BY LENORE SKENAZY | Jeffrey Deskovic is curious about everyone and everything. He goes to lectures and reaches out to people, including me. When I met the 41-year-old Throggs Neck activist for breakfast at City Coffee in Jackson Heights last week, he asked the weary waitress where she was from.
“Peru,” she replied, and she perked up when talk turned to her country’s purple corn drink — chicha morada.
“It is very delicious but you must drink it ice-cold.”
“Bring me one of those!” said Jeff.
Jeff is making up for lost time: The 16 years he spent behind bars for a rape and murder he didn’t commit.
Jeff was exonerated in 2006. A new DNA test matched a convict doing time for another rape and murder. Since getting out, Jeff has been bringing attention to wrongful convictions and false confessions — like the one he made, at age 16.
You may remember the case. It was up in Peekskill, N.Y., where Jeff was born and raised by his mom and grandma. The victim was a 15-year-old girl at his high school. Jeffrey caught the attention of police for a bizarre reason: He seemed too deeply upset. The cops spent the next six weeks focusing on Jeff.
“Half the time, they talked to me as if I was a suspect,” he said. “The other time they would pretend they needed my help to solve the crime. They’d say, ‘Kids won’t talk freely around us. They will around you.’ They were asking my opinions and congratulating me on my insights.”
For a shy young man who’d dreamed of becoming a police officer, these were heady, confusing times. One day the cops said they had new, special information to give him, but it was so sensitive that first he would have to take a lie detector test.
He skipped school for this incredible privilege and three cops drove him out of town. There, for the next six hours, they kept him in a small room, giving him endless cups of coffee — as if he wasn’t shaky enough — but no food.
“After 40 minutes, the polygrapher started giving me the third degree,” he recalled. “He raised his voice and kept asking me the same questions over and over. As each hour goes by, my fear escalates, and toward the end he said, ‘What do you mean you didn’t do it! You just told me through the test results that you did! We just want you to verbally confirm it!’ That shot my fear through the roof.
“It was then that the cop who pretended to be my friend told me the other cops were going to harm me — he said he’d been holding them back but couldn’t indefinitely. And he added if I did as they wanted, they would stop and I could go home afterwards.”
Jeffrey fell to the floor and curled into fetal position, sobbing. But he gave them their confession. The false one that sent him to prison.
There was no other evidence against him. His semen did not match that found on the victim, but the prosecutor said it didn’t matter because the girl was promiscuous — even though police interviewed 19 friends who confirmed that she had never had a boyfriend, much less sex. But those interviews were kept from Jeff’s Legal Aid lawyer, who, for his part, never bothered to interview Jeff’s alibi — the boy he’d been playing Wiffle ball with at the time of the murder.
After 15 years behind bars, Jeff finally came up for parole. He still said he was innocent. To the board, this meant he was not taking responsibility for his actions.
Parole denied.
He was freed only after the Innocence Project took his case and did the new DNA test.
Jeff sued the prosecutors who kept the evidence from his lawyer, and his lawyer who didn’t interview his alibi, and the polygrapher who said the test had “proven” his guilt — and won.
With that money, he set up a foundation to help the unjustly imprisoned. Now a lawyer, investigator and paralegal work on exonerating people behind bars for no reason — and helping them once they get out.
But most of all, they’re working to prevent wrongful convictions in the first place.
There’s a bipartisan bill in Albany that would create a commission on prosecutor conduct, Jeff says. The commission would punish prosecutors who railroad defendants.
And with that he finished his story and his chicha morada. He smiled at the waitress, and headed out into a beautiful June day.
He has lots to do.
For more information, visit www.deskovic.org or write to jeffreydeskovicfoundation@gmail.com.
Skenazy speaks at conferences, companies and schools about her book and blog “Free-Range Kids”
