Chapter 112: What the Order Said
It took eleven weeks and two days.
I know because I had it on the wall calendar over the printer at work, in pencil, marked from the sixth of February.
Kroll called Marisol's landline at 2:20 on a Wednesday afternoon in April.
“It's up,” she said. “Are you sitting down.”
I was not sitting down. I was at the scanner with a batch of indemnity agreements and forty pages left in the feeder.
I finished the forty pages. I want that in the record because it is the truest thing about me.
Then I took the bus and read it in the clinic file room with the door shut.
Forty-one pages. Order on Petition for Post-Conviction Relief. Reyner, J.
Stapled once in the corner. No cover sheet. The clerk's stamp at an angle across the caption.
Findings of fact, paragraphs 1 through 74.
Conclusions of law, 75 through 103. Order, 104 through 107.
I read the order first, at the back, the way I read everything now.
Paragraph 31: the court finds the notarial journal reliable and finds the statement was executed on the fourteenth.
Paragraph 33: the court finds no credible explanation for the execution of that statement two days prior to the collision.
No credible explanation. Two days prior. In a paragraph numbered 33, in the middle of a stack.
Paragraph 44: the court finds the seat position evidence credible but not dispositive standing alone.
Paragraph 52: the court finds the testimony of Dean Mercer to be substantially corroborated by the photographic and journal evidence, notwithstanding his obvious interest.
That word notwithstanding was doing a great deal of work and I read the paragraph six times.
Paragraph 88: had this evidence been available, no reasonable factfinder would have accepted the plea as knowing and voluntary.
Paragraph 104: the conviction is vacated.
That is nine words with a citation after it. I had waited six years and eleven months for nine words.
Paragraph 105: the sentence is vacated.
Paragraph 106: the matter is remanded to the county for such further proceedings as the People deem appropriate.
Paragraph 107: it is so ordered.
I read all forty-one pages twice, sitting on a plastic chair with a wobble in one leg.
Then I did what I always do, which is count.
The word innocent appears three times in that order. I went through it line by line with a ruler.
Once in the caption of a statute. Once in a case name. Once in a footnote quoting the statute again.
Not once about me.
Not one time, in forty-one pages, does that document say that I did not do it.
Paragraph 96 is the one I know by heart.
I am setting it down because people should know what these actually look like when they arrive.
The relief granted herein rests upon the involuntariness of the plea and the newly discovered evidence bearing upon it. The court does not reach, and does not decide, the question of the petitioner's factual innocence.
Does not reach. Does not decide.
Those are not evasions. They are accurate. A court decides what is in front of it and nothing else.
Brandt came in and I asked her the question and she gave me the honest answer, standing up, in about ninety seconds.
“A vacatur is not an apology. It's a correction of a judgment. The court is saying the process was bad.”
“Not that I didn't do it.”
“He can't say that. He wasn't asked to. We didn't plead it that way, because pleading it that way makes it harder to win.”
“You never told me that.”
“I told you in September. You wrote it in the notebook. Go and look.”
I went and looked, that night, and she was right. Page eleven. I had written it down and I had not understood it.
That is something I have to keep hold of about myself.
I am a good reader of documents. I am not immune to hearing what I want out of one.
Here is what actually changed in the world that Wednesday.
My parole ended.
There was no sentence, so there was nothing to be on parole from. It ended the following Monday, when the paperwork caught up with the ruling.
The restitution deduction stopped, prospectively, on the first of May.
The three thousand four hundred and twelve dollars already paid was not returned.
The order says the court lacks authority to claw back restitution from a private beneficiary. Paragraph 102. Two sentences.
Nothing else changed. Nothing at all.
Nobody rang a bell. Nobody opened a gate. I had been out for two years and eight months.
I went back to the office at half past five and did the rest of the batch, because Marisol pays by the hour and I had taken three of them.
At eight I locked up with the Schlage key with the green tape and stood in the lot for a minute.
Then I bought a chicken sandwich for four dollars and ate it at the bus stop, and that was the day my conviction was vacated.