I filed appeals for six years. All denied.
There was no DNA in my case. No physical evidence of any kind, actually, which is what eventually saved me and also what kept me in, because there was nothing to re-test. There was just a receipt and a record and a nineteen-year-old girl in a witness box with a cross around her neck.
In 2010 I quit. I don’t mean I quit filing. I mean I quit in the way where you stop asking for things because asking costs something and you’re out of it.
I got my GED. I worked in the laundry for eleven years and then in the kitchen. I read maybe nine hundred books. I learned to make a decent cup of coffee out of equipment that had no business producing one.
I turned thirty in there. Then forty. Both days went by exactly like the days on either side of them.
