimate object.

  "God damn you mother fucking piece of shit,” the other attorney down the hall was screaming. "I am so tired of this goddamn piece of crap computer. I swear to God, I'm going to throw it out the window at any second.”

  I smiled a little as I flipped through the magazines waiting for Jim to finish his conversation. He finally did, and then came out to the waiting room, and shook my hand.

  "Hi, I'm Jim Stack. I guess that you are Christian, and you're doing the appeal for Jamel Jackson?" He was smiling, and his body language was open. As was the collar of his shirt, which was a short-sleeve button-down with a collar that buttoned to the shirt. I imagined that he probably got it at Walmart.

  At least, that was kind of my impression. His shirt definitely did not look expensive, nor did it look professional. Neither did his polyester brown pants, nor his scuffed-up leather shoes. He was holding a cup of coffee when he came out of the office, and his eyes were bloodshot. He led me into his tiny, cramped office, where I could see that, in addition to the metal desk, a couple of threadbare chairs, and a Formica bookshelf, which he probably put together from IKEA, there was also a small cot in there. He motioned to the cot, and looked embarrassed about it. "This is just temporary, I'm looking for a place to land. My wife, she finally kicked me out.”

  I got a whiff of his coffee cup, and I understood exactly why his wife probably kicked him out. The coffee was definitely laced with some kind of alcohol - bourbon, from the smell of it. My stomach started to turn over just a little bit, just because I cou
ld not imagine drinking before noon. It was presently 10:30 in the morning. Of course, it was 5 o'clock somewhere, but I did not imagine that that would be a good excuse for this guy to be drinking at this hour.

  I sat down, and so did he. He clasped his hands in front of him, as he looked at me with his bloodshot eyes. "What can I do for you?”

  "Well, as you no doubt are aware, I have taken the case of Jamel Jackson's appeal from his criminal conviction. I just wanted to warn you, at the present moment, I'm going to be relying on an ineffective assistance of counsel defense. I just wanted to give you a heads-up about that. I also wanted to ask you, point-blank, why it was that you did such a poor job on this kid's case.”

  He nodded his head, as if he knew that this appeal was going to be coming down the pike at some point.

  "What can I say, I was having personal issues at that time. I was drinking all through the trial, and I didn't know what I was doing during it, because, I'll be honest with you, half the time I did not even know where I was. So, go ahead, hit me with the points that you think that I did wrong. I'm sure I probably did a lot of wrong, because I'll be the first to admit that I dropped the ball on that kid's case. If it helps you at all, I'll have you know that I am no longer working for the public defender's office, and the reason why am no longer working for them is because of Jamel's case.

  I'm sure that you think that I'm a fuck up. A wastoid. And, I'm not going to argue the point about that, because I am those things. But I wasn't always like that. I wasn't always like that at all. I mean, I always knew that alcoholism was in my genes. My father and my mother both were a couple of drunks, and so were their parents. So, you might say that I've come from a long line of alcoholics. But I always tried very hard to not become like them. I didn't take a drink until I was 30 years old.”

  I somehow couldn’t believe that. This guy seemed like the sort who started drinking at the age of 11 and just never stopped.

  “Oh, I know about you,” he continued. “When you called me, I did a little background check on you. I found out that you used to work for a white shoe firm in San Diego, making the big bucks. Well, I wanted you to know that I, too, worked for a white shoe firm here in Los Angeles, before, well, before I became like this. I was working for a big entertainment firm. We had clients that you would not believe. Big celebrities, models, actors and actresses, directors, studio heads, you name it, we represented them. Sports stars, too. I was making the big bucks too. But, I started drinking, and then I started using, and I lost all my money in the Las Vegas casinos. Turns out that it's true what they say about an addict – if you have an addictive personality, you're going to be addicted to a lot of different things. And once I decided to let the devil in, it was Katie bar the door. I took a sip of wine at the celebration that the partners had for landing an enormous account of a very prominent actress. Like, if I told you who it was, you would be astounded. A-list does not even cover what this actress is to this town. She’s a legend, and our firm landed her. And I decided at that point, that I had never taken a drink in my entire life, and everybody was drinking champagne, and I did not want to have a sip of even that. But, later on that night, I did have a glass of wine. And, it turned something on inside of me, I don't know, I guess it was maybe a latent desire, but it was very strong. And, after that first glass of wine, I lost myself in the bottle.”

  A sad story, one that I had heard many times before. While I felt for this guy, I was still angry that he messed up Jamel’s case so completely.

  “That's when I also started to use cocaine, mainly because I had to when I appeared in court,” he said. “I would be so drunk that I could barely stand up, so I needed to do some lines just to perk me back up. Just to make me alert in court. The gambling came later. That, too, was something that must've always been inside me, that demon that wanted to go to Las Vegas and could never stay away from any of the tables. I was drinking, and using, but the partners in my firm did not know that at that point, so all of us took a trip to Vegas. It was another celebratory thing, and the senior partner was paying for everything that weekend. And, I’d try to stay away from the casinos, because I just knew that if I did not stay away that I would get lost at the tables just like I got lost in the bottle. But, the siren song was just too strong, and I just went down to play some slots. Nobody saw me for the entire weekend, because I could not leave the casinos. And, I came back every single weekend. I told myself that I was only trying to win back the money that I lost, and that if I ever could just get to the point where I was in the black, I would just walk away.”

  Again, that was a familiar story that people always told themselves. Just win back everything I’ve lost, so that I at least break even, then I’ll walk away. At some point, the law of sunk costs kicks in, and nobody can walk away, because it was always virtually impossible to break even. That was the mind of a gambling addict, and, apparently, that was the mind of Jim as well.

  “But of course, that did not happen,” Jim said. “I didn’t walk away after I won big enough to cover my previous losses. I did win a big jackpot, and, at that point, that jackpot was enough to cover my previous gambling expenses and a little more. But all that Jackpot did for me was make me try to hit it again, and again, and again. And then I started playing blackjack, poker, craps, Baccarat, you name it. And I wasn't very good at any of it. It did not help that I was drinking and using while I was doing all of this. But, suffice to say that six months later, I had a nest egg that was completely gone. $500,000, gone, in just six months. So, I started embezzling from the firm, lost my license to practice law when the partners found out about it and turned me in, and then, when I got my license back, it was only suspended, I was not disbarred, I got a job with the public defender's office. I was grateful for that job, even though it was a huge step down for me income-wise and prestige -wise.”

  I was taken aback a little bit by how much this guy was willing to admit to me about his life. I knew that he was just trying to make excuses as to why it was he did such a poor job on Jamel's case. And I didn't really know where he was going with any of it, considering he was still drinking. It wasn’t like he could say to me that he did all this, and now here he was, whole and well, because that was not the case. He definitely was neither whole nor well. Still, I decided just to go ahead and let him tell me the rest of it.

  "So, I was hit with this murder case, and I wasn’t gambling anymore, because I was going to gambling anonymous, but I was still drinking. By that time, however, I was able to cover it up a little bit. You know, when you drink enough, you start to be able to handle your liquor, in a way. I mean, you can still get messed up, so messed up that you don't know what you're doing, but you can at least modify your behavior so that nobody knows how wasted you really are. And that's the point that I got to in Jamel's case. I got to the point where I was drinking, getting loaded every single day, but nobody was ever the wiser about it.”

  I wondered about that. If he was drinking that much, why would the judge put up with it? Apparently, however, he was able to cover it up enough that maybe the judge didn’t realize what was happening.

  “I know that I didn't do a good job with his case. Like I said, I was having a lot of personal problems during this time, too. A lot of stuff was coming up for me, because my dad died, right before this trial began. And, when he died, it was like the floodgate had opened. I was just dealing with a lot of grief about that, about how I could never make amends with him again. I mean, we weren’t speaking when he died, and we hadn’t been speaking for years. I blamed him for my mother's death, years ago, because she died of cirrhosis of the liver, and I always thought that he was the one that got her drinking. And, I just blamed him for being a shitty father. Which he definitely was. I blamed him for my drinking problem, my drug problem, my gambling problem. I blamed him for all of that, because that's what I grew up around. That's all I knew.”

  So, it was the perfect storm. A drunk gets hit with a tragedy, right before trial began. No
wonder he was such a mess. That didn’t excuse it, but I knew that it would be helpful to me when I asked for my evidentiary hearing on the issue of ineffective assistance of counsel.

  “And, well, the last thing I wanted to do was try a case, let alone a murder case, but that's what I had to do,” he continued on. “I phoned it in, I'll admit it. I not only phoned it in, but I barely could stay on my feet at all during the trial. So, that's the reason why I did not put on any evidence on his behalf, and that's the reason why I just let the prosecutor strike every single person of color off the jury - I did not want to argue with the prosecutor about his peremptory strikes. I did not have the energy to go to the court and tell them that those peremptory strikes were not appropriate, to say the least. I just went ahead and let him strike everybody of color off the jury. And yes, I knew, looking back, that there was quite a bit of evidence that the prosecutor got in that should not have ever come in. And, I did not challenge the things that did come in. I never made the argument that a small boy like Jamel couldn’t have gotten on Felicity’s grounds without some help. If I was any kind of an attorney I would have brought in pictures of the high stone wall that led to her house, and the stone wall that led to her pool area, and evidence that the pool area was supposed to have been locked with a combination lock that Jamel could not have possibly have known. I just let the prosecutor get away with the argument that Jamel just came off the street, and just went back there and raped her and left her for dead, and then called 911.”

  “Yeah, that never did make sense to me,” I said. “If he was the one who actually raped her, why would he also be the one to call the ambulance, and wait there with her?"

  "That did not make sense to me, but somehow, the prosecutor was able to explain that away,” he said. “He explained to the jury that the theory was that Jamel raped her and then called the ambulance, because he was concerned that she was going to die, and if she died, he would be charged with murder on top of the rape charge, so he knew he had to call the ambulance right away. Now, they never explained how it was that he would've been caught if he fled the scene. That was always a hole in the entire case, and I did not even bother to plug it in.”