I imagine every newsroom in the world has a similar dumping ground. Some were written on prison library typewriters, others in careful, neat lettering, many in kindergarten-blackboard scrawls. They all told the same story: I didn’t do it. I’m innocent. These jailhouse pleas were often trapdoors: you read one, fall into the case, spend untold hours reporting out the nooks and crannies of what happened, only to find, well, the guy was in the house that night robbing the place when the old lady was murdered; or, hey, even though she says she didn’t shoot him, she did get arrested with his drugs. It’s easy to say guilt and innocence are rarely black and white; it’s harder to reconcile, both professionally and personally. “Nobody,” a journalist friend once said to me, “is completely innocent.” That cynicism was taking root in me: Some complicity must tie most offenders to their convictions, I reasoned; the criminal justice system had the proper safety nets installed to catch the truly innocent. So the letters piled up.
It turns out experts on wrongful conviction have the same problem. Despite the legal organizations devoted to the issue, hard numbers on innocent men and women in prison remain difficult to come by. We can pin down actual exonerations—by 2011 the National Registry of Exonerations counted nearly nine hundred.1 But this tally only started in 1989. What about cases experts have missed? Have we missed them? One team has estimated that as many as two thousand to four thousand wrongful conviction cases slip into the legal system each year. Another theory puts the number of innocent inmates between 1 and 5 percent of all convictions.2 What frustrates a determination of the size of the actual problem is the avalanche of frivolous claims—those stuffed drawers at the newsroom. One legal expert has written that finding a truly innocent inmate is like looking for a “meritorious needle in the meritless haystack.”3
Kwame, however, didn’t remind me of those letter writers. He had a booming voice, keyed in a bebop mix of prison-yard slang, legal-speak, and touches of Arabic. He radiated calm, wisdom, and a been-there, seen-it-all attitude. He delivered his story simply, not with the heat of someone desperate to convince me but as if he was just relating the facts of his case. This, his calm delivery seemed to say, was just how it all went down.
“At seventeen, I didn’t know a whole lot about nothing, let alone the law,” Kwame told me. “There was no DNA or evidence. It was all who said what, and how strong who said what could be supported. But there were so many things that just didn’t jive. Just check out the bus route.”
The bus. In court, Ed Vernon, the state’s only eyewitness, had laid out a simple story for the jury: On the day of the crime, he’d left his middle school early, catching a city bus home. While the bus was waiting at the light at Cedar, a car pulled up to the driver’s side. The boy recognized three older guys from the neighborhood—Ronnie, Wiley, and Rickey. He waved. They waved back. Side by side, the bus and car made the left-hand turn. The boy got out. As he walked up the street, he saw the same young men attack the victim.
As I was replaying that testimony in my head, standing on that very same street corner, I spotted a city bus, its sides graffitied with streaks of road salt, huff to a stop at the Cedar light. Left-hand turn signals blinked. Kwame swung around to make sure I was watching, the air between us foggy with frozen breath. The bus swung left and drove off. Despite the traffic piled up behind the bus to make a similar turn, nobody moved alongside the bus. There was only one turn lane. If a car had been riding close to the bus, it would have banged into the curb.
“Edward Vernon said that he saw us in the car while we were turning,” Kwame said, his voice jumping with excitement. “But you can’t make that turn at the same time.”
What the witness had described was physically impossible, I realized. “And if you’re going to commit a crime,” Kwame said, “what the hell are you doing waving at somebody on the street for?”
* * *
Like loops on an elaborate signature, the Cuyahoga River splits Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs into east and west. It’s less a natural divide than a marker for social division—between economic status, ethnicity,