Presumption of Guilt

by Marti Green

  There was only one hotel within walking distance of the court, and the three checked into their rooms, then met in the lobby for dinner. The evening was pleasant, and so they walked the few blocks to the restaurant suggested to them by the desk clerk.

  Dani knew that the next day’s argument was crucial. If the appellate court didn’t grant a new trial, it would be over. Molly would remain behind bars until she was old enough to collect social security. Only she wouldn’t collect—she’d never worked and so never contributed to the fund. She’d never had a chance to finish school, start a career, raise her daughter.

  Bruce had warned Dani when he hired her that she needed to keep her emotions out of the job. “Don’t get drawn into your client’s plight,” he’d told her. It was especially so with clients on death row. If she’d established an emotional connection with a death-row client, and if HIPP wasn’t successful in freeing the client, attending the execution could take an unbearable psychic toll. “And then you’ll end up leaving HIPP, because it would just become too painful,” Bruce had told her. He was right, of course. And, by and large, Dani had succeeded at maintaining a professional posture. But not always. And not with Molly Singer.

  The moment Donna Garmond told her Molly had a daughter, she knew she’d fail miserably at keeping her feelings at bay. Her own maternal instincts shuddered at the thought of losing a child along with her freedom, a torment she knew would be made a thousandfold worse if her incarceration were wrongful. Tomorrow, though, she’d have to keep those emotions in check. When she stood to argue on Molly’s behalf, she’d remain focused and in control. The facts and the law. Win or lose, that’s all that mattered.

  The restaurant was only half full, and they were seated immediately. Tommy and Melanie ordered cocktails, but Dani never drank before an argument. She needed to get a good night’s sleep, and alcohol disrupted that. The food was better than expected, but they didn’t linger over it. They ate quickly and walked back to the hotel. When they reached the lobby, Melanie asked, “Do you want me to pepper you with some more questions?”

  “No, I’m going to turn in.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  Dani nodded, although the truth was, she’d felt queasy since finishing dinner. She said good night, then went up to her room while Melanie and Tommy stayed downstairs in the bar.

  As soon as she unlocked the door and stepped inside, a wave of nausea overtook her and she rushed to the bathroom, threw open the toilet seat cover, and deposited her meal inside the bowl. Finished, she stood up, rinsed her mouth and looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was drained of color, and beads of perspiration dotted her forehead. “This can’t be,” she muttered.

  She undressed and put on her pajamas, then got into bed with her notes for tomorrow’s oral argument, fervently hoping she wouldn’t be too sick to deliver it.

  The ringing of the telephone woke Dani the next morning. She picked up the receiver and heard a digital voice announce that it was her wake-up call. She glanced at the bedside clock, saw it was seven thirty, and groaned. She’d been up much of the night heaving into the toilet bowl, finally falling asleep after three a.m.

  She dragged herself out of bed, brushed her teeth, then stepped into the shower, making the water as hot as she could tolerate. She quickly dressed, then rode the elevator to the ground floor. Melanie and Tommy were already in the hotel coffee shop when she walked in.

  “You don’t look so good,” Melanie said when she saw her.

  “I think I had food poisoning last night. I didn’t get much sleep.”

  “Are you up for the oral argument?”

  That was the question Dani had wrestled with ever since she had awoken. Melanie had been lead on cases before, but always those where DNA evidence was in play. She knew the argument, though—she’d worked closely with Dani on the brief and had prepped her with questions. And, she was smart and quick on her feet. Still, today was crucial if they had any hope of freeing Molly.

  “I’m not sure. How would you feel about doing it?”

  Melanie straightened her back. “I can handle it. I know the points we have to make.”

  “Okay, let’s see how I feel when we get to the court.”

  Finished with breakfast—just hot tea for Dani—they walked over to the courtroom. Before going in, Dani said, “I think you’re going to have to handle it, Melanie. I’m still feeling shaky.”

  “Sure,” Melanie said, and they walked inside. Eric Murdoch was already seated, and he nodded to them. Slowly, the room filled with attorneys scheduled to argue their cases that morning. At nine thirty promptly, the door to the back rooms opened, and five justices entered the courtroom and took their seats. Dressed in the traditional robes, they looked like a sea of black, indistinguishable from each other, despite the fact that the chief judge was a woman. With her dark hair pulled back in a severe bun, she could have passed for one of her male colleagues.

  The first case was called, and the attorneys for both sides took their seats in front. It was a “hot” bench, the justices showering the attorneys with questions from the outset. When their fifteen minutes apiece were up, the lawyers left the courtroom, and Dani, Melanie, and Eric Murdoch moved to the front. The bailiff called their case, and Melanie stood up and moved to the lectern.

  The chief judge, sitting in the center, nodded for Melanie to proceed.

  “Your Honors, may it please the court, my name is Melanie Quinn, and I represent Molly Singer. Ms. Singer was convicted twelve years ago—”

  “Ms. Singer confessed to the murders of her parents, isn’t that so?” the chief judge asked.

  “Yes, but she quickly recanted. And there was no forensic evidence which tied her to the crime. Based upon newly discovered evidence, a 440 hearing was held. The defendants only had to show a probability that the new evidence would lead to a more favorable verdict. In this case—”

  Another judge interrupted. “Assuming that your evidence is sufficient to show that Mr. Singer had been involved in a crime, why would that necessarily lead to a different verdict?”

  “Because he wasn’t alone in committing that crime. And we introduced evidence that he had considered coming forward about the crime. Certainly a juror could conclude that he was killed to silence him.”

  “Isn’t that speculative?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. It’s always speculative. One can’t know with certainty how a jury will respond. But the court must look at what a reasonable person would do, and a reasonable person would have to consider the possibility that there was a motive for killing the Singers that was far more plausible than the one conjured up by the prosecution for Molly.”

  As Dani listened to Melanie’s responses, she felt more and more comfortable that she’d made the right decision to let her handle it. She still felt out of sorts and hoped her rumbling stomach settled down soon.

  “I have a more serious concern,” said another judge. “Why couldn’t the defendant have discovered this evidence at the time of her trial? It seems to me nothing has changed since then. The same steps she took now to uncover the fraud could have been taken then.”

  Melanie hesitated. Dani knew they hadn’t prepared for this question, since the trial judge accepted that it couldn’t have been discovered before. Years of standing before a row of judges had prepared her to field the unexpected questions, but Melanie was relatively inexperienced at this.

  “Because, uh, because they had no reason at that time to suspect there had been wrongdoing in connection with the jail. The state had done an audit and said everything was in order.”

  Good girl, Dani thought.

  The judges peppered Melanie with a few more questions, which she handled easily. When the red light came on, she sat down next to Dani and let out a huge breath. Murdoch stood up and moved to the lectern. His argument consisted of a repeat of Judge Bryson’s reasoning in his decision
. He, too, was showered with questions, but to Dani they seemed more like softballs, designed to allow him to expand on his explanations. Only the chief judge came down on him hard.

  “A juror from the first trial testified that if he had known of Mr. Singer’s criminal activity, he wouldn’t have voted to convict Ms. Singer. Isn’t that definitive evidence of the probability that the verdict would have been more favorable if they’d heard about this?”

  “I don’t believe it would have overcome Ms. Singer’s confession. Jurors have a difficult time ignoring that.”

  “But there was also testimony from an expert about false confessions. If he testified at a new trial, wouldn’t that serve to alleviate the jurors’ concerns and allow them to focus on the other evidence?”

  “No, I don’t believe it would.”

  The chief judge didn’t appear convinced.

  Dani managed to make it through the end of Murdoch’s argument. They stood up to leave, and as soon as they exited the courtroom, she excused herself and rushed to the bathroom. She wasn’t finished being sick. She hoped it was the remnants of food poisoning and not because of her sinking feelings about Molly’s chances.

  CHAPTER

  39

  Five weeks had passed since Molly’s appeal was argued and still no decision. That wasn’t unusual—it sometimes took months. Still, the anxiety ate at Dani. There was nothing she could do, though, to speed it along, and so she turned to other work piling up on her desk. She began with a review of letters from inmates seeking representation by HIPP. The first seven she reviewed were typical. They began with a protestation of innocence, blamed the system for being against them, then offered no facts to support their claim. Even without those facts, there was something about some of the letter writers’ voices that piqued her interest, but most times she sent back a routine sorry-we-can’t-help-you letter.

  She picked up the eighth letter and began reading. “My name is Tyrone Watkins. I been in prison in Illinois since I was fifteen years old. I be thirty next month. The Chicago police said I killed a woman. When they took me in, they kept at me so many hours I lost track. Then they said if I confessed, I could go home to my mama and sleep in my bed. They told me what to say and I signed my name. I never did hurt any woman. But the judge didn’t believe me. Can you help me?”

  A false-confession claim. Once, Dani hadn’t believed in false confessions, then she was proven wrong by the nephew of her childhood nanny, who had confessed to a rape and murder it was eventually proven he didn’t commit. Still, she thought it an isolated phenomenon. Molly Singer was the first false-confession case she’d handled at HIPP. And now Tyrone Watkins. She marked his file as “Accept,” and decided to do some research on false confessions.

  Dani was startled to learn that a full 25 percent of exonerated inmates had confessed to their crimes. The reasons for doing so varied, but the one thing they all had in common: the confession, even retracted, had trumped all other evidence in their trials, including DNA evidence. As a lifelong New Yorker, Dani recalled the case of five teenagers convicted of the rape and brutal beating of a Central Park jogger. The woman had been so badly injured that she had no memory of the crime. Dani had been as outraged as the rest of New York at the night of “wilding,” as the police dubbed the perpetrators’ activities, and gratified by their convictions. For months, the newspapers printed stories about the crime, the criminals, and the trial. Almost absent from the newspapers were the reports of their exoneration many years later, following the confession of another man known as the East Side Rapist. When the teenagers’ trial took place, the police had a DNA sample from the victim. It didn’t match any of the teenagers. The confessions they obtained from the teens didn’t match the facts of the crime scene and were inconsistent among them. None of that mattered. It only mattered that the teens—who were between fourteen and sixteen at the time of the arrest—had confessed. When, twelve years later, the East Side Rapist, who was then in prison, admitted to the crime, they tested his DNA. It matched that found on the victim. He gave details of the night that were accurate and could have been known only to the attacker. Four young men had spent years in prison because they confessed to a heinous act they hadn’t committed.

  And they weren’t alone. Dani read about the sixteen-year-old who spent fifteen years in prison for the rape and strangulation of a classmate, even though jurors had been informed that DNA evidence didn’t match his. But he had confessed, as had the man who was sentenced to death for the murders of his parents, only to be exonerated three years later when two gang members were convicted for their deaths. A father who confessed to the murder of his three-year-old daughter was eventually exonerated when DNA evidence later identified a neighbor, who by then was serving a sentence for sex crimes, as the perpetrator. The list of cases went on and on, some famous as a result of their causes being undertaken by celebrities, but most anonymous men and, yes, a few women, who languished in jail as a result of confessing to a crime they didn’t commit, and later exonerated when new evidence came to light.

  Why did they do it? Dani kept digging to ferret out the answers. Some confessions were given freely, to protect the actual perpetrator. Some, like the young man whose letter she’d just read, were given because of a promise made by their interrogator—perhaps to go home, or to get a lighter sentence. Or, often, because they were desperate to end the hours upon hours of relentless interrogation. And some, like Molly, fed lies by their interrogator, came to believe they were guilty. And once made, no matter how quickly recanted, that confession became the truth in the eyes of jurors.

  In many of those cases, DNA ultimately exonerated the defendant. In others, the true perpetrator was arrested on different charges and evidence was found linking him to the other crime. In rare cases, the true culprit confessed.

  None of those factors were present in Molly Singer’s case. If only they knew who had written the anonymous letters. He was right about hanky-panky with the jail. He obviously knew more. They needed him to connect the dots between the jail funds and the Singers’ murders. Then, maybe, Molly would have a real chance at freedom.

  CHAPTER

  40

  John Engles popped his head into Frank Reynolds’s office. “Want to get some lunch?”

  Although Engles had an office in the county jail, he had a second office in the county government building, at eight stories the highest building in downtown Andersonville. Frank’s office was on the top floor.

  Frank looked at his watch. He didn’t particularly care for Engles, but better to stay on his good side. “Sure, but let’s make it a quick one.”

  They rode the elevator down to the lobby, then strolled over to a coffee shop one block away. Settled into their booth, Engles asked, “What do you think will happen with the appeal?”

  Frank shrugged. “Have no idea.”

  “I think she did it.”

  Frank eyed him carefully. Once, he thought she was guilty, too. But someone killed Quince Michaels, and it certainly wasn’t Molly Singer.

  “Even after Michaels?”

  “Who knows if those investigators were right? It could have been an accident.”

  “Maybe.” Frank didn’t want to say more. He didn’t trust anyone now. He tried to change the subject, but Engles wouldn’t let it go.

  “You know, right now they only know that Singer and Michaels profited from the jail. If she doesn’t get a new trial, it stays that way.”

  “Even if she does get a new trial, it should stay that way. If you’re right, and Michaels’s death was an accident, they can say that he killed his partner to stop him from talking. Case closed and Molly goes free.”

  “I don’t think so. If they get a new trial, her lawyers are going to keep digging. I know the type.”

  Frank didn’t want to think about it. He wanted this mess to be over. He looked up and saw Darlene, his favorite waitress, approaching his table.
She was someone who always wore a smile and made him feel welcome.

  “Hi, Frank, what’ll it be today?”

  “I’ll have today’s special.”

  “Good choice. And how about you, Sheriff?”

  “The same.”

  Before Darlene left with their orders, she turned back to Reynolds. “So what do you think will happen with Molly Singer?”

  Frank remembered that Darlene had gone to school with Molly. He just shrugged and held open his two palms.

  “I sure hope she gets out,” Darlene said. “I never thought she was the kind of girl who’d do something like that.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  When the waitress left, Engles said, “See what I mean? Everyone’s talking about it. The sooner it dies down the better.”

  “Better for us, maybe, but not better for Molly.”

  Engles just shrugged, as though that issue couldn’t be more beside the point.

  Frank returned to his office and tried to settle down to work, only he couldn’t concentrate on anything. He worked with no success at the tightness in the back of his neck. Calm down. Everything will be okay. Only he didn’t believe it. Whatever happened, everything had changed for him. He realized now he’d fooled himself twelve years ago. He’d wanted to believe the Singers’ deaths had nothing to do with the deal he’d made. The day he told Alan Bryson he’d do what was asked of him, he lost himself. The man who prided himself on his integrity, who vowed to work hard for his constituents, had disappeared, gone in a puff of smoke, and replaced with a selfish, cowardly shell. He’d convinced himself over the years that his act was justified because of the good he was accomplishing as county executive. And he had accomplished much for the county. But it wasn’t enough to erase his shame.