Unintended Consequences - By Marti Green Page 0,35

help Darryl. Please, show them he’s innocent, that he didn’t do such a horrible thing.”

“But he confessed,” Dani reminded her.

“No, no, they made him, he told me so. Help him. You’re the only one I can ask.”

The years hadn’t changed her view of the criminal-justice system. Dani believed eyewitnesses were reliable. She knew innocent people didn’t confess, no matter how seriously they were mistreated. But Jenny was family. She promised she’d see what she could do. Being a new lawyer, first studying for the bar exam and then caught up in the energy of a new job, falling in love with the man who would become her husband, struggling with the demands of motherhood—it was easy to forget a promise amid all that. Once in a while, Jenny would call and ask, “Anything yet? Did you find anything?”

“No, I’ve been looking, but nothing yet,” Dani would answer with only the mildest twinge of guilt about her deception.

And then Jenny became ill, riddled with cancer that spread from her breast to her lymph glands and then her brain. Dani had left the U.S. Attorney’s Office by then, devoting her full attention to Jonah. When she visited Jenny in the hospital and Jenny clutched Dani’s hand in hers, looked at her with her rheumy eyes and whispered, “Please, before it’s too late, help him,” Dani knew she couldn’t avoid it any longer.

Darryl had been sentenced to life in a Florida state penitentiary. True to the cops’ promise, he’d avoided a death sentence through his confession. By then, Dani’s parents had retired in Florida, and she planned a trip with Jonah to visit them and arranged to meet with Darryl while she was there. As a result of that meeting, she began to question her previous assumptions.

Darryl had been 19 when the police picked him up for questioning about the rape and murder of Janice Priestly, a sixteen-year-old high school student working part time at a local Burger King. It was one of the many fast-food restaurants frequented by students at a nearby college, where Darryl earned straight A’s and edited the college literary magazine. He readily admitted to having been at Burger King that night, along with his friend Lance, planning the next steps for a shared research project. He hadn’t noticed any of the employees and left shortly after 8. But according to Janice’s friend and co-worker Rona McAfee, Darryl had been flirting with Janice, and when she finished her shift at 8, both Darryl and Lance followed her out the door.

When brought in for questioning, Darryl assumed that it must have been a mistake and saw no need to have a lawyer present. After all, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Twenty hours later, Darryl understood that his innocence was irrelevant. During his interrogation, he had been beaten in the head, the chest and the legs, never on the face, and always with a phone book held against his body so as not to leave evidence of the brutality. They threw a chair at him and repeatedly slammed his head on the table. When the abuse failed to produce a confession, the police told him Lance had confessed and would soon implicate Darryl. They told him he’d receive the death penalty unless he, too, confessed. They showed him photographs of death row. They held a hypodermic needle to his arm and said, “This is how we’ll kill you.”

At that moment, Darryl knew his only two choices were life in prison and death. He chose the former. The police had lied about Lance; he hadn’t confessed, nor had he implicated Darryl. But to escape the death penalty, Darryl had agreed to testify against his friend. They were both sentenced to life in prison.

Twelve years later, the governor of Florida received a letter from a convict on death row in Georgia saying two innocent men were in prison for the rape and murder of Janice Priestly, a crime for which the letter-writer took sole responsibility. Instead of interviewing the convict, Florida police interviewed Darryl in prison. Fearful that asserting his innocence would harm his chance for parole, Darryl reaffirmed to the police that he had committed the crime.

Now he sat before Dani, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life.” She believed him. When Darryl was convicted, DNA testing was in its infancy. By the time she’d met him, it was proven technology. Over the next few months, Dani tracked down evidence files from his trial