Chapter 99: Counsel of Record
The committee did not refer my file to the Project's own lawyers. They had four attorneys and a live docket of thirty-one.
They referred it out, to a law school clinic ninety minutes away on two buses.
The Fulcrum Post-Conviction Clinic. Second floor, brick building, broken intercom with a sign taped over it.
I got there at 8:40 for a nine o'clock and sat in the stairwell, because being early in a waiting room makes you look like a person who needs something.
Ilona Brandt was fifty-one, had a cough she ignored, and a coffee she never drank. Eight banker's boxes on her floor, none of them mine yet.
“Sit. I've read it. I have questions, then you have questions.”
She asked about the seat first. Everyone else went to the date. She went to the seat.
“Who pulled the module data?”
“A salvage yard in Fenner. Bendix Auto. They held the car nineteen days on a storage lien, because nobody paid the tow.”
“Who eventually paid it?”
“My aunt. Eleven hundred and forty dollars, on the nineteenth day.”
She wrote that down and drew a line under it. Two years later I understood that the line was the beginning of everything.
Then she went to the date, and she did not get excited, which was the first thing I liked about her.
“A date discrepancy is a good fact. It is not a case. Say that back to me.”
“It's a good fact. It's not a case.”
“Notaries make errors. Clerks make errors. The state will say error forty times before it says fraud once.”
“Then we show it was not an error.”
“With what.”
“His journal. A notary keeps a bound sequential journal. Numbered entries. You can't backfill one without breaking the sequence.”
She looked up at me properly for the first time.
“Where did you learn that?”
“Correspondence course. Unit four. Notarial acts and journals.”
“My third-years don't know that until March.” I told her I had had the time, and she let it go past.
She slid a folder across the desk. Nine pages, clipped, not stapled.
I turned to the last page before I read the first, checked the date line, then went back and started properly.
She watched me do it and said nothing then. She said something about it two years later, in a corridor.
The terms were not generous. They were honest, which is different and rarer. The clinic would represent me at no fee, students would work, and she would sign everything.
I would be responsible for costs. Costs were paragraph 14, and paragraph 14 was long.
Filing fees. Transcripts. Records requests. Service of process. Deposition transcripts. Experts.
“Read fourteen out loud.” I read it out loud. Two minutes and eleven seconds.
“Now tell me what it means.”
“The lawyers are free and the case is not.”
“Correct. Most people don't get that until the first invoice comes.”
She listed what I would need on the back of an envelope, in a column.
An accident reconstructionist, because seat data means nothing without someone qualified to say what it means.
A document examiner, if the state contested how the confession was executed. Certified transcripts of the plea and the sentencing, sold by the page, no discount.
“What does a reconstructionist cost?”
“Six thousand five hundred for review and report. Four hundred an hour to testify, portal to portal.”
“Transcripts.”
“Three fifty a page. Plea and sentencing together, about six hundred pages.”
I did it in my head while she was still talking. Two thousand one hundred and change.
“Filing fee.”
“One thirty-five, unless you get a waiver. Apply for it. It is a form and it is not shameful.” I said I would apply.
She coughed, pushed the cold coffee an inch away, and said the sentence I had come for.
“The clinic does not pay for experts.”
“None of them?”
“There is a fund. Eleven thousand dollars, four cases ahead of yours, and two of those men are still inside.”
“So it's mine to find.”
“It's yours to find. This is where most of them stop, and I would rather you heard that from me than worked it out in June.” I asked what happened if I could not find it.
“We file what we have, we lose, and you've spent your one good petition on a bad version of it.”
“How many do I get.”
“One. Successive petitions get dismissed on the pleadings before anybody reads them.”
I looked at the eight boxes on her floor and thought about eleven thousand dollars split four ways ahead of me.
“How long do I have.”
“A year from discovery of the new evidence. You told Kroll you understood the seat data in March.”
“I did.”
“Then you have until March. That is not much runway and I will not pretend that it is.”
I signed the agreement. Two signatures, one on page eight and one on page nine.
Then I filled in the date myself, in my own hand, and read it three times before I let go of the pen.