Wrongful Conviction Read online

  Wrongful Conviction

  Rachel Sinclair

  Tobanna Publications

  Copyright © 2019 by Rachel Sinclair

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

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  Johnson County Legal Thrillers (Kansas City, Missouri)

  Bad Faith - https://tinyurl.com/y3a6vtcm

  Justice Denied - https://tinyurl.com/y6l24d5u

  Hidden Defendant - https://tinyurl.com/y2od8qrd

  Injustice for All - https://tinyurl.com/y2znryaw

  LA Defense - https://tinyurl.com/y6o6j83f

  The Associate - https://tinyurl.com/y5kskl7c

  The Alibi - https://tinyurl.com/yy96k97t

  Reasonable Doubt - https://tinyurl.com/y6nw27kn

  The Accused - https://tinyurl.com/y2d9t3z7

  The Hate Crime - https://tinyurl.com/y5w4e24k

  Secrets and Lies - https://tinyurl.com/y6pwcjjw

  Until Proven Guilty - https://tinyurl.com/yxlllu7d

  Emerson Justice Legal Thrillers (Los Angeles)

  Dark Justice - https://tinyurl.com/y2ezwnny

  Southern California Legal Thrillers (San Diego)

  Presumption of Guilt - https://tinyurl.com/y2oowdwz

  Justice Delayed - https://tinyurl.com/y3lh6rno

  By Reason of Insanity - https://tinyurl.com/y3d4k584

  Wrongful Conviction

  Chapter 1

  Christian

  I just got a new case – Jamel Jackson. I felt privileged to be representing him, because I had read about his case in the paper, and I couldn’t help but think that he was getting a raw deal. He had been convicted of raping an actress. Not just any actress, but an A-list actress by the name of Felicity McDaniel. I had been following the case along, and I just had a feeling that there was something that was missing in the entire procedure.

  So, when I went to see him in the jail, unannounced, I talked to him to get a sense as to what had happened. The kid was just 18 and had been convicted for the rape of Ms. McDaniel, and to say that he was frightened would be an understatement.

  “Why are you here to see me?” he asked me. He was a slight African-American boy, only about 5’6” and probably a buck thirty, with braided hair, café au lait skin and fine features. He had obviously been crying, as his big brown eyes were bloodshot and red. “They just put me in jail. I’m going be serving life in prison. I don’t have the money to pay nobody for an appeal, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  He looked down at his hands, which were shackled, as were his legs. I knew that he was due to be transferred to the state penitentiary, in Victorville, California, within days. From the looks of him, the prospect of going to a maximum security prison was terrifying for him. As it would be for anybody in his shoes.

  I had a strong feeling that this was an innocent boy who was looking back at me, and I knew that nobody was going take his case. It was not only the fact that he had no money , but also because this was the case that nobody really wanted to touch with a 10 foot pole. Still, his situation did not deter me. Once I had a feeling that an injustice was done, that’s all I really knew.

  “Listen, you only need to know one thing,” I said. “And that's that I am interested in your case. I don't even expect you to pay me. I know you don't have the money.”

  Jamel looked at me suspiciously. “Yeah, dog, don't nobody do nothing for free. Why do I think that this is going to cost me more than cash?”

  I folded my hands in front of me and looked at him silently. I was studying him, just as he was studying me. What I didn't really want to tell him was that I was very interested in this case because I just had a feeling that the person who really raped Felicity was somebody who really needed go down, and hard. There was a shadowy figure behind his entire case, and I just had a feeling that it was somebody who deserved justice. I wanted to be the one to give it to him.

  What I knew about this case was that there was no DNA found inside of Felicity. She, herself, had no recollection of what had happened to her - she was beaten that badly. She'd been in the hospital for several months before she was even able to talk to the cops. She had severe memory loss, and her abdomen had been kicked so viciously that she was bleeding internally. These were just her internal injuries. Externally, she had been savagely kicked, so she was bruised everywhere. Her eyes were swollen shut, and it took the best plastic surgeon in Los Angeles to bring her to where she looked like herself again.

  The best I could tell, the reason why this poor guy was in jail, and convicted, was because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. He had explained to the court that he was an Uber delivery driver, and that Felicity apparently had ordered a sub sandwich from Subway to have delivered to her house. However, by the time he got there, according to what his court testimony was, he had found that she was not answering the door. He didn't know what to do, because he was new on the job, and he didn't realize that in cases where the person doesn't answer the door, you're supposed to indicate on the app that nobody was answering, and then you have to wait a certain amount of time. If the person doesn’t answer the phone or the door within that window of time, you can leave with the food.

  However, as Jamel had explained in his testimony, he wasn’t aware of that provision. He thought that he had to make every effort to deliver the food. So, he had gone around to the pool area to see if he could find her, and, he told the court, he found her laying by the pool, unconscious. He called 911, and they came to take her to the hospital. She almost died.

  Of course, the prosecutor made hay about the fact he was able to get into the pool area in the first place. After all, the pool area of her house was locked, with a combination lock. The assumption was that if he was telling the truth, and he really was an Uber driver, and he just wanted to deliver her food, come hell or high water, he would not have been able to get back there.

  This was one of the first errors that I found in the case. His defense attorney did a terrible job. I knew that I was going to have to comb the transcripts for any kind of error the court made, but I knew that in the end, I probably was going to have to go with an ineffective assistance of counsel defense, and try for a writ of habeas corpus. His defense attorney never even proposed the question of how would Jamel have been able to get back into the pool area, even if he was the one who was the rapist? If the pool area was locked, it was locked. In fact, that was the entire hole in the entire case as far as
I was concerned – there was no reasonable explanation as to how it was that he would been able to get on the grounds in first place. To me, the entire thing seemed to be a huge set up.

  I wasn't sure, but my instinct told me that what had happened was that the actual person who beat her and raped her did so and then summoned an Uber delivery driver to come and deliver food, with the intention of eventually setting up the driver, whoever it was. The person who raped her deliberately left the pool area open, and left the gate to her home open, and that person had taken the chance that the Uber driver would not have known that you're not supposed to go onto private property to deliver food. Indeed, I had reviewed the rules for Uber delivery drivers, and that's one of the things that they're not supposed to do – they are not supposed to go onto private property. If the person doesn't answer the door, the person doesn’t answer the door. You take the food and you go.

  So, the prosecutor was able to make hay about that entire thing as well. He was able to show that since it was Uber policy not to go onto private property, that meant that Jamel’s protestations that he was an innocent bystander was bullishit, because if he really was just an innocent Uber driver, he would've followed the policy like he was supposed to.

  Of course, if the defense attorney was doing his job, he would've hammered home the fact that Jamel was, indeed, delivering Uber at the time that Felicity was found. That would have been easy enough to do - all he would have to have done was subpoena the Uber dispatch to show that Jamel had indeed taken an order from Felicity's house, and delivered it at that time. That would have bolstered Jamel’s story. But the defense attorney didn't even bother to do that, so the prosecutor was able to successfully make the argument to the jury that Jamel wasn’t delivering at that time, but that he had wandered in off the street, and was able to scale the wall to Felicity's mansion, and then scale the wall to her pool area, where he raped her and beat her and then called 911.

  None of it made sense to me. I knew that Felicity's walls around her house and around her pool were made of stone and were 10 feet tall. The prosecutor was not able to really establish that Jamel would've been able to scale either one of those walls, let alone both of them, but again, the defense attorney did not question the theory that Jamel got onto the grounds by scaling the walls. In fact, the defense attorney did not even bother to go to the site and see exactly how high these walls really were.

  There were so many errors that were committed by his attorney, I couldn’t even count them all. Unfortunately, I had a harder time trying to find errors that the court had made. It seemed to me that the court really didn’t make too many errors in the case, but the defense attorney was another story. He made a ton.

  And, at this point, I was cynical. I had seen what happened when people were corrupted by the system, and I knew that there was a good chance that the defense attorney might've been paid off to throw the case. Of course, I had no proof of that, but I did know that he was extraordinarily incompetent. I also knew that somebody was going to be convicted of raping this poor woman. An A-list actress was raped, beaten so badly that she was practically in a coma, she lost her memory, and she had to have extensive plastic surgeries to return her to normal. Somebody was going to pay for that. So, after reading through the facts of the case, and the transcripts, I realized that what happened was that somebody was going to pay for doing that to her, and Jamel was unfortunately the closest person that the prosecutor could find to pin the blame on.

  The reason why I was convinced that the true culprit was somebody who was well-connected was just the fact that so many things had gone wrong in this case. It wasn't just that the defense attorney did not object to things that were clearly objectionable, and there were quite a few things that were objectionable, and it wasn't just the fact that the defense attorney failed to put on exculpatory evidence, such as showing that the walls of the compound were way too tall for a small boy like Jamel to have scaled.

  "Jamel, here's the thing,” I said to him. “At this point, I don't think you really have a choice but to trust me. What do you have to lose? You just told me that you don't have the money to hire somebody to file an appeal for you, so, as I see it, it’s either me or nobody. You're already convicted of raping Felicity McDaniel. You have a chance to actually get out of your prison sentence, and, that chance lies with one person – me.”

  He shook his head. "No, don't get me wrong. I know what you're saying, and I know that if somebody don't help me, I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison for something I had nothing to do with. But I just don't know what's in it for you.”

  I took a deep breath. "Listen, here's the thing. I went to law school because I knew far too many of my friends who were going into the joint for nonviolent drug offenses. That's how they cleaned up my neighborhood – cops would sweep anybody and everybody who was caught with so much as a joint, and make sure that they got the book thrown at them. Of course, the only people who were subjected to this kind of treatment were minorities – the black people and the brown people. On the other hand, I would stand on the street corner and smoke a joint, and cops would drive by me and look the other way. But, if there was a black boy, or a Hispanic boy, or girl for that matter, they couldn't do anything on the street. If they had so much as a dime bag on their person, they were harassed, and, trust me, the cops harassed people on my street, and they would be charged with intent to distribute and be put away for a long time. So, after seeing one person after another on my street go to prison for what should have been a misdemeanor possession, I decided I was going to do something about it. The thing that I decided to do was to go to law school so that I could help people like the people that I grew up with.”

  At this, Jamel smiled. "Come on, you're putting me on. You’re not from the streets.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  "Look at you. You got lots of money, I can tell." He was looking at my Rolex watch, and he nodded his head approvingly. "That watch costs more than what my mama makes in an entire year. Twice as much as what she makes. I can just tell it’s not hot. I mean, you get these clowns in the hood selling that shit on the street, but you know it's made in Taiwan and it’s going to break by the end of the day. But I can tell that that's the real shit right there. No, you ain't never been on the streets. But that's all right. I'm sure you have your reasoning for trying to get me out of this place. I think you probably just want the publicity, but, as my mama says, I’m not going to look no gift horse in the mouth.”

  I was telling him the truth about my neighborhood. It was a rough place to grow up, especially if you’re a minority. But I knew that I presented as a rich guy, and I wasn’t going to convince this kid otherwise, so I let it go.

  “That's good. Listen, here’s what I'm going to do. I’m going to go ahead and take your case, and file a notice of appeal immediately. I think we have a very good chance of getting your conviction overturned, but in the meantime, I really want to prove your actual innocence. I know that there was no DNA that was found on Felicity, so it's going to be difficult to try to prove your innocence, but I'm really going to try to do just that. At any rate, even if I can't show the appellate court that you are actually innocent, I want to go ahead and make the case for your new trial. And, I can almost assure you that you're going to get a new trial.”

  I took a deep breath, hoping that I was not promising too much. It wasn't like me to go ahead and make a claim like I just made to him – that I would be able to for sure get him off of his charge. But, at the same time, I knew that there was a good chance that that would happen.

  Jamel was looking at me now, his eyes scrunched up and with a look on his face like he just could not understand anything about what was going on. "Listen, I'm okay with walking this prison sentence down. I got a brother in the system, half-brother really, and he tells me that things aren’t so bad behind bars. To tell the truth, I was having a hard time trying to make ends meet on the streets. I mean, I was driving Uber and all that shit,
but they don't pay nothing. And you know that most of the money that I was making through Uber was going into the tank. I ain’t got a pot to piss in, and that's the truth. Listen, I know that kids like me, we don't get a lot of breaks in this world. We certainly don't get to have defense attorneys just take our cases for free. I still don't know what your game is, but you're right about one thing – you are the only game in town for me. So, I'll let you represent me.”

  I took a deep breath. My homebase was in San Diego, of course, and this kid was convicted in Los Angeles County. But, he was being taken to the Victorville prison, and that would've been the same thing if he would have been convicted in San Diego County, so I figured that it wasn’t going to be too much of a burden to represent him.

  I left him with a handshake and an assurance that I was going to be working on his case as soon as possible.

  I called Avery in my car on the way home.

  "I saw Jamel, and he's going to be my new client.”

  "Are you sure about this?" Avery was concerned about my taking on this case, because she knew it was going to be hard on me if I lost. She also knew that it was going to be hard on me to travel, because the District Court of Appeals was here in Los Angeles County. But, at the same time, I knew I didn't have to really make too many appearances in court, so it really wasn't that big of a deal for me.

  What was going to be somewhat hard on me was the fact that I was determined that I was going to find the real person who had raped this woman, which meant that I was going to have to make a lot of trips up to Los Angeles to try to figure that one out. I was going to have to talk to a lot of people, and I was going to have to make more than one pilgrimage to the actual site where she was raped. But, for the time being, it was just a matter of me getting back to my office in San Diego and combing through the transcripts for all the errors, and then doing my research, and writing out a brief, and then having an oral argument as soon as possible.