Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

process. When it became apparent that the public defender was going to get me killed, Lorri started doing research into defense attorneys. When she found someone she believed could do the job, she’d hound them until they agreed to take the case. When it was time to pay them, she begged and borrowed until it was done. She took loans from family members and friends, too.
    The daily struggle was endless. The attorneys early on in my appeals would get lazy or go off to work on other cases they thought would bring them more prestige. Every day Lorri would have to plead and threaten in order to keep them moving forward, even at a snail’s pace. It was maddening, draining, and exhausting. There were times when the stress and frustration of dealing with callous and greedy people pushed her to the point of collapse, yet she still would not stop. To do so would have meant my death.
    She had to learn every single detail of the case, inside and out—names, dates, places, everything. She had to be my spokesperson, my representative. There is no one else in the world who could have done what she did, accomplished what she accomplished.
    In many ways Lorri was like a general, fighting battles on many fronts. Sometimes she fought against defense attorneys as hard as she fought the state. Some of those battles were won, others were lost. One loss came from Jason’s attorney right away. The cornerstone of his defense strategy from the outset was to make me look guilty. His plan was to dump the weight of the entire case on me and say that Jason had been sucked into the situation only because of his proximity to me.
    To accomplish this goal, the attorney lied to Lorri and me. He asked us to talk to a mitigator, who he believed could be helpful; in capital murder cases, a mitigator comes in after conviction and works to lessen the sentence—ideally to eliminate a death sentence. We agreed. I spent a day talking to a woman who wove together a mental health report that came to be known as Exhibit 500. In it she claimed I was schizophrenic, bipolar, and suicidal, and suffered from extreme hallucinations, and anything else you could think of. To this day that report is still cited as the most damning piece of evidence against me. The woman who wrote it couldn’t even testify in court because she’d already said in the past that she had lied on the witness stand in another case. To circumvent that little problem, she simply had another person file her report on me. That person’s name is on that report to this day. Events like this honed Lorri’s skills, sharpened her claws, and turned her into the warrior she became. Without her strength and drive, I would have been dead long ago.
    The attorney I had at the time didn’t really care one way or the other. And Lorri and I were not yet educated enough in the legal process to know what was happening. By the time we understood what Jason’s attorney was doing, it was too late. The damage had been done. It had become a stain on my life that would shadow me forever. Jason himself still doesn’t know any of this as I write it. He was blameless. Throughout all of this, a new execution date hovered in the background, though one was never actually assigned to me because the legal wranglings never resulted in my case being brought to federal court. After a stay of execution, a new date isn’t assigned until the state appeals are exhausted, and from 1996, the date I was supposed to enter federal court, until my release in 2011, federal court remained out of reach.
    As soon as I was sentenced and incarcerated, people far and wide sent letters of support and often monetary donations, too—anywhere from a dollar to thousands of dollars—which were used by my defense team. Inquiries were made on countless levels, from investigating the murders to the missteps in our trial to finding new evidence and witnesses we could use in future appeals and ultimately to effect a second trial for ourselves. All of these efforts cost money that we didn’t have, and nothing happened without it, apart from the hiring of new lawyers (I had seven working on my case at various times through the years) for my defense, who in turn were tasked with opening new investigations, finding forensic experts, and filing paperwork. One of the costliest aspects of a major defense is paperwork—you wouldn’t believe how the cost of photocopies and more photocopies can add up.
    In 2001, a new law regarding DNA testing went