What else would you call the man who
has confronted America's criminal-justice system and freed 36
innocent prisoners?
When James C. McCloskey entered Princeton Theological Seminary, he
fully expected that his chosen path would lead him to a life as a
minister in a mainline Presbyterian church. He never guessed it
would lead him to prisons scattered across the nation, much less to
a national reputation as a miracle worker.
McCloskey, executive director of Centurion Ministries, has helped
exonerate 36 men and women convicted of murder and rape, including
four on death row. Anybody who has studied the criminal-justice
system knows that freeing innocent prisoners is all but impossible.
Accomplishing the impossible not just once but over and over again
must qualify as a miracle - right?
Ask Clarence Brandley, who was a high school custodian in Conroe,
Texas, in 1980, when police arrested him for the murder of Cheryl
Fergeson, a blond-haired, blue-eyed student. The school's other
custodians, all of whom were white, shared opportunity, means, and
motive with Brandley, who is black. But when the white custodians
cast suspicion on their colleague, police arrested and prosecutors
charged Brandley - despite his almost clean record and a lack of
physical evidence linking him to the murder.
An all-white jury convicted Brandley, who was sent to death row.
McCloskey entered the case in 1986, traveling from
New Jersey to
seek evidence exonerating Brandley. According to Nick Davies, who
spent two years watching the Brandley case unravel while writing
the book
White Lies: Rape, Murder and Justice, Texas Style,
McCloskey eschewed an expensive hotel and instead moved into a
room over the garage of a defense lawyer's home, where he
"instantly surrounded himself with piles of paper, the whole
six-and-a-half-year history of the Brandley case. He hid in his
room, reading and writing notes, emerging only occasionally to
shoot baskets" with the lawyer or play with the lawyer's children
"before diving back into the paperwork."
Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of how the case left the
tracks, McCloskey understood that the only way to right the wrong
was to visit the white custodians over and over until the real
murderer finally told the truth. In 1987, Brandley was awarded a
new trial after it was discovered that the prosecution had withheld
evidence and that witnesses had committed perjury. He was
exonerated in 1990, and McCloskey escorted Brandley out of the
death row prison.
"McCloskey has compiled a record that is unparalleled," says
veteran attorney John C. Tucker, who has argued before the U.S.
Supreme Court and authored the books
May God Have Mercy: The
True Story of Crime and Punishment and Trial and Error: The
Education of a Courtroom Lawyer. "It's an extraordinary
achievement in a system that ferociously resists admitting a
mistake once direct appeals are over and a defendant's conviction
has become 'final.' "
All this from a totally unimposing 63-year-old.
THE ELDEST OF three siblings, McCloskey grew up comfortably
in the
Philadelphia suburb of Havertown. His father, who managed a
family construction company, taught him honesty, hard work, and a
maxim: "Knowledge is power." He also insisted that the family
attend an evangelical Presbyterian church. Though McCloskey did as
he was told, he came to resent organized religion. During college
at
Bucknell University, he stopped attending church, partied, and
majored in economics.
Graduating in 1964 with a career plan of going into international
business (with a focus on Japan), McCloskey volunteered for the
U.S.
Navy as an officer, with hopes of seeing the world. He
received an assignment in
Tokyo. Later, he volunteered for combat
in
Vietnam, where he learned a lesson that would serve him well:
Not everything is as it appears. He saw his commanders falsify
statistics about fatalities and heard American political and
military leaders mislead the public. His time in the Navy earned
him the Bronze Star for valor.
Upon returning home, making money became McCloskey's career plan.
After earning a master's degree in international business and
returning to
Japan as a well-paid consultant, he eventually settled
in
New York City to try a
Wall Street job, followed by a stint as a
management consultant at Hay Group in Philadelphia. He quickly
realized it was a poor fit. Concerned about the meaning of his
career and his reluctance to commit to marriage, McCloskey sought
direction through religion.
He returned to Philadelphia, where he told only one person about
the pull of faith - the Reverend Richard Streeter, who was minister
of Paoli Presbyterian Church. Streeter's preaching "compelled one
to serve others, and the only person I had been serving was
myself," McCloskey recalls. His epiphany arrived when he decided
the corporate life felt exploitative.
"If I was going to be exploited by anybody, I wanted to be
exploited by God, not by a corporation," he says. McCloskey began
exploring entry into the ministry. Some moments, he says, "I
thought I was crazy. Me, in the ministry? If my friends and family
ever discovered that, they'd think I was a fool, and a hypocrite."
When he gave notice at his consulting firm, his boss said, "Gee,
Jim, I didn't even know you went to church."
At age 37, McCloskey entered the Master of Divinity program at
Princeton Theological Seminary. Required to undertake his field
education in a church, a nursing home, or a prison, he recalled an
interesting luncheon talk years earlier by a prison chaplain. For
no better reason than that, McCloskey asked for an available
student chaplaincy. His assignment: Trenton State Prison. There, in
1980, he met Jorge De Los Santos, a convicted murderer proclaiming
his innocence.
McCloskey had no reason to believe De Los Santos. After all, don't
all inmates proclaim their innocence? But, as a new audience of one
for the inmate, McCloskey finally agreed to skim legal documents
from the case. To his surprise, he discovered that a witness who
identified De Los Santos as the murderer had given false testimony.
Furthermore, McCloskey discovered, as he dug deeper, that a fellow
inmate had swapped an alleged jailhouse confession from De Los
Santos for leniency, another deal never disclosed to the defendant.
Well, McCloskey thought,
maybe not all inmates who proclaim
their innocence are lying.
McCloskey took a one-year leave from the seminary, raised $25,000,
learned investigative techniques, and found a lawyer willing to
file an appeal. He found the jailhouse informant whose testimony
had helped prosecutors convict De Los Santos and persuaded him to
admit he had lied. As a result, De Los Santos was freed in
1983.
ALTHOUGH IT DEFIES common sense and the principles of
fairness and justice, evidence of actual innocence is frequently
ignored when presented after a jury or a judge has issued a guilty
verdict. Police, prosecutors, and judges value finality: They are
overwhelmed by new cases; the victims deserve closure; new evidence
sometimes is not probative; reopening cases is time-consuming and
expensive; the reasons pile up.
McCloskey began to understand the paths of resistance during his
lonely, quixotic De Los Santos investigation. Wondering whether the
obstacles would defeat his effort, McCloskey completed his divinity
degree in 1983. By then, so many other needy inmates had approached
him, McCloskey abandoned his dream of ministering to a congregation
in a traditional church setting. Instead, he decided to devote his
life to assisting men and women who appeared to fall into the
category of "imprisoned innocent."
Later that year, using his knowledge of business procedure and
choosing Princeton, New Jersey, as his base, McCloskey
incorporated Centurion Ministries, named for the Roman soldier at
Christ's crucifixion who said "Surely, this one was innocent."
Pleas for help flooded in. No inmates could afford to pay, so
McCloskey worked alone and lived rent-free in exchange for helping
his elderly landlady with grocery shopping.
In 1986, as it became clear that McCloskey's unlikely production
would run for more than one act - he played significant roles in
two additional New Jersey exonerations that year - journalists
started paying attention. A
New York Times article inspired
Kate Hill Germond, a businesswoman and community activist who had
just followed her husband from
California to New York City. Germond
viewed the
Times photograph of McCloskey's cramped work
space and thought,
I could organize him. She and McCloskey
met. Though McCloskey could afford to pay Germond only $100 a
month, she joined him. A gifted investigator and organizer, she,
too, began cracking open prosecutors' faulty cases.
Paul Henderson signed on next. A
Seattle Times reporter who
won a Pulitzer prize for vindicating a man falsely accused of rape,
Henderson left the newspaper to become a private investigator. In
1988, he began investigating for Centurion on a case-by-case basis.
Soon, he and McCloskey helped free two
Los Angeles men wrongly
convicted of murder. Henderson joined Centurion full-time in 1996,
working from his Seattle home.
"Jim's dedication to his mission and determination to find the
truth combine to make him the best murder investigator in America,"
Henderson says. "He knows how to make anybody comfortable talking
to him, from a district attorney to a crack addict. He is involved
in every case being handled by Centurion. I have trouble keeping
track of three or four at a time. Jim has command of every case -
dozens and dozens."
Today, the paid staff is made up of five full-time salaried
employees, four part-time salaried employees, and 15 volunteers.
McCloskey has also assembled a national network of forensic
scientists, but money is always tight, and there is never enough
time or manpower to devote to all the cases that come to his
attention. Sometimes dispirited by the financial shortfalls despite
Centurion's remarkable results, McCloskey says that it took a
California group two years to raise $7 million to rescue Keiko the
famous killer whale - more money than Centurion has received in
nearly 25 years. During 2005, Centurion's operating deficit
ballooned to $500,000, its largest ever. McCloskey refuses to ask
lawyers and forensic experts to work pro bono, knowing it is easy
for them to push unpaid cases to the back of the queue. Instead, he
usually negotiates a reduced rate with committed professionals who
absorb the rest of the costs.
Finding the right lawyer in a locale can be arduous. For example,
in 1993 McCloskey accepted the case of Ellen Reasonover, a single
mother in St. Louis convicted of murdering a service station
attendant in 1983. By then, Reasonover had spent more than a decade
in prison while relatives did their best to raise her daughter.
Police and prosecutors never produced physical evidence linking
Reasonover to the murder, never produced an eyewitness, never
located the murder weapon, never charged anybody besides Reasonover
despite believing she worked with two accomplices, used unreliable
jailhouse-snitch testimony as the basis of their case, and made
deals with the snitches that were never disclosed to the
defendant.
After digging by McCloskey and Henderson convinced them of
Reasonover's innocence, Centurion Ministries sought a lawyer in St.
Louis to file an appeal for Reasonover. But a good-old-boys network
in that city, as perceived by McCloskey, gave him pause. Instead,
he retained James Wyrsch, a lawyer in
Kansas City, about 300 miles
across the state. Wyrsch in turn deputized law-firm associates
Cheryl Pilate, a former newspaper journalist who had recently
earned a law degree, and
Charles Rogers, a former public defender.
Using evidence gathered by McCloskey and Henderson, Pilate and
Rogers finally found a federal judge who listened. The judge, a
Republican former prosecutor, ordered Reasonover freed. When she
walked out of prison in 1999, McCloskey greeted her, just as he had
greeted Brandley when he left the death row of a different prison
in a different state a decade earlier.
DESPITE HIS UNSWERVING faithfulness to the cause, McCloskey
is not infallible. In 1988, he took on the case of Roger Keith
Coleman, who was on
Virginia's death row for the rape and murder of
his sister-in-law. Before his execution in 1992,
Time
magazine put Coleman on its cover with the headline: "This Man
Might Be Innocent. This Man Is Due to Die." Coleman shared his
final meal with McCloskey, who vowed to press his case to the end.
He successfully petitioned Virginia Gov.
Mark Warner in January of
this year to reexamine the DNA evidence, but when the results came
back, they showed that Coleman had deceived everyone with his
protests of innocence. The news, McCloskey said, "was like a kick
in the stomach."
Still, the stream of alleged injustices never seems to slow, and
McCloskey's passion and persistence are so admirable that many use
the word
saint when accounting for his successes against a
usually intractable criminal-justice system. McCloskey, on the
other hand, worries about how his obsessiveness on behalf of the
wrongfully imprisoned might have compromised his spirituality.
Freeing dozens of prisoners comes with a cost perhaps greater,
though harder to measure, than never marrying and never fathering
children.
“Practically every waking moment, I’m thinking about this case or that case,” McCloskey says. “And while I like to think I’m serving God, I have drifted away from my roots. My prayer life is almost nonexistent.” Talking to the inmates and their loved ones simultaneously sucks him dry and gives him strength. “You’re always dealing with their pain and suffering,” he says. “You’re always in the pit either of suffering or of the lies that put them there — misbehavior by authorities, corruption.”
Retirement is not an option. On a secular level, McCloskey lacks a pension. On a spiritual level, McCloskey knows he must follow the path that began in that New Jersey prison. Then there is the harsh daily reality that so many innocent people in prison await his attention.
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