Authors: Lee Goodman
Injustice (49 page)
In the morning I carry my things down to the truck, then I drive home and stop in the very spot where, just hours before, I sat in the truck above Smeltzer's corpse, waiting for Upton. The day is promising. Tina and Barn and I will be at our cabin up north in a few hours. Lizzy and Ethan will meet us there. Maybe Chip and Flora will show up, too.
I get out and walk toward the house. The door opens, and Barn runs out and jumps into my arms. “Daddy, you're late.”
“Sorry, Barn.”
Now Tina is at the door. I put Barnaby down.
“I was thinking about you last night,” Tina says.
“I was thinking about you, too.”
“Actually, I was missing you,” she says.
“Likewise. Actually.”
“It will be nice, all of us being together at the lake, now that everything is settling down.”
“Yes,” I say. “It'll be wonderful. Now that everything is settling down.”
UTHOR'S
N
OTE
Daryl Devaney and Tina Trevor are fictional characters, but the Innocence Project is real. In the late 1980s and early '90s, the development of modern DNA testing finally made it possible to prove innocence (or guilt) years, and even decades, after a crime was committed. But as the character Nick Davis says, “The justice system doesn't treat kindly continued claims of innocence once the jury has ruled and appeals have all been exhausted.”
The Innocence Project was founded at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1992 to “assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing.” It is now a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization. Over the past twenty years, lawyers for the Innocence Project and its network of organizations have continuously chipped away at all the obstacles preventing the reversal of wrongful convictions, but it is still (as Nick says) a Sisyphean task.
At the time of this writing, DNA evidence has been used by the Innocence Project and its network of organizations to free 316 wrongfully convicted prisoners, 18 of whom spent time on death row. The average time of incarceration for these vindicated prisoners is about thirteen years. Also, many other wrongful convictions have been reversed through the work of the Innocence Project on grounds other than DNA evidence. Learn about the project and read some of the stories at
www.innocenceproject.org
.
LEE GOODMAN
's work has appeared in
The Iowa Review
, where it received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize in fiction, and in
Orion Magazine
. Goodman is also a screenwriter and a former attorney. He holds an MFA from Bennington College and has taught fiction writing at the University of Alaska and Interlochen Center for the Arts. He has two children and lives in Alaska, where he operates a commercial salmon fishing boat during the summer.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
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LSO BY
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EE
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OODMAN
Indefensible
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Lee Goodman
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Cover images © iStockPhoto; Stockbyte/Getty Images
Jacket Design by Pete Garceau
Jacket Photographs: White Tiles © iStockPhotos
Shadow of Person Walking © Stockbyte/Getty Images
Author Photograph by Ted Goodman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodman, Lee.
Injustice : a novel / by Lee Goodman. âFirst Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3607.O577I55 2015
813'.6âdc23
2014045974
ISBN 978-1-4767-2803-2
ISBN 978-1-4767-2806-3 (ebook)