Chapter 54: Seven Thousand Five Hundred
I have a prepaid phone. Twenty-five dollars a month.
Five hundred minutes, which is more than I use in a year.
Between the fifteenth of December and the ninth of January I used a hundred and forty-one of them.
Nine law offices. Two clinics. One nonprofit.
I kept the log on the back of a credit union deposit slip. Date, name, minutes, result.
I want to record what I said, because I said the same thing twelve times and I got better at it.
The first version was: “I think there's a problem with my conviction.”
That version got me two sentences of a receptionist's time.
By the fourth call I had it down to: “I'm a post-conviction inquiry. Vehicular homicide, plea, 2019. I have a signed confession dated two days before the crash.”
That version got me put through.
A complaint is a feeling. A claim is a document, a date, and a discrepancy.
Call five was a firm on Whitcomb Street with a lobby I have never seen. A man came on the line and asked three questions.
“Did you plead guilty?”
“Yes.”
“Was the plea in open court, with a colloquy?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell the judge you were guilty?”
“Yes.”
Then he said the thing everybody said, in one form or another, and I am going to put it here in his words because his were the shortest.
“Then the date is a typo until you can prove it isn't, and proving it isn't costs money.”
I asked how much money.
Post-conviction petition, investigation, records work, one evidentiary hearing if we got one.
Seven thousand five hundred dollars, flat fee, up front, plus filing costs and transcript fees.
If it went past a hearing, more. He would not quote past a hearing.
I thanked him. He was not unkind. He was quoting a real number for real work.
I asked if he would read the page first. He said four hundred dollars, credited against the retainer.
Call seven was the innocence organization at the university. A woman named Priya took forty minutes with me, which was more time than anybody had given me since I got out.
She was honest in a way that hurt.
They take about eleven cases a year out of about nine hundred inquiries.
They prioritize cases with biological evidence.
DNA is a machine that gives an answer. A date on a form is an argument.
She said guilty pleas are not disqualifying.
A quarter of the exonerations in the national registry are guilty pleas. I wrote that down.
Then she said the intake queue was running fourteen to eighteen months and that I should apply anyway.
I applied that night. Eleven pages, handwritten, because the library computers time out at forty minutes.
Question 14 asks you to say in your own words why you are innocent. I used the space to describe a date.
Call nine was a woman named Ruth Ahearn who works alone above a tax preparer.
She listened for four minutes without saying anything, which is unusual, and then she asked one question nobody else had asked.
“Who paid the lawyer?”
I said I did not know. I said I had never received a bill.
She said, “That's the case. Not the date. Who paid.”
Then she said she was carrying a hundred and ten open files and could not take it.
She said it like a woman apologizing for a flat tire.
She said if I ever got the original statement in my hand, to call her back.
Here is the arithmetic I did on the ninth of January, sitting on the floor of my room because there is no chair.
I make eleven dollars an hour, thirty-eight hours a week. After withholding that is one thousand four hundred and sixty a month.
Rent above the laundromat: five hundred and twenty. Utilities: sixty-one. Phone: twenty-five. Bus pass: fifty.
Food: two hundred and thirty if I am careful, and I am careful.
Supervision fee to the state: forty a month, which people do not know about. You pay for being watched.
Restitution: two hundred a month, and that one I will not reduce and did not consider reducing.
That goes to the Okoro family through the clerk. I have never missed one.
That leaves three hundred and thirty-four dollars.
I had one thousand three hundred and forty saved in a credit union account.
Seven thousand five hundred minus one thousand three hundred and forty is six thousand one hundred and sixty.
Six thousand one hundred and sixty divided by three hundred and thirty-four is eighteen point four.
Eighteen and a half months.
I wrote the number 18.5 on the pad and put a box around it.
Then I turned the page and started reading about how long I actually had, and it turned out to be twelve.