(Photo from Wikipedia.)

Imagine bringing your 14-year-old daughter to America, with aspirations and dreams for her future.  Imagine learning, one year later, that she had been murdered and sexually assaulted.  Then imagine that the young classmate who befriended your family during your time of grief is the one arrested, tried and convicted of the crime.

Imagine you’re that classmate, spending the years when you should have been graduating and starting a career and a family, instead rotting in a prison cell for a crime that you did not commit.  Imagine your anger and frustration as your appeals get rejected, your letters to journalists go unanswered, your request to the District Attorney to retest the DNA evidence is coldly snubbed.

Imagine that you’re that District Attorney, now running for state office, with a splashy political event about reinstating the death penalty scheduled for the very day that the prisoner, whose request was not ignored by your successor, is to be released from prison, exonerated by a new DNA test.

Imagine you’re one of the jurors whose decision robbed that young man of 15 years in the prime of his life.  Or imagine you’re one of the original police investigators, horrified to discover that the true killer you ignored at the time killed another person, a murder that better police work may have prevented.  Imagine you’re the parent of that victim.

In order to imagine all this, let’s go back to November 15, 1989. 

Angela Correa was a high school freshman in Peekskill, N.Y.  Though she had only been in America for a year, she was learning English quickly and was enthusiastic about her education.  On that evening, she left home with her camera to take pictures for the high school photography class she loved.  She never returned.  Two days later, her half-naked and strangled body was found near a local elementary school.  The presence of semen indicated a sexual assault.

Jeffrey Deskovic was a sophomore who shared two classes with Angela.  Though they were not close friends, he was distraught over her death.  He met Angela’s family at the wake, and subsequently, according to The New York Times, “Mr. Deskovic went to church with the family, dined at their home and took Ms. Correa’s younger sister to the movies.”

Young Jeff began researching the case, apparently bringing information and ideas to the police investigators.  Jeff, naively, saw himself as being a good friend and a good citizen.  The police, however, saw a young man suspiciously obsessed with the case.

Eventually, police picked up Deskovic for questioning, and he agreed to take a polygraph test. After 6-9 hours of interrogation (the length of time varies in the news reports), without a lawyer or parent present, the frightened 16-year-old boy curled up in a fetal position, sobbing, and confessed to killing Angela Correa.  Deskovic insists that the confession seemed like the only way to end the questioning.  “I didn’t think they were going to stop until I told them what they wanted to hear,” he explained.  Besides, he knew the DNA evidence would exonerate him.

Which it did.  And didn’t.  The DNA test clearly showed that the semen did not come from Jeffrey Deskovic, but even though Deskovic had recanted his confession, this did not lead the investigators to conclude they had the wrong person.  In a startling leap of logic, they concluded that high school freshman Angela Correa must have had a consensual sexual encounter earlier in the day.

Despite Deskovic’s protestations of innocence, despite the DNA mismatch being introduced into evidence in court, the jury, on its third day of deliberations, convicted Jeffrey Deskovic of second-degree murder and first-degree rape on December 7, 1990.  Because of Deskovic’s youth, Judge Nicholas Colabella sentenced him to the minimum of 15 years to life.

Pedro Rivera was not Angela’s biological father, but once he met and began wooing Angela’s mother, Angela Vazquez, he felt like her daughter was his own flesh and blood.  Young Angela had been living in Colombia with her grandmother, but once Pedro Rivera married Angela Vazquez, they filled out all the immigration documents to bring her to America legally.

The loss of a child must be a punch to your gut, with the force of a Mike Tyson left hook, expelling every molecule of air from your lungs and never allowing them to ever refill.  Many strong marriages collapse from such traumas. This was one of them.  Pedro and Angela separated in 1992, and divorced soon after.

Deskovic’s early years in prison resulted in a slow estrangement from family and friends.  According to him, there were two early suicide attempts. Seeking peace, he converted to Islam, which helped him cope with the solitude but did not eliminate the anger against the justice system.  He filled his time between appeals by getting an associate’s degree, playing a lot of chess and learning to fix computers.  

Jeanine Pirro was not Westchester’s District Attorney at the time of Deskovic’s conviction (that was her predecessor, Carl Vergari), but by 1997, she was on her way to election to a second term and receiving national attention from her frequent appearances on cable-TV shows like Geraldo Rivera’s, discussing criminal cases like O.J. Simpson’s.  Later that year, her image - half tough-chick, half glamour-girl - landed her on People’s 50 Most Beautiful People.

That year, Deskovic read about Pirro speaking of DNA being able to reverse wrongful convictions, and wrote the Westchester District Attorney a letter, asking her to reopen the case and retest the DNA.  The response, according to Deskovic, was a “very rude letter,” the gist of which can be summed up in two words:  Screw you.

And so the years continued to pass, and Deskovic resigned himself to eventually dying in prison.  But finally, in 2005, two things happened that would change his luck: Pirro was succeeded as District Attorney by a woman with no interest in appearing in People, Janet DiFiore; and Deskovic contacted the Innocence Project.

The Innocence Project was founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in 1982.  It was created to use the technological advances in DNA testing to free prisoners who have been wrongfully convicted.  Jeffrey Deskovic was to be their 184^th success (out of 266 to date).

Convinced by research into the case that Deskovic might be innocent, Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison approached DiFiore in the summer of 2006 with a request to retest the DNA through the FBI databank.  DiFiore agreed.  (In Pirro’s defense, the databank was just coming online in the late 1990s, and at the time of Deskovic’s request, she may not have had access to it.)

The DNA was matched to Steven Cunningham, currently serving a life sentence in Westchester for a subsequent homicide. Confronted by the evidence, Cunningham confessed to the crime.  And after spending 5,766 days as a convicted murderer and rapist, Jeffrey Deskovic was freed from prison as an innocent man.

(Deskovic, left, with lawyers Nina Morrison and Barry Scheck.  Photo from Jeffrey Deskovic's website.)

Prison habits die hard – at his first post-release meal, at an Italian restaurant in New Rochelle, Deskovic declined a table in the center of the room, insisting on a seat with his back to the wall. However, Deskovic appears to be successful at making lemonade out of his lemons: he has become an eloquent spokesman, and has established a foundation, for criminal justice reform.

In what Barry Scheck called “cosmic irony,” on the day Deskovic was released, Jeanine Pirro, then the Republican candidate for state Attorney General, was to hold a press conference calling for the return of the death penalty in New York.  The Pirro campaign cancelled the event, not to avoid questions about Deskovic, but more likely to placate the police officer’s union that howled about her using Ground Zero for a partisan political event.

According to The Journal News, Pablo Rivera has not spoken to his ex-wife since the divorce, and believes she returned to Colombia, undoubtedly with a large hole in her heart that will never heal.  Rivera has remarried, but he still visits Angela’s grave every week.

Imagine that we learn something from all this.  Imagine that we stop rushing to judgment based on media coverage that is often inflammatory and filled with unsubstantiated rumors and “facts” that turn out to be untrue.  Imagine that we ignore the blowhard know-it-alls of cable TV, the Nancy Graces who exploit the misery of others for their own fame and fortune, who think any person questioned by police is a criminal, who think every defendant is guilty, who think every inmate should be strapped to a death row gurney. 

We could begin by expressing a little humility, by acknowledging the limits of our knowledge and our fallibility.  It’s important to remember that, except for the killer, there were no villains in this story.  The police and the District Attorney truly felt they had the right person.  The jury, understandably, gave greater weight to a police officer’s testimony rather than that of a teenage boy.  Jeanine Pirro felt she was defending the public’s interest.  Everyone involved had the best of intentions. And you know what’s paved with good intentions.

I consider myself a pretty smart guy, but I’m wrong a lot.  A lot.  So are you.  And so, unfortunately, is law enforcement.  Even the best justice system in the world makes mistakes.  As Judge Colabella said upon Deskovic’s release, “He got a fair trial.  He didn’t get a perfect trial.”

Jeffrey Deskovic, in a grisly way, was lucky that Angela Correa was sexually assaulted, because that left the DNA evidence that would eventually exonerate him.  Most crimes leave no DNA.  He was also lucky that he was convicted in New York, a state that has not executed a prisoner in 47 years.  

Imagine Jeffrey Deskovic, wrongly convicted -  and wrongly executed - buried in the same bleak cemetery as Angela Correa.

The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice

The Innocence Project