Chapter 102: The Answer
We filed on the third of March, two days inside the deadline.
Eighty-four pages of petition. Nineteen exhibits. A memorandum of law running forty-one of the eighty-four.
The fee waiver came through, so it cost me nothing at the window and eleven thousand dollars everywhere else.
Kroll filed it in person.
Brandt does not trust electronic filing on a deadline day, and she has reasons that involve a man in Cardley who is still inside.
She sent me a photograph of the clerk's stamp. 3 MAR, and the time, 2:47 p.m.
I looked at the date on that stamp for longer than a person needs to look at a date.
Then the state has thirty days to answer, and the state took thirty-one, and nobody cared.
Their answer was thirty-one pages. I read it twice, on a Tuesday, at the office, after close.
I want to say what is actually in a document like that, because I had imagined it wrong for six years.
I had imagined somebody at the Attorney General's office reading my petition and going pale.
I had imagined a phone call, and a meeting, and a person with authority saying the word wrong.
That is not what happens. What happens is procedural and it is not personal and that is worse.
The answer had five headings. I will list them the way they listed them.
One. The petition is untimely, the one-year period having run from the date of conviction.
Two. All non-jurisdictional defects were waived by the entry of a knowing and voluntary plea.
Three. The claim is procedurally defaulted, not having been raised on direct appeal.
Four. Laches. The state's ability to respond has been prejudiced by the passage of six years.
Five. Petitioner admitted her guilt under oath and may not now be heard to deny it.
Not one of those is a statement about whether I killed Nadine Okoro.
There were no facts in it.
There was no discussion of the seat. There was no discussion of the date. There was no mention of a photograph taken at 04:41 by a man in Fenner.
Heading four was the one that stayed with me.
The state said it was prejudiced by delay. The delay was six years. I spent them in a facility the state operated.
They had known where I was every single night. They had counted me twice a day.
Brandt was not surprised by any of it. She read it in about four minutes and put it down.
“This is the form answer,” she said. “They plead every bar and see which one sticks.”
“There's nothing in it about the photographs.”
“There won't be. Not until they have to. They're hoping the judge dismisses on the pleadings and nobody ever reaches the photographs.”
“And if he doesn't?”
“Then they get a lawyer who actually reads it, and things get slower and more serious.”
I asked her the question I had been carrying since the intake form.
“What does the state do when it's told it was wrong?”
She looked at me for a second and gave me the honest one.
“It defends the judgment. That's the job. Nobody at that office was there in 2019. They inherited a file and a duty.”
“So no one is going to be sorry.”
“Somebody may be sorry, personally, quietly, years from now. It won't be in a document.”
I said that was fine. It mostly was.
Then I read the answer a third time, at home, at the kitchen table, with a pencil.
That is a habit from the scanning job. You read the third time for the parts nobody meant you to read.
Page nineteen. Footnote six. Nine lines of small type supporting an argument about restitution.
The footnote said the restitution amount had been calculated by reference to the civil settlement, and it gave a file reference.
Subrogation claim file 19-SR-4477-C, Meridian Casualty Company.
I sat looking at that for a while, with the pencil still in my hand.
I had four hundred and twelve pages of my own case file. I had read all of them, most of them more than once.
That number was in none of them.
The state had a document I had never seen, and it had come from an insurance company, and it was in a footnote about money.
I wrote the number on the back of my hand, which I had not done since I was a child.
Then I copied it onto the sheet in my locker, and then into the notebook, because a hand is not a filing system.
In the morning I called the clinic at ten past eight and got the voicemail and left the number twice, slowly.
Brandt called back at nine. I read her the footnote.
“Where is that from?”
“Their own answer. Page nineteen.”
There was a pause on her end and then a sound I had not heard from her before, which was interest.
“They cited it,” she said. “If they cite it, we can have it. Give me a week.”
It took eleven days. She issued a subpoena to Meridian Casualty for the complete underwriting and claim file.
The box came on a Tuesday. Three hundred and forty pages, and a cover letter apologising for the delay.