Chapter 56: The One-Year Rule
The public library on Danforth has four computers and a forty-minute session limit.
It also has a reference librarian named Owen, who is about sixty and does not ask what you are looking up.
I spent eleven sessions there in January.
I paid two dollars and forty cents in printing fees that month, at ten cents a page, and I kept every sheet.
The state has a post-conviction statute. Every state does.
Ours is chapter 7. It is nine pages long, and about six of those pages are about what you cannot do.
Here is the structure, and I am going to lay it out flat because it is the wall the whole year ran into.
Owen showed me the annotated code, which puts the cases under each subsection in six-point type. I read those annotations for three sessions and understood about half.
You can file a petition saying your conviction was obtained in violation of your rights.
You must file it within one year.
One year from what? From the date the judgment became final.
Mine became final thirty days after sentencing, in November of the year of the crash, because I did not appeal.
You do not appeal a plea.
That is most of the point of a plea, from the state's side.
So my one year ran out more than five years ago, while I was inside.
The law library in that building is open Tuesdays and Thursdays and has one copy of the state code with pages 400 through 430 torn out.
That is not an excuse either.
Thousands of people file from inside. Some of them win.
There are exceptions to the one-year bar. There are exactly three of them and they are narrow.
One: a right newly recognized by a court and made retroactive to cases on collateral review. Not mine.
Two: the state actively prevented the filing. That is a hard showing, and I did not have it and never would.
Three, and this is the one: a factual predicate that could not have been discovered earlier through the exercise of due diligence.
Then a petition must be filed within one year of the date that factual predicate was discovered, or could have been discovered by a reasonable person exercising due diligence.
I read that sentence forty times in a public library on a Tuesday afternoon.
Due diligence.
Here is what it means for me. I worked it out sitting there with a pencil.
It is bad.
The state will say: you had this page.
You had it in the discovery your attorney received in the year of the crash.
You had a certified copy of the whole file in your own hands twenty-two months ago.
You are a certificated paralegal. You scan four hundred pages a day for a living.
And they will say: a person exercising due diligence would have read the date on her own confession the day she got it.
And they will be right.
I sat in a chair with a wobbling caster, in a library that smelled of carpet shampoo, and admitted that to myself.
It took about four minutes, which is faster than I usually manage.
They will be right about what I could have done.
That does not make them right about the law. It is a bad place to start.
There is a counter-argument, and Ruth Ahearn eventually made it better than I could.
The operative discovery is not the date on the page. It is what the date means.
That requires the crash report beside it, and I did not have the two pages side by side until I had the whole file and a table big enough to hold them.
That is a thin argument. I knew it was thin the day I invented it.
But there is a second door, and it is the one that mattered.
Actual innocence.
Most states, and mine is one, allow a freestanding actual-innocence claim that is not subject to the one-year bar.
The reasoning is that the state's interest in finality does not extend to keeping innocent people convicted.
The standard is brutal.
New, reliable evidence. Such that no reasonable juror would have convicted.
A date on a photocopy is not that. It is not close to that.
But a chain is.
The original signed statement. Evidence of who prepared it. Evidence of when. Evidence of who paid the lawyer.
That is four things and I had none of them and I had a photocopy.
At 3:40 on the last Tuesday in January I wrote a date at the top of a clean sheet.
The eleventh of December, 10:52 p.m. That is when I understood.
Under it I wrote: FILE BY DECEMBER 11 NEXT YEAR.
Then I underlined it twice, which I do not do.
Owen looked over, because the pencil made a noise.
Twelve months.
I needed eighteen and a half to pay for it.