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

countered immediately with the Alford plea: all three of us would plead guilty yet we would maintain our innocence. We would be released but not exonerated by the state.
    I thought I was going to have a heart attack. My first reaction was to think:
Tell them anything. Tell them I’ll say I’ve done anything if they’ll let me out.
I had reached a breaking point—my soul was damaged, and my physical health was even worse. Freedom was terrifyingly within reach.
    We got off the phone and a week of sheer hell began—I often think it was worse than the previous eighteen years combined. It didn’t help matters that I hadn’t really slept or eaten in days. By the time the offer was made, I knew I didn’t have much time left. I was dying. Every day that passed made me a little weaker, a little sicker. And I was losing my eyesight as well. If I didn’t jump on this deal, then the prosecutors would drag the case out for years—going to trial would be a terrible gamble to take. I would never live to see outside these walls again. I was willing to do whatever the courts and lawyers wanted by that point, just to avoid a miserable death in a filthy prison cell.
    When Benca and Jason’s and Jessie’s attorneys arrived at the Little Rock office of the attorney general on Monday the eighth, they were surprised to find a conference table lined with state prosecutors, all wearing their best suits and ties. It seems McDaniel and company meant business. They wanted to avoid the upcoming hearing, which would inevitably have led to a new trial for us. They wanted to put this case to rest, out of their lives for good—at one point, McDaniel said to Braga, “Is this going to get rid of Lorri Davis?” So everyone had turned out to make sure the deal went down, that day. As McDaniel asked each of our lawyers, starting with mine, for a vocal acknowledgment and agreement of the plea deal, things began to fall apart. Benca agreed, Jessie’s lawyer agreed, but when they got to Jason’s lawyer, he said they were not prepared to accept the deal—they hadn’t yet discussed it with their client. McDaniel went berserk, I hear. He said he’d get Jason on the phone from prison immediately. Jason’s lawyer said that wouldn’t do, he wanted to discuss the plea in person with his client. McDaniel said he’d get the lawyer into the prison in a matter of hours that day. Still, Jason’s lawyer refused, saying he had a brief at home he needed to work on. He’d get into the prison to see Jason within a few weeks. We could have been released the next day. Even McDaniel was shocked. He said, “Do you mean to tell me you’re going to allow your client to sit in prison for weeks when he could be out tomorrow?”
    So that was it for the day. At that point, everyone from our lawyers, Lorri, our friend Jacob Pitts, and more were camped out at the Capital Hotel, and all efforts became focused on getting word to Jason. By the night of the twelfth, as far as everyone knew he still had not responded or perhaps even heard from his lawyers. If word got out to the media, the state had made it clear the deal was off, so secrecy was a must. On that night, Lorri called Holly, the woman Jason had been corresponding with most often in recent years, and discovered that Jason had in fact heard about the deal, and he had said no.
    The prosecutor wanted all three of us—Jessie, Jason, and me—to take the deal or there would be no deal. Over the years Jason had grown to love prison. His circumstances were not the same as mine. He had a job, he had befriended the guards, and was actually looking forward to the next year in prison school. Jason had also said previously that he wasn’t willing to concede
anything
to the prosecutors. I understood that with all my heart, and I also knew he still believed he would be exonerated one day and walk freely through the prison gates. But his attorneys weren’t nearly good enough, and the state was too corrupt to ever let that happen. In many ways Jason was still the sixteen-year-old boy he’d been when we first went in. I was trapped in a nightmare, chained to someone I couldn’t even communicate with.
    And Holly’s response to Lorri was cavalier—she and Jason both felt morally superior to the terms, despite the fact that there were no guarantees in our future. Lorri got off the phone and called Eddie Vedder to update him. He in turn called Holly and begged her to talk some sense into Jason when he called her