Toward the end of an event at Quimby’s on Monday Dave Eggers did a little math. In a survey, police and prosecutors reported they get it right 99.5 percent of the time. If that’s true, he argued, the 0.5 percent of cases they get wrong works out to approximately 11,000 innocent people in prison today. Up on the platform with him, James Newsome, who’d been one of that number for more than 15 years, jumped in. “I’ve never met a prosecutor who believed that anyone was wrongfully convicted. Never.” He asked if there were any prosecutors in the audience. No hands went up.
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Newsome and Eggers were on hand to promote a new book from McSweeney’s, Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated. Though Surviving Justice probably won’t be a best seller, a standing-room-only crowd of between 50 and 60 had shown up. The book is the first in a new McSweeney’s series called Voice of Witness, oral histories on human rights abuses inspired by a chance meeting. In 2003, after a talk by Studs Terkel at the University of California at Berkeley, Eggers was approached by Lola Vollen, founder of the newly organized national Life After Exoneration Program (LAEP), which assists exonerated prisoners with free job training, psychological counseling, legal help, and medical treatment. After Terkel’s talk Eggers had oral history on the brain. In fact, he was already working on a collection of interviews with public school teachers (published last year as Teachers Have It Easy). He’d also recently gotten an offer from Orville Schell, the dean of Berkeley’s journalism school, who’d encouraged him to come up with an idea for a course. By the summer of 2004 Eggers had a classroom of students at the school, ready and willing to begin interviewing exonerees who’d be brought to class by Vollen, with a book as the final product.
Eggers first got interested in the subject about ten years ago when he saw a Bill Kurtis report on the Gary Gauger case. Gauger, the McHenry County organic farmer convicted of murdering his parents in 1993 and sentenced to death in ’94, had his conviction overturned in ’96 and was pardoned by Governor George Ryan in 2002. Eggers followed other cases as they appeared in the newspaper and was struck by what the exonerees usually said immediately after release. “They’re happy, they don’t want to talk about being angry, they don’t want to talk about being bitter, they don’t even want to talk about their case.” There must be more to the story than that, Eggers thought. He imagined an “unfathomable rage.”
“No one understands prisons,” she adds. “It’s like coming from a foreign country, and unless you’ve been one of its residents, you just can’t imagine.” Monica Mahan, a social worker who counsels exonerees at Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, agrees. “To me, the most demeaning thing a therapist can say to their client is ‘I understand you, I feel your pain.’ ‘Cause we don’t. We understand it in an intellectual way, but we don’t understand it in the way that they’ve really experienced.”
The last question of the day for Newsome was political: who was the state’s attorney at the time of his conviction? “Richie Daley,” he answered. As a line formed to get books signed by Eggers, I asked Newsome if I could interview him. He refused. He’s worried that more publicity might have a negative effect on his business, and he’s burned out on the issue. He excused himself and left the store. He didn’t come back.
