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Michael McLeod
ok yes I'm an old war horse and sometimes I look over old stories i wrote over the course of a 40 year journalism career, ranging from police reporter to movie reviewer to magazine writer. This one's from the police beat. Small Florida town. My lord, happened thirty-odd years ago. But It's one I'll always remember. I thought I'd share it and I promise I won't make this a habit.
THE WRONG MAN
TODD NEELY HAD A PERFECT ALIBI. HE HAD FAITH IN THE SYSTEM. HE HAD EVERYTHING BUT THE RIGHT VERDICT. HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN? IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK.
By Michael McLeod
PUBLISHED: November 11, 1990 at 5:00 AM EST |
Todd Neely felt the unfamiliar rasp of a tie and collar against his neck. That was real. He felt the hard angles of the big oak defense table against his elbows and chest. Real enough. The rest – the judge, the lawyers, the woman on the witness stand pointing him out as her attacker – seemed almost transparent. Frightening as it was, he kept getting the sensation that none of it had anything to do with him.
Todd Neely was a baby-faced, snub-nosed 18-year-old, halfway through his senior year at South Fork High School near Stuart, an hour’s drive north of Palm Beach. His priorities lined up like a lot of teen-age male agendas: girls, surfing, skateboarding, slam dancing, cars. He was quiet but trouble-prone. He’d lost sight in one eye playing with BB guns. He’d lost his license for driving drunk. He’d lost his brand new Volkswagen GTI when he let a girlfriend drive it and she tore out the transmission on a stretch of rough road. But this? This wasn’t Todd’s kind of trouble.
Not attempted murder.
Yet the police persisted, as did the victim, 24-year-old Linda Zavatkay. She’d been attacked around 9 p.m. in her Port Salerno apartment by a young man who held up a butcher knife and demanded sex. They scuffled, and Zavatkay suffered a superficial stab wound in the abdomen. The attacker ran off into the night. Todd, who lived with his mother in the same apartment complex as Zavatkay, was arrested three days after the attack. The case against him looked rock solid. The victim even had an eyewitness. But Todd insisted that he was nowhere near Linda Zavatkay that night. He had been having dinner with three other people at the Lobster Shanty, 11 miles north of Zavatkay’s apartment. Sitting at a window table with him, looking out across the St. Lucie River, were his mother, Edith; his sister, Bethellen; and a family friend, Lew Crosley. The waitress remembered Todd and his family. On their check, a computer had automatically stamped the time they came in, 8:26 – and the time they paid the bill, 9:31.
You couldn’t ask for a better alibi, said the lawyers. Even the prosecutor must have had doubts. Otherwise he wouldn’t have made such a generous offer before the trial: If Todd would plead guilty, he’d serve no jail time.
Todd was insistent, though. His view of the criminal justice system was based on the flawless, alabaster image he’d studied in civics class. He was innocent, so why should he pretend to be guilty? The truth would come out in the trial, wouldn’t it?
But that image shattered the moment the white-haired judge looked down at Todd and pronounced him guilty of attempted murder.
Suddenly, all the wooden formality of the courtroom disappeared. Todd could hear people crying. He saw Bethellen, sobbing as she ran out of the courtroom, even in her grief already determined to tell someone, anyone, that a huge mistake had just been made.
Then Todd saw his mother walking toward him, crying, trying to hug him. “Sorry,” the bailiff said. “I can’t let you touch him now.”
Blinking back tears, all Todd could do was look at her and ask:
“What went wrong?”
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, JOHN Tallieri opened his newspaper and saw the account of Todd’s trial and conviction. He was halfway through the story when he spotted a detail that made him crumple up the page in his lap, stunned.
“My God,” he said aloud. “They’ve convicted the wrong kid.”
Tallieri lived in the same apartment complex as Linda Zavatkay. He didn’t know her, but he and his wife, Kathy, were sure they knew who had attacked her. Not only that, they had given the police information about the suspect.
Now Tallieri, still stunned, picked up the phone and called Todd’s attorney.
“There’s been a terrible mistake. . . .
I DIDN’T DO IT.
If you’re a part of the criminal justice system, the phrase gets into your pores.
Nobody ever did it. Nobody’s ever guilty. It’s the mantra of virtually every prisoner, the white noise of every courthouse in the country. After a while, if you’re around it enough, you don’t even hear it anymore.
Which is just as well. Because the truth is, it’s usually a lie.
Todd Neely wasn’t lying. His story is a clear-cut example of how hard it is for an innocent man to be heard above that courthouse chant.
It’s also a story about how easily the system – with a helpful hedge here, a white lie there – can be used to make almost anyone look guilty.
It is a story about inept investigation and prosecution – behavior that crippled a family emotionally and financially for more than three years.
It is a story that, while outrageous, is in some ways not at all uncommon.
By conservative estimate, thousands of people are wrongly convicted of felony crimes in the U.S. every year. Most of these cases escape public scrutiny. Todd Neely’s nearly did.
Had it not been for a courageous woman who refused to stop fighting for her son, Todd would still be in jail.
It was Edith Neely who pushed for publicity that made his case – which might have warranted no more than a police-blotter squib in most big cities – a cause celebre in Stuart. She gave up her job to devote herself full time to Todd’s defense. She took law courses to educate herself about the system she was battling. She convinced a nationally recognized attorney to take Todd’s case.
Even so, it took more than three years for the state to acknowledge its error – three years of branding Todd Neely a criminal, withholding critical evidence of his innocence, convicting him, sending him off to jail, and then doggedly electing to retry him after the original conviction was overturned.
Ultimately, the state not only dropped charges but took the unusual step of making a public apology – acknowledging Todd’s innocence and confirming what defense attorneys had argued all along.
Once the lawyerly debate over guilt or innocence was over, the only real question left was the simple one that Todd had asked: What went wrong?
The answer is: A lot.
THE RIVER PINES TOWNHOUSE in Port Salerno goes on for blocks, with broad, neatly landscaped expanses separating the squarish clumps of apartments.
Rain was threatening as dusk fell on the complex on the night of June 19, 1986. Linda Zavatkay walked outside with Steve Davolt, a friend who had been visiting her. After Davolt left, Zavatkay went back inside to do some sewing.
A few minutes later she heard a knock. Thinking it was Davolt, she opened the door and saw the attacker. He threatened her; they scuffled; she was stabbed.
After he dropped the knife and ran, Zavatkay, pressing tissue paper to the one-inch wound in her stomach, called Davolt, who lived nearby and was already home. Then she dialed 911 and spoke to the Martin County Sheriff’s dispatcher.
This is a partial transcript of the call, which came in at 9:12 p.m.: Zavatkay (her voice high-pitched and frantic): “He was a young kid, about 16 at the most . . .”
Dispatcher: “Could you tell what color hair he had or anything?”
Zavatkay: “Brown hair.”
Dispatcher: “Brown hair?”
Zavatkay: “He had braces.”
Dispatcher: “Braces?”
Zavatkay: “Braces.”
While Zavatkay was still on the line with the dispatcher, Davolt returned and rushed into the apartment. On the 911 tape, he can be heard saying: “I seen the kid. . . . I seen his shadow.”
A patrolman arrived in a few minutes. So did Detective Steele Ritter, who would become the lead investigator, and his partner, Lloyd Jones.
Ritter, who was new to the Martin County Sheriff’s Department, found very little physical evidence at the scene. The knife had been handled by other people, making it difficult to identify fingerprints. The front door and the doorknob had been smeared by the rain.
That left Ritter and Jones with one thing to go on: Zavatkay’s description. They decided to find out if anyone in the complex knew of a teen-ager who matched it.
They went to a nearby apartment and questioned a woman. Yes, she said, she knew of someone who matched that general description: the boy who lived next door to her. She pointed to his car in the parking lot. It was the disabled GTI. The detectives took down the license number and checked the registration, and the name came back: Todd Neely.
Ritter and Jones didn’t try to find Todd to question him, even though they were just a few feet from his front door. Nor did they question any more neighbors to see if any other teen-agers in the complex matched Zavatkay’s description.
They had a name. They had a suspect. It was time to call it a night.
THE NEXT DAY, THE MARTIN County Sheriff’s detectives got a picture of Todd out of his high school yearbook. It was 3 years old, taken when he was 15. They put it in a photo lineup with six other similar-looking youths and showed the lineup to Linda Zavatkay.
Zavatkay, still in the hospital after exploratory surgery, looked at the faces and frowned. She was having a little trouble.
Ritter told her to concentrate on the facial features – she might want to try covering up parts of the faces.
Another detective was even more helpful. On the second run-through, as she scanned the photos, he thought he noticed her eyes linger on one picture.
“I can tell you see him,” he said.
At that point, Zavatkay’s eyes widened in fear. She wrapped her arms around her knees, then pointed to Todd’s picture.
Police arrested Todd later that day. A week later the friend who was with Zavatkay on the night of the attack called Ritter. He said he could identify Todd. Now the police had two eyewitnesses.
True, Todd didn’t have braces, as Zavatkay had insisted after the attack.
True, he wasn’t “16 at the most,” as Zavatkay had estimated.
True, the photo Zavatkay identified was Todd Neely as he had appeared three years before – in other words, a Todd Neely who no longer existed.
But troubling little details like that were already falling by the wayside.
A MUGGER SHOVES A gun in your face. A rapist wields a knife.
In that instant of fear, what are you looking at? The weapon or the attacker?
Elizabeth Loftus says she knows: In all likelihood, your eyes are riveted on the weapon. Loftus, a psychologist at the University of Washington, calls the phenomenon “weapon fixation.” It’s one of several reasons she distrusts eyewitness accounts of crimes and has developed a nationwide reputation for her studies about their unreliability.
Todd’s lawyer, Russell Ferraro, brought Loftus to Stuart to testify. His strategy was simple: Present Todd’s alibi, then use Loftus as an expert witness to cast doubt on Zavatkay’s credibility.
During the four-day trial before Judge C.P. Trowbridge, Loftus testified that victims frequently think that an attacker’s features are forever etched in memory. But the truth is, they looked at his face only fleetingly.
Victims often mistakenly think a sense of danger heightens their perceptions. And, Loftus said, they often unwittingly substitute the face of someone else while trying to remember the attacker.
Ferraro argued that all those factors could have influenced Zavatkay to falsely identify Todd.
But his strategy in using Loftus didn’t turn out quite as well as he’d hoped.
For one thing, the judge was clearly skeptical. Trowbridge, a testy veteran with 27 years on the Martin County bench, had little tolerance for outsiders.
When an occasional flashy Miami attorney would try to have a hearing continued because of a trial elsewhere, Trowbridge was known to bristle and then snap: “That’s not the way we do things in Martin County, young man!”
Now he appeared similarly unimpressed by this West Coast psychologist with her studies and her multiple degrees, flown in especially to tell Martin County how to do its business.
When the prosecutor objected as Loftus testified about her credentials, Trowbridge said airily: “She is entitled to give a commercial.” Later, bemused by it all, he asked: “Do you think there is any way we could sell tickets and charge anybody in the audience to hear this?”
Loftus later confided to friends that this was the most hostile judge she’d ever testified before.
Peter Neil was glad to see somebody else taking heat from old Trowbridge. Neil, the young assistant state attorney, had lost five straight cases in front of the dean of Martin County judges and was determined not to lose another. For this trial, the sallow, bespectacled Neil was particularly aggressive.
Some might say imaginative.
Neil conceded that Todd was, indeed, at the restaurant on the night of the crime. But he theorized that, midway through his dessert, Todd left the restaurant in a separate car, drove to Port Salerno, committed the crime, and then rejoined his family.
The theory required some pretty bizarre behavior on Todd’s part, not to mention split-second timing and a lot of luck with traffic lights.
But the prosecution still needed to explain away one of the first things the victim used to describe her assailant: braces. Todd didn’t wear them.
That problem disappeared when Zavat-kay testified that, on second thought, she’d been wrong about the braces. What she’d seen, she said, was really just the glint of the attacker’s knife in the light at her front door.
In his decision, the judge still appeared preoccupied with the entertainment possibilities of the trial. “This could make a piece on 60 Minutes,” he said.
But his fascination with the conflicting stories didn’t translate into any doubt in terms of sentencing. He not only found Todd guilty, he gave him a near-maximum sentence: 15 years.
EDITH NEELY WAS STAGGERED by the verdict. But her spirits lifted when she heard about the call from John Tallieri, the man who had told police about another suspect just a few days after the attack.
The Tallieris had always worried about a teen-age boy of 14 or 15 who lived in the apartment complex. They didn’t know his name or where he lived. But the boy had exposed himself to their 9-year-old daughter. He had also climbed a tree to look into their bedroom window.
Linda Tallieri had described the boy when a detective came by their house about a week after Linda Zavatkay had been attacked. The boy was short, she said. About 14 or 15 years old. He had brown hair. And there was one other thing: He wore braces.
Braces. That was the detail that Tallieri had noticed in the newspaper account about Todd’s conviction. Todd, the story noted, did not wear them.
When she heard about Tallieri’s call, Edith could almost hear the sound of all the pieces snapping together. But now there was another puzzle.
If the police had known about another suspect all along – a kid who acted suspiciously and seemed, judging by the braces, to fit Zavatkay’s original description better than Todd – why hadn’t they questioned him? And why hadn’t they told Todd’s attorney about him?
Edith already had gotten a hard-knocks education in criminal law. She knew that during pre-trial discovery, the state is obliged to share all such information with the defense.
It appeared they hadn’t done that. Todd’s attorney immediately asked for a new trial, charging that the prosecution had withheld crucial information.
Police countered that, yes, they had canvassed the neighborhood and questioned several people about a week after the crime. But that was standard procedure, a routine search for more evidence. And as far as they were concerned it had turned up nothing. Ritter, the lead investigator, said he had told Todd’s attorney as much; the tapes of his pre-trial deposition bore him out.
Trowbridge excused himself from hearing Todd’s request for a new trial. Instead, he turned it over to Circuit Judge Dwight Geiger, who denied the request.
TODD, AT LEAST, WAS TEMPORARILY free, released on bail while his case was appealed. He had spent three months in jail, the one place where people actually believed him. “Happens all the time,” one prisoner had said, nonchalantly, when he told them he was innocent.
But Todd didn’t want to talk about jail or even about his case.
Edith Neely had a different attitude.
She became obsessed, devoting herself to clearing Todd with the single-minded dedication of an Olympic athlete.
A spare bedroom in their home began to fill up with court transcripts, correspondence with attorneys, law journal articles, charts and graphs from Todd’s trial. Edith called it, aptly, her “war room.”
To give herself a better handle on the case she took a class about law at a junior college. When the instructor assigned a paper on the criminal justice system, Edith’s got an A-plus.
She was grateful about one thing: She had been with Todd on the night of the attack. So there was no doubt in her mind. Defending him wasn’t just a matter of a mother’s unquestioning faith. Edith knew Todd hadn’t done it.
An industrious single mother of three, she had started a business of her own in Stuart, a billing service for doctors. As a sideline she helped senior citizens file medical claims. Battling bureaucracy was something she did with relish. Once, she fought with Blue Shield for six months over a matter of $2 – and won. An insurance adjuster once complained to a doctor: “She’s caustic.” “Yes,” Edith Neely had admitted, when the remark came back to her. “But I get the job done, don’t I?”
Soon after Todd’s trouble began, her billing business folded – partly because of the notoriety brought on by the trial, and partly because she was spending so much time working on Todd’s case.
Money problems began to pile up. Crosley, the friend who had been with them at the Lobster Shanty that night, vowed to help. He had very little money himself. So he begged. His mother volunteered her savings. Swallowing his pride, he took it. A family friend gave him a substantial, interest-free loan.
Help came from unexpected directions, as well. Bill Donaldson, an 80-year-old retiree and a longtime civic booster, took an interest in Todd, convinced he’d been railroaded. Donaldson even buttonholed his old fishing buddy, Judge Trowbridge, to tell him Todd was innocent.
Trowbridge brushed him off. But Donaldson kept on – writing letters to local politicians, helping Edith organize garage sales to raise money for Todd’s defense, having long talks with Todd to encourage him. “I just want to see Todd free of this thing before I die,” he said.
Edith Neely needed all the help she could get. She was starting to develop a taste for dark, jailhouse humor.
“It cost $75,000 to get my son convicted,” she would say. God only knew how much it would take to get him freed.
She started telling friends a joke: Question: How many lawyers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: How many can you afford?
Behind the wry humor was a sense of desperation. She kept finding herself driving the route between the restaurant and Linda Zavatkay’s apartment – the route Todd had supposedly used to drive to the scene of the crime. The best time Edith ever had was a half hour.
She became a gadfly to her attorneys. Even before she had learned about the mysterious boy with braces, she had pressed them to look for the kid who really attacked Zavatkay. If the police wouldn’t do their job, she would.
At first, when the attorneys kept telling her to work with the system, she backed off.
But how could you work with the system when the system wasn’t working?
She stopped trying to be nice.
When Ferraro told her that finding the boy with braces “doesn’t really matter,” she threw the phone across the room.
When the prosecutor, Neil, responded to growing public pressure by attacking her in print – “I don’t know what her problem is. What she needs is a shrink” – she filed a defamation of character suit.
Caustic?
Edith Neely was beyond caustic.
TODD WAS OUT OF JAIL, BUT HE didn’t exactly feel free.
He couldn’t go back to his old high school because he’d been expelled upon becoming a felon.
He wanted to at least take his girl to the prom, but he couldn’t even do that. No felons allowed on school property.
For Todd it was like waking up one day to discover you’d been kicked out of your own life.
He got as close to his old routines as he could – tried to just chill out, surf, hang with his old buddies after work.
He earned his high school equivalency diploma. A girlfriend put Todd in touch with a surveyor who hired him. He tried to put the whole thing out of his mind. But Edith Neely would wake up nights and Todd would be in the bathroom, sick to his stomach from tension.
He had become a kind of local celebrity, and when he passed people, he sometimes heard them whispering. He tried to ignore it. But once, when two women passed him in the mall and then buzzed at each other, he turned on them.
“Yeah!” He took a threatening step toward them. “I’m the one! I’m the dangerous Todd Neely!”
Graduation came along, and this time Todd just sneaked in and watched the ceremony from the back of the room.
Seeing all his friends get their diplomas gave him a familiar feeling. It was sort of like the way he’d felt in the courtroom. He was watching something that had nothing to do with him.
ONE NIGHT, EDITH WAS WATCH-ing a made-for-television docudrama about Lenell Geter, an aerospace engineer. Geter was identified by 11 eyewitnesses as the man who robbed a Texas fast-food restaurant. But the truth was that Geter was at work, 60 miles away.
Even so, he was wrongly convicted and spent 18 months in jail. His conviction was overturned through the gutsy efforts of Ed Sigel, a fiery Dallas attorney.
At first, Edith and Lew were simply stunned by the parallels.
Then Edith realized what she was going to do: She was going to hire Sigel.
Sigel had a laid-back southwestern accent, a direct, folksy way of putting things, a shambling stride – and after 25 years as a criminal defense lawyer, a killer instinct in the courtroom.
Todd’s defense efforts picked up steam immediately after Sigel came on the case.
He started by sending an investigator to track down the mysterious “boy with braces.” If they could assemble enough incriminating evidence against him, it might be enough to finally persuade someone that Todd deserved a new trial.
Lew Crosley went along with the investigator on a cloak-and-dagger mission. They tracked the boy to Gainesville, Ga., where he was a student in a military school. Posing as prospective customers who wanted their sons to go to the school, they got a grand tour from a series of spit-and-polish officers.
They even got to talk to the boy and had their picture taken with him.
When she saw the photo, it was no surprise to Edith that he bore a striking resemblance to Todd.
Later, the investigator videotaped interviews with several of the boy’s friends, who confided that he had bragged about attacking a woman in Florida.
All the information Sigel gathered was turned over to the state attorney’s office, along with an impassioned letter asking the state attorney, as a fellow officer of the court, to put aside his role as an adversary to see justice done.
No response.
Despite the new evidence, the state maintained that there had been no mistake. Todd Neely was guilty and had been fairly convicted.
ED SIGEL HAD BEEN SPENDING SO much time in Stuart that the local Holiday Inn felt like a second home.
Now, pacing back and forth in his room, he and Joe Negron were working on their latest strategy to free Todd.
Negron, a young Stuart attorney, had cut his teeth on Todd’s case. When it began, he was a law clerk for Ferraro. He had done much of the early footwork on the case – including a futile search for another suspect long before the “boy with braces” revelation emerged.
Once Negron passed the bar exam, Edith made him Todd’s full-time attorney.
The defense team became a study in contrasts. Negron was solemn, a good listener and painstakingly thorough.
Sigel took the stiff-arm approach to practicing law. With his accent and his abrupt, down-home way of speaking, he was the only lawyer Edith had ever met who gave her the impression that he’d just come inside from chopping wood. The biggest words she every heard him utter were the ones he used to describe Peter Neil’s theory about Todd’s supposed mad dash to the crime scene and back.
“Prosecutorial hallucination,” he called it.
Now, at Sigel’s suggestion, the Neelys had asked an appellate court to order a rare coram nobis hearing. This would make it possible for the court to consider new evidence.
The Fourth District Court of appeals ordered the hearing and appointed Circuit Judge William Frye to preside.
It was February 1989. The Neely case had been dragging on for almost three years but finally seemed to have reached a turning point.
Sigel and Negron planned to present information about the boy with braces – including the testimony from friends who said he had talked about the crime.
They also planned to point out inconsistencies in the police investigation. Sigel figured that his cross-examination of Steele Ritter, the lead detective, could be a key. Ritter was scheduled to be on the stand in the morning. If he could just get Ritter to crack. . . .
So, in the hotel room, Negron and Sigel put together a list. “One hundred killer questions,” they jokingly called it – questions Sigel planned on hammering into Ritter the next day.
As it turned out, the real killer questions would come from an unexpected source: Ritter himself.
The next morning, Ritter took the stand, and Sigel began questioning him. But there were no dramatic revelations – not until, during a recess, Sigel was stunned by an urgent message.
The message was from Ritter. He had cornered another attorney who happened to be in the courtroom.
“Tell them to ask me about a conversation I had with Peter Neil,” he said. “If they ask me the right questions, I can tell them a story that will blow the lid off.”
Over increasingly frantic objections from the assistant state attorney, Rick Barlow, Sigel did just that.
The questions Ritter had passed along involved a conversation between Neil, the prosecutor, and Ritter before Todd’s trial in 1987.
The conversation came after Ritter casually mentioned the canvass of the apartment complex shortly after the crime – the one that had turned up the controversial information from the Tallieris about the boy with braces.
At the time, no one, not even the police, knew how significant that information would turn out to be because no one had bothered to follow it up. No one had looked for the boy with the braces. So when Ritter casually mentioned the canvass sheets to Todd’s attorney during a pre-trial deposition, he downplayed their significance.
Even so, Neil was incensed at the very mention of those sheets. After the deposition, the prosecutor turned to Ritter and said, ‘What the s are you doing? They didn’t ask for the canvass sheets. I told you not to give them anything they didn’t ask for.’ “
Now, three years later, Ritter understood. He finally recognized the importance of the boy with the braces, the canvass sheets, and the prosecutor’s angry reaction at their very mention.
Prompted by defense questions he himself had volunteered, Ritter related all of this during the new hearing.
It was a damning admission – particularly when coupled with testimony from a state investigator who, going through Neil’s files to help prepare for the case, had discovered seven canvass sheets that Neil had never shown to defense attorneys. True, they had never asked, and rare is the prosecutor who is eager to hand-feed defense attorneys.
However, all of it together helped Sigel make a convincing argument that Neil had indeed withheld crucial information about the case – information that would have helped the defense team clear Todd.
“The only way Pete Neil won this case was by trickery and deceit,” Sigel argued during the hearing. “He couldn’t win in fair combat. He won it because he was a jerk.”
In his decision, Judge Frye overturned Todd’s conviction, writing: “The petitioner has shown by strong and convincing evidence that the then-assistant state attorney has deliberately and actually suppressed vital information in the hands of the state that could, would, and has led to . . . evidence that would have conclusively led to a different result in the trial court.”
But the jubilation of the Neely family at his decision was short-lived.
First, the state attorney’s office announced that it was appealing Frye’s decision. Then, when the appeal failed, the state announced that it would try Todd Neely once again.
THE FINAL TWIST IN TODD NEELY’S long struggle to clear his name wouldn’t come until August of this year.
Todd was slated to be re-tried for the crime. A preliminary hearing was just two hours away when Negron got a telephone call from Rick Barlow, the new assistant state attorney who had been preparing to prosecute Todd in the new trial.
The state was dropping all charges, Barlow said.
Negron was stunned.
Why now, after battling tooth and nail for four years?
He couldn’t believe it. He decided to walk across the street to Barlow’s office in the Martin County Courthouse.
Barlow was a shade of gray that Negron had never seen before.
The prosecutor told him that a state investigator had turned up “conclusive evidence” linking another suspect – the boy with braces – to the crime.
The investigator had taken the knife used in the attack to show to the boy’s aunt and uncle. Pointing to its broken tip, they identified it as one that had been missing from a set they owned. It had been missing ever since the night of the attack on Linda Zavatkay.
Barlow rubbed his forehead and gave a long sigh. Then he said the state was conceding that Todd was innocent. He planned to apologize to the family.
Prosecutors never admit error; it’s just not done. They never say someone is innocent; they simply drop the charges.
Negron went back to his office to give the Neely family the news. Edith whooped. Todd buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking softly. He wasn’t crying. He was laughing.
TODD NEELY IS FREE, but the Todd Neely case remains a tangle.
Although prosecutors do have evidence against another suspect, they cannot prosecute him. The statute of limitations has expired. There is nothing they can do.
Attorneys for Todd Neely are pursuing sanctions against the state attorney’s office in Stuart. The sanctions would enable them to recover the cost of Todd’s defense: roughly $300,000. Several civil suits are also inevitable.
Peter Neil was investigated by the Florida Bar, which took no action. Neil is now a prosecutor in Mobile, Ala. He refuses to comment, but maintains he did nothing in Todd’s case that any other prosecutor wouldn’t do.
Steele Ritter is no longer a detective. Neither is Lloyd Jones, his partner. Ritter has been transferred to road patrol. Jones is a process server.
Judge Trowbridge has retired. He refuses to discuss the case.
Bill Donaldson, the retiree who was one of Todd’s first allies, got his wish: He lived long enough to see Todd Neely free. Donaldson was one of the first people Todd called with the good news. Later that day, Donaldson fell ill, was taken to the hospital, and died of an aneurysm.
Edith Neely and Lew Crosley were married. They have established a grassroots organization for people who have been wrongfully convicted. It’s called PAIN – People Against Injustice Nationwide. They have vowed to devote themselves to it indefinitely.
Joe Negron is handling much of the ongoing legal action in Todd’s case. Negron says: “This case should be in the law school textbooks.”
It will be. Ron Huff, professor at Ohio State University, is including the Neely case in his upcoming book: Convicted But Innocent.
Based on his analysis of 500 cases of wrongful convictions, Huff believes that, at the very least, 6,000 people are wrongly convicted of a felony every year.
He says that the Neely case fits the classic pattern of wrongful convictions: Eyewitness errors, witnesses pressured or coached by police, an overzealous prosecution and a mismanaged defense.
Huff says it’s important to note that wrongful conviction is a double-edged sword. “This is not just a civil rights issue, but a public safety issue.” Not only is an innocent person in jail, but the real criminal is free to victimize others.
And Todd Neely?
He says that he is still a surfer dude at heart, and that may be true.
But it’s also true that he has become a different kind of surfer dude than he was three years ago.
For one thing, he has streaks of premature gray in his hair.
For another, he isn’t the laid-back, flip-flop sort of person he once was. These days, whenever he goes anywhere, he notices things.
What time it is. Who is there, and who isn’t. Strangers. Police cars. License plate numbers. He pays attention to details. He’s seen what can happen when you don’t.
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