Injustice: The Truth

I will be honest. I have avoided this blog - because I haven't had any good news to give, and it's like swallowing hot coals to have to deliver the same terrible news I have received. In a time such as this, there is nothing good to write. But I'm here now, because the truth needs to be told of what has happened in my life over this last year - the truth I haven't been able to tell anyone but my closest friends. I'm going to start from the beginning of this case, and bring it all up to speed. This was written on July 3rd (therefore, references to "yesterday" refer to the 2nd), and it took me until now to gain the courage to post it. If you do not feel like reading a real, true modern tragedy, don't read on. It is true, it is disturbing, and it is likely to end in the deaths of about three people whose health cannot survive in its wake. This is in dedication to their memory, while they still survive. In dedication to the truth behind the manifold lies. And in dedication to my fiance, George.

Sally, as we will call her, is the step-sister of my fiancee. His mother married her father many years ago. Last year, Sally had moved out of her father and his mother's house in order to be with her own blood mother, a conniving woman well known among everyone including the police and the courts for trying to imprison, harass and devastate anyone who dared cross her - and there, Sally's hatred festered against my fiance's mother for months on end. From this black hatred, a plot was hatched to bring the entire family down, to tear apart what had been joined by his mother marrying her father. And my love, my fiancee, was the perfect scapegoat. By leveling this accusation, not only would it devastate his mother and tear apart her marriage to Sally's father - but furthermore, the stress might be the last nail in his mother's coffin, since she suffers from a chronic and deadly neurological illness and is now nearly skeletal from its damage. Even more, if she claimed to be a victim of the crime, she could hold a free ticket for government money for the rest of her life - something her mother had proudly told her would save her from ever having to work again. It was the perfect plan.

And so, in January of this year, she faked her best cry and told an earth-shattering lie: That he had committed a terrible crime.

By early February, the police, not only obligated to investigate but taking her words as God's own, sent a state trooper who stormed into our house, stole him away and interrogated him for hours on end. I sat outside a tiny, run-down small town station, dark and empty but for the officer and my fiance crammed into a tiny room - and clutching myself against the horrible cold, I knew something was wrong. When at last he stiffly walked out of the police station, shaking and in pain, he collapsed into the passenger's seat of my car and wept, "I'm fucked."

I have read accounts of false confessions before. But I have never known the true evils of our justice system until now. For hours he was manipulated, pushed, coerced, cajoled, terrorized. He was told that if he did not confess, he'd be taken away to jail and they'd automatically believe the accuser. He was told over and over again that he was doomed, and promised leniency if he confessed. Before it was over the officer was throwing things, pounding on the table, towering over him. He was told to "write a letter of apology"...which, in essence, would be a written confession. Having had only an hour or two of sleep, his bones aching from the horrible winter cold and his chronic ill health, his head pounding, the sheer liquid fear aggravating damage that had been done to his brain years before, he rocked back and forth, slurring complaints of agonizing head pain and struggling against the officer's onslaught. He had never had this happen before. He had no idea what to do. What started as a simple, "Well I guess I'll explain the truth and this'll be done" ended in tragedy. Shaking and weeping, desperately fearful that he'd never see me again, after hours he collapsed and gave in to the officer's demands. Trembling fingers wrote on paper and he struggled to make it as ineffective as he could, while the officer dictated to him what he should write - careful to say "In your own words, of course" for the hidden recorder in order to cover his ass. He broke the law repeatedly, the law he was meant to uphold, and in that tiny locked room he broke down an innocent man into saying he was guilty of a crime he could never dream of committing.

In the months since, a case has been launched and gone into full swing. At first, he was taken to jail, and I single-handedly pulled together all of his friends, his mother, and my friends, and we scraped together the bail to rescue him. Sitting in a tiny cell crawling with bugs, seeing horrors that are unspeakable, he was on the verge of suicide - and with guards all too happy to leave razors unattended in the cells for hours at a time, it would have been all too easy. Every night I had clung to the little stuffed dog he bought me for Valentine's, and lay awake sobbing and praying. Every day was spent organizing, gathering funds, pawning and selling what little I had, calming his hysterical mother down and coaxing her to drive 2 hours alone in a broken down van with what little money she had gathered to help. Finally, after an agonizing week and with the sale of my car, we finished. I called the bondsman and drove, white-knuckling the steering wheel, to the jail house. We filled out paperwork and turned it in. And we were turned away. In direct opposition to the judge's orders, the police smirked and told us it wasn't good enough. The bondsman, an old hefty man who could barely walk, shuffled back to us and said, "I've never seen anything like it. They just don't want to let him go." Thinking they had a criminal in their clutches, they had refused, however illegal it may have been. We almost left empty-handed - but we begged, shaking and weeping, for the bondsman to try again. It was a long shot.

The jail stalled for hours before letting him go. When he staggered out of the building, he was an empty shell of a man, pale and sickly and wide-eyed with terror. He has never told me what happened to him in there, except for a few things. But I know the truth. The horrible, unspeakable truth. An innocent man was subjected to true horror at the hands of a system meant to protect the innocent. And it was just the beginning.

He had scraps of paper with him. Little scraps with shaky scribbles of increasingly-frantic pleas, prayers, little letters of love and despair to me. He had been ruined, his heart torn out and inked all over these little pages in jagged lines.

At first I got him a court-appointed lawyer, since we had spent every last spare dime on his bail. I had to do a lot of snooping and calling around to even get them to give it to him. The system stalled and stalled. Everyone wanted a feather for their cap, bonus points for capturing a criminal, sentencing him, prosecuting him. In a small town in one of the most economically-desperate states of America, with officials all vying for the adoration of the public and votes - everyone wanted in on this. I fought corruption with a cell phone, throwing the book at them. I made enemies. Cops followed me around, hugging my bumper with their squad cars, crouched in unmarked cars, slowly passing by the house and glaring inside. At long last, we were given the lawyer, but as the weeks passed and he did precisely nothing, we discovered eventually that even he was against us. You see, if a lawyer and a prosecutor negotiate a plea deal - it is reflected on both of their records as a win. He had every bit of interest in refusing to help us. And he was all too happy to oblige the prosecutor.

We called literally dozens of lawyers, seeking anyone we could afford, anyone who would help us. We reached out and received a few donations from friends, but in this economy nobody has money to spare - the donations totaled at about 50 dollars. Still, with it we managed to scrape by. At long last we found an attorney from a big city about an hour and a half to two hours away. He listened to our tale of woe and said proudly, "Let's get in there and give 'em hell."

For a time, we had hope. He stormed right into that small town courtroom and he did just as he said - he gave them Hell. They didn't stand a chance. The prosecutor became red-faced with rage, flabbergasted at how well we had done to gather evidence. I personally acquired a recording of the seedy interrogation and wrote a 40-page transcript. Every word, every detail, every sound effect, with a two-page cover letter of annotations and periodic time stamps for reference. It was nothing short of a masterpiece and it was done in just 12 hours of frantic, tearful work, as I was forced to listen over and over and over again to the love of my life being broken down and manipulated and bribed and intimidated by a police officer who does not deserve his badge. Multiple times I threw my headphones and broke down, weeping that I couldn't do it again, not again, no more. But it had to be done, and it proved to be essential. When I handed it to the lawyer, he gave me a look of awe.

For a time, we had hope. The prosecutor was offering lower and lower and lower plea deals, before we had even begun to chip away at Sally's sick little lies.

Then, someone leaked to her part of our evidence. We suspect that our court appointed attorney, angry at having been fired, went and spoke to the prosecutor, still holding what evidence he'd had while working for us. Even our lawyer agreed that was the most likely culprit. Sally had been called in by the prosecutor, and they decided to revise the story altogether. A "motion to amend" was filed - moving the dates conveniently right where they needed to be to break the solid alibi that my fiancee had. Right where they needed to be to try and take him down. When asked in court later why she had done this, she just shrugged, grinned wide and said "I thought about it and realized the dates didn't seem right." In the audience, her mother smiled wide and nodded in silent approval, proud of her conniving daughter and the welfare money she'd soon be able to steal from her.

That was just yesterday.

The whole case had been reset. We went back to a preliminary hearing and prepared to hear the prosecution struggle to show that they had enough proof to move forward. All they had was the lie of a teenage girl, a constantly-changing story...but what they also had was a shifty cop with a big award-winning smile, and a false confession forced out of my fiance. It was nothing - and yet it was everything. They had no proof - but it didn't matter. We have mountains of proof - but it is not enough. The preliminary was an utter circus. Sally got on the stand and poured on the tears. At first, she froze up - she couldn't tell her lies with everyone staring her down. With the whole courtroom silent enough to hear a pin drop (but for the rain - yes, literal rain, because my life is just that weird sometimes - falling outside), her mother loudly cleared her throat and Sally flinched to attention and started nervously recounting her tale in deadpan, rehearsed tones, then froze up again. This went on until the judge ordered a 15 minute recess. By the time those 15 minutes were up, she had been huddled in a little cluster of white trash and wiggers, all from the side of the family hell-bent on this succeeding, all patting her on the back and whispering to her - and she returned to the stand with a grin on her face and her head held high. Her mother sat motioning and mouthing to her silently, and she rehearsed the perfect lines, complete with official-sounding words. Our lawyer upon cross-examining her asked, "Who told you to use those words?" and she sassed with head bobbing side to side, "Nobody, I just know them!" He asked, "When you changed your story, why did you do so?" She smirked and said, "I just thought about it some more." She played the court room like a violin. And the judge, looking bored out of his mind, actually bought it. The case ho-hummed its way back to gearing up for trial. And our lawyer told us: "It looks grim."

My fiance's mother stood wearily leaning on her cane, trying to beg the lawyer to give her any signs of hope. An acquaintance of ours sat avidly telling stories of friends of hers who'd been in similar trouble. My fiance's eyes were hollow as he stood beside his mother and asked over and over, "What does this mean?" And I just looked up at the lawyer. He looked at me, eyebrows lifted, sad and helpless. And I knew. Piercing the chorus of voices, I asked the million dollar question: What kind of plea deals do we have on the table now? Trying to remain professional, he explained in detail. I knew what it boiled down to. As my fiance and his mother grew more heated trying to beg for hopeful news and wrap their minds around it all, I sighed. The lawyer looked at me and said, "You get it, don't you?" I nodded. "I get it. Trust me, I get it." He picked up his briefcase. "You can explain it to them, then." And he went on his way.

Yesterday, as the rain fell on the windshield of my tiny little Prius, cracked by last winter's harsh Michigan temperatures and ice and since left unattended with every spare dime poured into legal fees - I wept and delivered the deadly news.

At this point, we have a choice. Try to negotiate for a plea deal, which may be a required 20 year prison sentence (we will not know for certain until about a month from now). Or try to fight...knowing that confessions are almost never overturned, and that if that confession stands, a jury of our peers will sentence the man I love to 25 to life. With his health on the decline and the crime of choice carrying such powerful venomous stigma and hate - he will not survive. The first guy to try and shank him will likely be the last.

I am spending the last days with my love. I do not know how long we have. If a sufficiently-lenient plea deal cannot be reached, we know that he will be taken to prison and we know he will die. We will fight the case with nothing left to lose. And when the time comes, we will have spent every last moment clinging to each other until the end.

His mother's health is declining. She is working on getting her affairs in order. She knows this stress is about to kill her. He has left her a last recording of his voice, and she has left everything to him in the hopes he can survive long enough to receive it, and in the wake of her entire family betraying her. If George is in prison, all of her possessions, her house, her money, will fall to Sally and her father - which is what they hope for.

My health is also declining. I will not likely survive. I don't think I want to anymore.

Somewhere, a teenage welfare mother is bragging to her parents, and being bribed with a house for herself and her skinny wigger husband-to-be for a job well done. They will live on to forever steal tax dollars and raise scum of their own.

George, I love you. I have fought with everything I have, every bit of strength in me, and every last dollar and possession I own. I would do it all again over and over if only I could save you. I still cling to frail shreds of hope that we will survive. I will not stop fighting - I will stall for time as long as I can. Please survive with me. As long as we can.

I love you.