Free The Moth by Unknown Page B

Turns out that they had picked up a mentally handicapped kid in our neighborhood and coerced him into making a confession, and then he was led to implicate Jason and me. Nothing in this confession made any sense whatsoever, but it didn’t matter to them. I was put in a cell, and I kept thinking,
Surely someone’s gonna step in and put a stop to this. Surely, someone is gonna rectify the situation. They can’t put you on trial and prove you’ve done something you haven’t done.
It seemed to me that science would say that’s impossible.
    But they did.
    They took us to trial, and the evidence was the Stephen King novels that I read, the music I listened to, the clothes that I wore. And they found us guilty. I was sentenced to death. Not once, not twice, but three times. The judge read these death sentences in this really bored, monotone voice, like it was just another day at the office for him.
    People asked me later, “What were you feeling when he was sentencing you to die?” It’s almost impossible to articulate. If you’ve ever been beaten, a lot of times, you know, when you’re punched in the head, you don’t register pain. You see a brightflash of light, hear a loud noise, and you’re completely disoriented, you have no idea where you even are for a few minutes. That’s what it was like when he was reading those death sentences; it was like being repeatedly punched in the head.
    They sent me to death row. I was in a cell for about a week before I noticed a shadow on the wall. It was from the man who had already been executed, who was in the cell before I got there. He had stood against the wall and traced around himself with a pencil really, really lightly, and then very subtly shaded it in. I mean it was so subtle I didn’t even see it for about the first week. And then after I saw it, I couldn’t un-see it. So for years I slept on a dead man’s mattress, stared at a dead man’s shadow, and lived in the cell with ghosts.
    They filed appeal after appeal on my behalf, all before the same judge who sentenced me to death. He denied them all. Even when new DNA evidence came in that excluded me and the other two guys from the crime scene, and instead pointed the finger at one of the victims’ stepfathers and the man who was providing the stepfather with an alibi, the judge still said, “This is not enough.”
    Then we were allowed to appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court, and by this time awareness of what’s going on, public interest in the case, had been building. There’d been documentaries, there’d been books, countless newspaper articles and magazine stories and TV shows. So the Arkansas Supreme Court knew they were being watched. And in the end that was the only thing they really cared about, winning the next election. So they ruled that all of this new evidence would be heard, and the prosecutors realized that meant there was gonna be another trial.
    So a deal was hammered out—an Alford plea. What anAlford plea means is that I plead guilty, and I walk out of the courtroom, and I can still publicly maintain my innocence, but I can’t sue the state.
    And people have asked me what I was thinking about the day that I went into court knowing that I could very well go home that day? And the truth is, I wasn’t thinking anything. By that time I was so tired and beat down that all I wanted to do was rest. I was dying. My health was deteriorating very rapidly. I was losing my eyesight. I knew I wasn’t gonna make it much longer.
    The prosecutor said that one of the factors for him making this deal was the fact that the three of us together could’ve collectively sued the state for $60 million. I knew they could’ve had me stabbed to death for $50 any day of the week. Happens in prison all the time. So I knew if I didn’t take that deal, one way or another I would never live to see the outside of those prison walls. So I took it.
    I’ve been out of prison now for a little over ten months, and I live