The book is the brainchild of co-editors Laura Caldwell and Leslie Klinger. Caldwell is a former medical malpractice-defense-attorney-turned-professor at Loyola Law School in Chicago, where she is also the director of the Life After Innocence Program. Through this clinical program, students provide assistance to exonerees to begin their lives again. Such assistance is something that states provide to ex-offenders but not to those freed following a wrongful conviction. Caldwell is also the author of 14 novels that have been published in over 22 countries, as well as a work of nonfiction that recounts one man’s efforts to win exoneration.
Caldwell’s co-editor, Leslie Klinger, is a New York Times bestselling editor of over 20 books in the mystery field and considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sherlock Holmes and Dracula.
I spoke with Caldwell about “Anatomy of Innocence” and the process of bringing together those with great stories and those who know how to tell them.
Exoneration of the wrongfully convicted, whether through DNA or other means, is often described with a mountain of statistics. In the DNA category, since 1989, 349 people have been exonerated, in 37 states, with 20 serving time on death row. The average length of time served is 14 years. In 71 percent of the cases, witness misidentification played a part in the wrongful conviction. Less than one-third of exonerees win compensation for their time served. And on and on.
Looking at exoneration on a spreadsheet, however, makes it easy to forget the human element behind the numbers. That’s where “Anatomy” comes in. Caldwell told me that it’s exciting to know that more people are learning that wrongful convictions happen.
“But what I haven’t seen represented on too frequent of a basis,” she says, “is what it’s like to be in the mind, in the soul, behind the eyes” of someone who has experienced a wrongful conviction. “Anatomy” takes the reader to this terrifying place. And it is a destination so horrible that even knowing that the tragedy is ultimately corrected does not ease the overwhelming sorrow that one feels for the individuals.
Telling an exoneree’s entire story, sometimes spanning decades, is a monumental task that few writers, especially successful ones, would have the time to devote. So, instead, each story focuses on one stage of an exoneree’s experience.
The book opens with the account of the arrest of Gloria Killian. The police knocked on her door to ask some questions about the murder of an acquaintance of her roommate. Wanting to help out, she voluntarily agreed to accompany them to the police station. Killian was eventually convicted of the crime and spent 17 years in a California prison before her conviction was overturned. It was discovered that the testimony of the witness against her had been “purchased” in exchange for that witness receiving a lighter sentence for the crime.
The arrest story is followed by the tale of the Chicago police using torture during the interrogation of David Bates to secure a confession. The torture led to Bates spending 11 years in prison before being exonerated for a murder that he did not commit. The life-cycle of wrongful conviction continues with stories that focus on trial, sentencing, incarceration, appeal, exoneration, post-release and more.
As for putting all the pieces together, Caldwell told me that getting the authors on board was the easy part. The emails started arriving in rapid succession from writers once word got out about the project. “We at some point had to tell people ‘no.’ ” Once the writers were chosen each was paired with an exoneree. An effort was made to match each person’s story to the most fitting storyteller. The authors were paid $400. Exonerees each received $500, plus they will get a small percentage of sales if a certain threshold is met. The rest of the proceeds will go to Loyola’s Life After Innocence program.
A strict requirement for choosing exonerees was that they had to have been fully exonerated, Caldwell explained to me. In other words, a person whose conviction was reversed on legal grounds or a so-called technicality was not eligible. This limitation precluded the book from including one story that was akin to an exoneration, but the legal arrangement by which the individuals won their freedom was a plea bargain. This precluded the involvement of Johnny Depp with the book, who often spoke out about their plight. I can feel Caldwell’s disappointment all the way from Chicago.
To minimize the authors’ time commitment, and especially eliminate their need to do research, Caldwell’s clinical students prepared a brief dossier of each exoneree’s entire story. But because the authors were to focus on just one particular aspect, Caldwell said to author S.J. Rozan, who was paired with Gloria Killian, “Now your piece is just the day that she got the first knock on the door and eight hours later when she’s getting perp walked.”
The writers and exonerees worked together by phone. I was surprised to learn that the collaboration took place this way. Based on the vividness and power of the stories, I had suspected that the partners spent a week together in person.
Curiously, the list of “Anatomy’s” authors includes Arthur Miller, the legendary playwright and longtime opponent of the death penalty, who died in 2005. Three years earlier, Miller sent a seven-paragraph essay that he’d written about an exoneree to Rob Warden, then of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern School of Law, to be used in a campaign to eliminate the death penalty. Miller had told Warden that he was granting him all rights in the essay.
Warden gave the never-before published piece to Caldwell for her use in the book. Lawyers were convened, and Miller’s estate contacted, and all agreed that it was permissible for Miller’s work to be included in the collection.
In it, Miller describes the plight of Peter Reilly, who was convicted of murdering his mother. Reilly’s community believed in his innocence and raised funds for his appeal. In the course of a hearing on whether to grant Reilly a new trial, the original prosecutor dropped dead on the golf course. The new prosecutor, studying the file, discovered evidence that had been withheld from the defense. Reilly was freed after it was introduced at the hearing. Miller aptly titled his essay “Luck and the Death Penalty.”
The goal of “Anatomy of Innocence,” Caldwell told me, was to describe what wrongful conviction and exoneration “feel like.” Mission accomplished. And no doubt each fiction writer involved came away a believer that truth really is stranger than the stories they make up.