Through the roach-rife lobby, where bold bugs nose the soles of your shoes and scores of black women sit stiff-backed for hours in scoop chairs shushing their toddlers; through the pat-down room, where the beetle-eyed guard rifles your groin and buttocks; through the metal detectors and slab-steel doors and second and third sets of guards, you enter a room in which young black men are slouched in seating pods, the sleeves of their orange jumpsuits rolled up tight. There, at the back, by the bolt-barred windows, waits the luckiest — and unluckiest — inmate here, a man so bedeviled by the state of Pennsylvania that he inspired famous lawyers in two different states to fight like Hessians for his release. A kid of 20 when the murder cops came and sucked him into this nightmare, he's older than you'd imagined him looking at 43, growing tufts of gray in his billy-goat scraggle and patchwork steel-wool hair. But, built like a boulder, he wraps you in a hug that loudly resets your spine. Here is your reward for the drive to Philadelphia and those hours dodging insects in the waiting room: Anthony Wright, whom this city tried its damnedest to destroy, is a man of patience and implacable peace. No police force on Earth could bend his will now.
We sit beneath a pillar, knee to knee. Small tears stand out on his lashes. He's waited 23 years to tell this story, and now that someone's listening, the words won't come, bunched up in that bank vault of a chest. "It's just, you fight and you fight, man. . . . I wrote 10 letters a day, seven days a week, to anyone I thought might give a damn — and then the day comes that I prayed and prayed on, and now I can't even get it out. . . . "
But who, with Wright's inventory of pain and sorrows, could describe the indescribable that befell him?
How do you convey being a strapping young man with a job and a little boy and a lazy Sunday watching football when two cops barge into your life and drag you off to hell? Is there any way to summon a sense of what it was like in that box in the Police Administration Building, where, as you would later tell the court, they chained you to a chair, pressed their hands on your neck and threatened to skull$#@! you if you didn't sign a confession that you did not write to the rape and murder of a 77-year-old woman? No call to a lawyer or your terrified mother, no room to breathe in or gather your wits; just hour after hour in a hole with those men and their short-fuse insistence that you sign their paper.
And so you signed just to make it stop, to get out of that room and go anywhere else with the space and the silence to think. It didn't hit you until weeks later that you'd signed your life away;
only the doubts of five jurors kept a needle out of your arm and spared you to write your daily stack of mail to strangers around the world. And then one of those letters hit the intake box at the Innocence Project office in New York, and the long, slow frog-march to justice began, a 17-year grind to clear your name and shuck the great stone off your back.
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Originally Posted by Torchbearer
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