Chapter 97: The Policy
The Ardith Justice Project took applications by mail only.
No email. No telephone. A post office box in a city four hours north of me, and a stamped envelope if you wanted an answer back.
I learned that on a library computer with eleven minutes left on my session.
The intake packet ran nineteen pages. I printed it for two dollars and ten cents and carried it home in a grocery bag because it was raining.
Marisol let me use the office scanner after six if I logged my own paper.
I logged it. Forty-one sheets that month, four cents a sheet, off my check.
She never asked what I was printing. She read the log instead. That was her way of asking.
The packet had four sections. Identification. Conviction. Evidence. Statement. I did them in order, because the order is there for a reason.
Identification took eight minutes. Name, aliases, inmate number, parole officer's name and badge number.
I still knew my inmate number faster than my own phone number.
Conviction took longer. Docket number, plea date, sentencing date, appellate history, prior post-conviction filings.
I had none. You give that away when you plead. I gave mine away in four minutes.
Then page four. Section 3.2.
The Project does not accept applications from persons who entered a plea of guilty.
I set the packet on the scanner glass and stood with both hands flat on the lid.
The lamp was still warm. It laid a white bar straight through the sentence.
I read it again with the light on it. It said the same thing.
Two years of carrying four hundred and twelve pages, and it ended on page four.
Then I read all of 3.2, because a certificate somewhere says to read all of it.
Subsection (c). Exceptions. Three, lettered i, ii, iii, in nine-point type.
Roman one was DNA. I had none. Nobody had ever doubted whose car it was or whose name was on the registration.
Roman two was a co-defendant swearing sole responsibility. I had no co-defendant.
That was the whole design of the thing.
Roman three ran nine lines. I read it four times standing up.
Where the applicant alleges the plea or confession was procured by fraud, and documentary evidence of that fraud exists independent of the applicant's own account.
Independent of my own account. That was the phrase.
The confession was executed on the fourteenth. The crash report was written on the sixteenth.
Nobody had to believe me. The paper said it without me in the room.
It had been saying it for six years to nobody at all.
I sat down on the floor of the scanning room, because the only chair had bond files stacked to the armrest.
I laid the exhibits out in two rows, squared to the baseboard, the way I sort anything.
Row one, six documents. Row two, four.
I put the confession and the crash report side by side, dates up, a hand's width apart.
Then I stuck a note above the gap and wrote 48 HOURS on it in capitals.
That was the case. On a carpet that had not been cleaned since before my arrest.
The evidence section wanted a numbered index. I built one. Eleven items.
Item 7 was the seat track printout, four pages, printed on a dot matrix in 2019.
Item 8 was the manufacturer's specification sheet for that seat rail, downloaded off a parts catalogue for nothing.
Item 9 was Dean Mercer's driver's licence. Height, six foot two.
Item 10 was Bree Halloway's. Height, five foot two.
Item 11 was the page with Renata Halloway's name on it, which I did not understand yet.
At twenty to nine Marisol came back for her keys and stopped in the doorway.
She looked at the two rows and did not step on them.
“Rent's due Friday,” she said.
“I know.”
“You're on the schedule Saturday. Seven to three.”
“I know that too.”
She left. She did not say good luck. I would not have known what to do with it.
The last section was the statement. One page, handwritten or typed. No attachments, no exceptions.
Tell us, in your own words, why you are innocent.
I had six years to prepare that page. I sat in front of it for fifty minutes.
I wrote four sentences and crossed out three of them and started the page again.
Under the box was one more question, in smaller type, and it had teeth in it.
Have you ever told anyone, at any time, that you committed this offense?
I had. Out loud, in a courtroom, to a judge who asked me twice and waited both times.
I said yes twice. I signed my name underneath it. Both of those things are facts and I have never argued with either.
I checked the box marked YES, because the alternative was lying on page nineteen of a form about a lie.
Then I wrote the date beside it, and I read the date, and I read it again.