Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [112]
“A lot of my healing took place inside maximum-security prisons,” she told me. “The first time I went there, I thought I was going to see a bunch of monsters who somehow were different from the rest of us. But what I discovered was that at some point in our lives we are all victims, and at other points we are all offenders. Even if our offense doesn’t land us in prison, we all hurt other people.” As a volunteer, Penny served on panels designed to convey to inmates the effects of violent crime on its victims. Her goal wasn’t to make the inmates feel remorse for its own sake; it was to help them accept responsibility for their actions and do something meaningful with the rest of their lives. “None of us can take back what we’ve done in the past,” she said. “So the first thing I’d always tell them is that the most meaningful apology is how you live the rest of your life.” But if the past can’t be changed, it also can’t be denied—and so, in panel after panel, Penny talked about the importance of admitting mistakes.
While Penny was working in the prison system, Steven Avery was working to get out of it. After the guilty verdict—he had pled innocent—his family started a Steven Avery Defense Fund. His lawyers challenged the conviction, but it was upheld by the appellate court. The defense appealed that ruling, too, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear the case. For a long time after that, it seemed as if Avery had run out of options. In 1985, DNA testing was all but unheard of in the United States; the only physical evidence presented in the original trial was a hair found on Penny’s shirt, which the prosecution claimed was microscopically (not genetically) consistent with Avery’s. But as the years passed, the forensic use of DNA became more common, and in 1996, Avery successfully petitioned the court to reexamine the biological material in the case. Using technology that would be considered primitive today, a crime lab tested fingernail scrapings taken from Penny in the hospital and found three different samples of DNA. One belonged to her, another was ambiguous, and the last didn’t correspond to Penny or Avery. A judge ruled that the findings were inconclusive, and Avery remained behind bars.
The appeals and hearings were hard on Penny, primarily because they kept dragging the assault back into the foreground of her life. From time to time, though, she was also given pause by the sheer doggedness of Avery and his family. “I’d been working with inmates, after all,” she recalled, “and I’d seen that at some point most of them just gave up their appeals. So I remember wondering, why is this guy so persistent?” Then, in 2001, she learned that the Wisconsin Innocence Project—part of a national organization that uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions—had agreed to take Avery’s case. Penny’s initial reaction was anger: “I just felt like, here we go again, this is never going to end. And if this DNA doesn’t exonerate him or is inconclusive, two years down the road is there going to be another hearing?” But she was also shaken. “I remember going through the thought process of: you know, they probably don’t take every case that crosses their desk. So why did they agree to take his?”
Individual actors can move quickly—in the fraction of a second it takes to glance down at a watch or rush toward the water. But systems are often unimaginably slow.