"Now I question everything"

This isn't the typical fare one sees at McSweeney's, which is usually more like this (via GeekPress): "Responses in an Interview for a Nanny Position That Will Almost Certainly Sink Your Chances of Getting the Job."

Humor, in other words, usually quite offbeat, dark, or satirical.  My cup of tea exactly.

But this isn't.  Humor, I mean.

In 1992, Beverly Monroe was accused and convicted of murdering her longtime companion, Roger Zygmunt de la Burdé. He had actually killed himself. Though de la Burdé's death was originally treated as a suicide, a police detective named David Riley was intent on charging Monroe with his murder. He succeeded, and Monroe spent seven years in jail fighting to prove her innocence. When she finally did, in 2003, she had spent hundreds of thousands on legal fees, lost her home, and missed out on seven years of her life.

Here's part of Beverly's Monroe's account of how Riley began the process of convicting her.

[Riley] started writing out this so-called statement to the suicide—a hypothetical. He had about three or four sentences down before I said, "What are you writing?" and he said, "Oh, don't worry about this, this is just a hypothetical."

He starts writing this down as though I have said it already—that I was there asleep on the couch and that I remember this. And I said, "I don't remember this, I don't think it can possibly be true. I remembered leaving, and I remember him telling me goodbye. I wasn't asleep, he wasn't asleep." But he wouldn't listen to any of it. He just kept writing. And then he asked me about picking up the gun. He said, "What did you have on?" He never went to a question directly. He just said, "What did you have on?" So I'm thinking, OK, "What did I have on? I had on a long-sleeved sweater." And he said, "Would you have used that to wipe off the gun?"

He's insisting that I go along with this, and I said, you know, "Joe [Hairfield] picked up the gun," because I remember Joe saying it. I didn't see it.

We'd been in that car a little over two hours, and he says, "You have to sign this." And I said, "But it's not true." That's when he got really ugly. His face turned red and he was very angry. He said that all he had to do was pick up the telephone and by that afternoon it would be all in the papers. I would lose my job, I would be arrested, I would not be able to speak to my family, he would drag my family through the mud. That made me realize if I didn't do what he said that my life was going to be over, my life as I knew it. This person has the ability to destroy you and they're threatening to destroy your life and your family. I wouldn't have a chance to talk to my boss, explain anything. I'm the person that's responsible for my family. I'm a single mother with three kids in college, and what do you do? It's like someone holding a gun to you and saying you have to do it, you have no other way to go. He basically said that he was either taking me or that piece of paper. What do you do? So I signed it.

I thought I would be able to get away, to get back to my office, to be able to think. He said, "Wait here." We got out of the car and he went to his car and he got his gun, a huge gun, and he stuck it in his belt, and he walked me around through the woods. Almost all of that time he was trying to get me to take some kind of plea. He was just threatening me again. It was not till 4:30 that he brought me back to where the cars were.

I remember I asked him what would he do then. He said he would take this to the prosecutor but that I could go back to my office. He said he would call me. This is how strange it all was. You'd think if you really thought someone was a murderer you would arrest them.

We've all heard stories of justice miscarried, of innocent people exonerated after serving years or even decades behind bars, or executed for murders they didn't commit.  But if these are true as presented, such things are more widepread than I realized, and worse, they aren't innocent mistakes committed by police or prosecutors who merely made mistakes while seeking justice.  Those, while tragic, are often forgivable and unavoidable imperfections of the best justice system in the world.

This, though, isn't forgivable, at least not in the same way.  We can't just chalk this sort of thing up to the downsides of life on this Earth, shrug, say "c'est la vie" and move on.  And no, I don't know what Riley's motivation might have been to do something like this. 

I'm a big believer in restitution, which doesn't often happen in the criminal justice system.  When an offender is fined, those fines should largely go to his victim rather than the state, except as necessary to cover costs.  And anyone who knowingly attempts to wrongfully convict anyone of anything, or even passively permits such, should be required to make restitution—as far as is possible, of course—to anyone so wronged.

This account is from a book available from McSweeney's: Surviving Justice:  America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated.  I haven't read it and I don't know what conclusions it comes to, so I therefore can't recommend it.  But it, and any stories like it, certainly bear investigation.  No—they require it.  Demand it.  If we call ourselves civilized, we can do no less.

And if any of what this book claims is true, we have lots of work to do.