Godsey - Blind injustice: a former prosecutor exposes the psychology and politics of wrongful convictions

My client Ricky Jackson was sentenced, as he says it, to death by electrocution. He narrowly escaped the chair in the 1970s before spending nearly forty years in prison for a murder he didnt commita national record that no one sets out to break. On a chilly Cleveland morning in November 2014, I walked with him as he left prison at age fifty-seven and entered a world that barely resembled the one he knew in 1975 as a kid who had just turned eighteenRickys age when the state of Ohio first sought to kill him.

And I sat in court with Raymond Towler, who spent twenty-nine years in prison for a rape he didnt commit. Raymond is a peaceful and philosophical man, and an incredible artist and musician. A renaissance man. I was there when the judge banged her gavel and said to Raymond, after he had suffered through decades in prison, You are free to go. After that, the judge left her bench, embraced Raymond, and, with tears in her eyes, recited the Irish blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face;

the rains fall soft upon your fields,

and until we meet again,

may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

So far in my career as an innocence lawyer my Ohio Innocence Project represented and helped free twenty-five people like Ricky and Raymond who together were sent to prison for a combined 470 years for crimes they didnt commit. Some of them, like my client Nancy Smith, were ripped away from the arms of their children, and were able to hold them again in freedom only after they had become adults. Others, like Ricky Jackson, returned to a world that contained no remaining family members or friends with whom they had any sort of intimate connections.

I got to know my late friend Lois Rosenthal because she was naturally drawn to the problem of wrongful convictions. Lois was not a lawyer. Rather, she was a philanthropist and social justice activist of the best kind. She and her husband, Dick, have transformed my hometown of Cincinnati with their generosity and philanthropic spirit. For this reason, the Contemporary Arts Center, as well and many other things in town, bear their name. Lois was instrumental in establishing and building the Ohio Innocence Project, the organization that I cofounded in 2003 and still run today. The primary mission of the Ohio Innocence Project is to free innocent people from prison, like Ricky, Raymond, and Nancy.

Through the years, whenever I described a new case to Loisin other words, when I told her about a prisoner whose case we had recently investigated and for whom we had discovered new evidence proving innocenceshe would ask, How could this happen? Over and over again through the years she has asked me: How could this person have possibly been convicted in the first place?

And a few months later, when I would inevitably tell her that despite the strong evidence of innocence we had amassed the prosecutors were fighting back hard and were refusing to admit a mistake, she would ask: Why? Why do they do that? Why cant they admit their mistakes? How can they let an innocent person stay in prison? How can this be? Lois could never understand why the system fights back the way it does. The way it twists the law and facts to keep these injustices from seeing the light of day. And the way it resists reform. The way it makes heart-wrenching mistakes and then stubbornly refuses to change and improve.

Lois is not alone. Anyone who has been introduced to the problem of wrongful convictions in this country has asked these same questions. Indeed, I frequently speak on the topic of wrongful convictions, and the first questions Im always asked as soon as I finish a speech are: Why does this happen? Why do the prosecutors make it so hard to obtain justice for these poor people? Why isnt the system changing to reduce these problems?