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.