Exoneree Diaries

The Fight for Innocence, Independence, and Identity

Alison Flowers

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781608465873
• eBook ISBN: 9781608466535
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Through intimate portraits of four exonerated prisoners, journalist Alison Flowers explores what happens to innocent people when the state flings open the jailhouse door and tosses them back, empty-handed into the unknown. From the front lines of the wrongful conviction capital of the United States—Cook County, Ill.—these stories reveal serious gaps in the criminal justice system. Flowers depicts the collateral damage of wrongful convictions on families and communities, challenging the deeper problem of mass incarceration in the United States. As she tells each exoneree's powerful story, Flowers vividly shows that release from prison, though sometimes joyous and hopeful, is not a Hollywood ending—or an ending at all. Rather, an exoneree's first unshackled steps are the beginning of a new journey full of turmoil and triumph. Based on Chicago Public Media's yearlong multimedia series—a finalist for a national Online Journalism Award—this narrative piece of investigative journalism tells profoundly human stories of reclaiming one's life, overcoming adversity, and searching for purpose—at times with devastating consequences and courageous breakthroughs.

PART ONE

KRISTINE

Convicted in 1996

Exonerated in 2012

Indianapolis Star

I.

“It feels great when you walk out, and you can hug your family, and no one is telling you don’t touch ’em.”

Kristine took soft, steady steps down the courthouse hallway on a late August day. On her shackled feet, she wore crisp, white sneakers her family had ordered from Walkenhorst’s catalog, a company that specializes in products for inmates. Her dyed blonde hair fell to her shoulders in smooth layers, the result of diligently wrapping her strands underneath a do-rag, setting it while she slept—a beauty trick learned behind bars.

Outside, the Indiana sky appeared cloudless above the courthouse clock tower, on top of which grows a storied mulberry tree, a point of pride for Greensburg, the county seat of Decatur. Nicknamed “Tower Tree Square,” the area around the courthouse is lined with Civil War–era buildings, with mom-and-pop shops like Storie’s Restaurant serving “made-from-scratch pies” and “pork tenderloins the size of your head”—that is, any day but Sunday.

Inside the pre–Civil War era courthouse, the words “Decatur County Circuit” are squeezed together on one side of the double doors to the courtroom. On the right-hand door, the single word “Court” is etched in metallic decal.

Decatur County sheriff’s deputies escorted Kristine to the courtroom, blocked by a huddle of local reporters and TV cameras on hand for the latest twist in the case. As the cameras clicked, Kristine offered a shaky half-smile as she braced herself for the hearing. Inside the courtroom, her family waited. Some childhood friends also looked on. Kristine wasn’t sure if they were there for spectacle or for support.

Kristine had walked those halls before. Almost seventeen years earlier, in 1996, she was wearing a chunky knit sweater over her growing belly, tears staining her cheeks, after being sentenced to sixty years for murder. The nine months leading up to her trial were a painful blur—the trailer fire, the loss of her three-year-old son Tony, the swift investigation and arrest five days later, the grim months in a jail cell, the discovery of a pregnancy while on bond. With not so much as a parking ticket on her record at the time, she struggled to believe the nightmare she was living.

Now something else was happening, and it also felt like a dream. She was about to walk free.

A few months before her release, she had been reading Jesus Calling on her bed at Indiana Women’s Prison (IWP) in Indianapolis when her daily devotion was interrupted.

“Bunch!” the counselor hollered her last name down the hall. “Phone call. My office.”

On the line was Jane Raley, one of Kristine’s pro bono attorneys from the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, who had been laboring on her case for five years, with assistance from two law firms and another attorney. For more than a decade, Jane had helped free the innocent. With about a dozen exonerations, a human rights award, and some death-sentence commutations under her belt, Jane was a pro. Known for her empathy, Jane was beloved by her clients, who took to her like a best friend or parent. But she was also a relentless, fierce advocate for them, and Kristine was no exception. The work was slow, and positive developments for her clients were scarce. But this time, she had good news to share. She told Kristine the State Supreme Court had ruled in her favor, awarding her a new trial. She was to be released on her previous bond.

Kristine was shocked. “You wait for that moment for so long and it gets there, you feel like they are going to jerk it back and say, ‘We’re keeping you,’” she says.

Scared and overwhelmed, she called her friend Donna. “I’ll be home in forty-eight hours,” she said over Donna’s shrieks. “I have so much to do, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it.” Kristine didn’t know what to expect next. But with her freedom imminent—what she thought would be immediate—Kristine prepared for her release.

She purged her belongings, passing them out to all her friends in prison. Kiera got her black drawstring shorts with the pockets—a coveted item no longer available in the overpriced, privatized prison shop known as commissary. Her bunkie Leslie got her small TV that had cost $179. Her radio went to Rhonda. She distributed a couple pairs of illegal earrings to some others. Another friend got her makeup.

The only thing she kept were her Polaroids and some scanned photos of her son Trent, now sixteen, whom she had delivered three months into her incarceration. Photos were a restricted item in prison, and Kristine had kept too many snapshots from their monthly visits to pass inspections. She had to sneak the photos between her legal papers, rotating them out.

She was ready. And then she waited.

Weeks later, Kristine had still not left the prison. The trial judge’s vacation plans came between Kristine and her prompt release. Finally, she was shipped to the county jail for a brief hearing at the courthouse, where her pro bono lawyers were ready for her. At Decatur County Jail, the deputies didn’t process her in, Kristine says. “Because there was a good chance I was leaving.”

In the courthouse hallway, a man behind a camera asked, “How are you doing today, Kristine?”

“No cameras in the courtroom,” a deputy said as the reporters shuffled in.

Kristine sighed, smiled, and looked up as she approached the courtroom.

A fill-in judge ordered her release; Kristine would have to report back in a month’s time for a pretrial hearing. A new murder trial had been set for February 2013. Upon her exit from the courtroom, TV reporters plunged their microphones toward Kristine as her hands remained chained. A heavy belt hung around her beige prison uniform.

“What does this day mean to you?”

Kristine looked around through her rectangular, narrow, black eyeglasses. She took a breath. “It’s everything right now,” she said in a shaky, high-pitched voice, swallowing the tears. She shook her head and took a long sniff. “More than I can put into words. More than I can say.”

The reporters wanted to know what she planned to do next.

She laughed. “Probably disturb my son while I watch him do everything. Because I want to see everything he does.”

“Did you ever give up hope?”

“No. Never.”

A plastic bag with her name on it held a purple-and-blue striped frock, dress shoes, and some tan-colored pantyhose. Kristine’s mother, Susan, had managed to get these items into the hands of a deputy inside the jail, where she was preparing to leave.

Kristine chucked the nylon pantyhose. “No way was I going to wear that. That was another prison,” she says. But she conceded and put on the “horrible, ugly dress” from her mother.

Clutching the plastic bag and some papers, she walked out into the sunshine. Another batch of reporters greeted her. After years of running file photos and old video on her case, the news crews ate up the chance to capture fresh footage of Kristine, hugging her mother and the lawyers who had helped her. Kristine smiled and pivoted to answer their questions.

“Once I’m fully cleared, I’m going to law school,” she told them, garnering claps from her supporters.

Kristine had worked in the prison law library for several years, becoming a paralegal and helping other women with their cases. She was one of the first inmates at IWP to take the LSAT. She had done much of her own legal work in prison, sending ideas and tips to her local attorney.

“You seem so happy,” one reporter noted. “It would seem like you might be tempted to be bitter about waiting this long to get out. You don’t seem to show that. Can you explain that?”

Kristine turned to him mid-question, and her face dropped. “I think because this entire time I haven’t been by myself,” she answered. “I’ve had a family that has stood by me. I’ve had people that believed in me and stepped up. And you can’t receive blessings like that and be bitter.”

Away from the reporters, her teenaged son Trent was a little st...

Table of contents

• Exoneree Diaries
• Author’s Note on Sources
• Introduction
• Part One: Kristine
• Part Two: Jacques
• Part Three: James
• Part Four: Antione
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Resources
• About the Author