Injustice by Lee Goodman Page B

years, so I finally looked at the record.”
    â€œWhat’s the evidence against him?”
    â€œHe lived in Orchard City, close to where the kid disappeared. Neighbors said they’d seen a red truck casing the neighborhood. Devaney’s sister had a truck that fit the description. Daryl didn’t have a license, but he used to drive the truck around on their farm. Daryl lived with his sister. And Daryl is odd. He has borderline intelligence and apparently was inappropriate sometimes.”
    â€œInappropriate how?”
    â€œModesty, grooming, hygiene. So the police questioned him a couple of times but couldn’t get anywhere. A year later, when Cunningham’s dog found the body, the police immediately took Devaney in for questioning again. This time he confessed.”
    â€œSo what’s the problem?”
    â€œLots of problems: They questioned him for fifteen hours before he confessed. And his sister claimed that, given his limitations, there was no way he could have driven those two hundred miles from Orchard City up here to Lukus County to bury the body, then gotten home again without her knowing he was gone. And who knows if he even understood that he could stop the questioning and ask for a lawyer.”
    â€œDid his trial lawyer try to get the confession thrown out?”
    â€œNo. The state offered a deal. If he’d plead guilty, they wouldn’t go for the death penalty.”
    â€œOuch. So you’re arguing against a confession and a guilty plea?”
    â€œRight. That’s the thing. The guy is persuadable.”
    â€œWas there physical evidence?”
    â€œI don’t think so. I have the impression the cops didn’t look too hard once they had the kid’s remains. When the body turned up, they swooped in, questioned Daryl all night long, got the confession, arrested him, pled him, sentenced him.”
    â€œWhat about corpus delicti?” I asked. Corpus delicti is the legal principle that someone can’t be convicted solely on their own confession. The confession needs corroboration of some kind.
    â€œRight,” Tina said. “Apparently, Daryl knew details that hadn’t been released to the press. Stuff about where and how he was buried.”
    â€œThen that resolves it, right? He must be guilty.”
    â€œFor Christ’s sake, Nick, think like a lawyer,” Tina said. She was genuinely irritated. “They questioned him for fifteen hours. Fifteen hours! And he’s cognitively impaired. How easy would it be for the cops to feed him those details, get him all confused about what he knew and what he didn’t? So when they finally convince him that he must have done it, he works all this new information into the narrative. Problem solved.”

C HAPTER 17
    I t was evening. I put Barnaby to bed and read him Henry Hikes to Fitchburg , his favorite—or maybe it’s my favorite. I took ZZ to Rokeby Park for our run, then home and up to the office, where Tina was drafting her petition to have the state turn over all physical evidence it had collected in the Kyle Runion case.
    â€œHow’s it coming?” I asked.
    â€œNot bad.”
    â€œDo you think you’ll . . .”
    â€œPlease,” she said, “I just want to . . .” And she dove back into it.
    I took out my file on the Subsurface probe. “Want some ice cream?” I whispered.
    Tina shook her head. I went down and got a bowl for myself; back at my desk, trying not to clink my spoon against the bowl too loudly, I ate ice cream and read transcripts of the previous grand jury witnesses.

    Morning. I went into the personnel records and pulled Henry Tatlock’s file. Anyone applying to work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office has to survive a background check. I recalled Henry mentioning some trouble when he was in his teens, but I never knew all the details. There was nothing about it in the official record. I called him at