***A letter to the public, written by Patrick Bradford. Obtained from his Innocence Page (Seek Justice) on Facebook***
Falsely accused, maliciously betrayed, wrongly imprisoned; these are bad things! A man can get plenty of psychological mileage out of them. I got my fair share: anger, hatred, frustration, despair, vengefulness, obsession....But I have lived this experience as a journey, not an event, and the bitterness of its beginning is only that, a beginning.
To an extent, the widespread popular perception of cops as a tight-knit fraternity is accurate, but not in the way that it is generally understood. Brotherhoods will form among saints and cutthroats alike. They are inherently neither fine nor sublime.
I begin with this, because, on one hand, it was the false image of an honorable brotherhood that provided the mask behind which the antagonists of this story hid their criminal intent: "He must be guilty, because we would never do this to one of our own if we weren't completely sure." On the other hand, I myself had been taken in by the idealized concept, and I had to learn the truth the hard way.
As soon as suspicion had fallen on me (not without some justification, initially) I began to see my brothers in arms as one would a great herd of wildebeest: when one is found vulnerable by a single slim cheetah, the only conceivable response of ten or twenty tons of bovine sinew and hoof is to flee in mad terror to a safe distance to stare, twitching and wild-eyed, as the unfortunate one is devoured. And I was the unfortunate one.
For the most part, I was avoided as though my condition were contagious. My fellow heroes, along-side whom I had fought and bled, whose lives I had protected with mine, whose families I had guarded, whose asses I had covered both in the streets and under legal scrutiny; these same men could not maintain eye contact.
The few exceptions came like Nicodemus, at night: "I don't believe any of it...Most of the others don't either...The bastards have themselves a scapegoat...If you don't see me again..." And then I didn't.
And so it happened to me alone--as it had to be, in any event. I was wrenched from hearth and home, thrust out of my identity and my world and cast into an antithetical identity and a polar opposite world. I crossed over in an instant, in the sinister stroke of some disinterested pen, from decorated cop to degraded convict; from society's arm of enforcement to society's whipping boy; tough break! But it was only the beginning.
Damned Fool:
I remained foolish and naiive for much longer than the wiser people around me (family, and a colorful assortment of jailmates). I still held pitifully to the ridiculous ideal that what had happened was a terrible mistake. There was simply no place in my narrow reality for true cops knowingly bringing a false charge of murder against one of their own. But I was not allowing myself to see the obvious: these were not "true cops," and I (a fact of which I remain proud) was definitely not one of their own.
And so I had to be forcibly, though incrementally, extricated from my naivete. My first hard lesson came in form of a police report sent to me by my lawyer. The report, detailing the verification of the observations of a reliable witness, set forth undeniable proof that the fire--the fire that I stood accused of setting--was burning before my arrival.
The facts contained in this one report were more than adequate to have cleared me, had it not been suppressed. Instead, some judge had obliviously signed a warrant based upon the speculations of a fireman from the black box of his "experience," in direct contradiction to known facts! Thus, my fool's world quickly began to dissolve around me, and I was left to face the cold, stark reality: the crocodile tears shed by the Chief of Police, the exaggerated chagrin of the lead detective...
Now the diabolical truth was crushing in on me as I read one report after another that contradicted the charging affidavit. The time of death determined in the autopsy excluded me; the "witness" who reported a police car in the driveway was a mental patient, known to me, who reported the sighting as a recovered memory after the relevant information was printed in the newspaper the same day; the claim that I could not have observed the fire as I reported was utterly refuted by the first fireman into the house. I became physically ill.
I thought I was being cured of my sanguine worldview, but I remained a fool. Somehow I still believed that the clear, documented truth would prevail. I imagined--I blush inwardly to confess this--a sea of blue in the courtroom, if not in open support, then come to see for themselves if the allegations against this "one of their own" were true.
But this was not to be; a couple of cops showed up--one of them my relation. One by one, the State's witnesses whose original statements were exculpatory, blatantly changed their stories. Nobody was there to care that the entire case was founded on perjury. The judge allowed it, the jury uncritically accepted it, and the media effectively ignored it. My defense was like shouting for help in a blizzard: my voice muted to impotent silence. And that was the end of me; yet still the beginning.
Enemy Within:
An offense can be a powerful intoxicant. Even small ones will often cloud one's judgement to the extent that accurate self-evaluation becomes impossible. The sheer magnitude of the offense I nursed might have been sufficient to leave me permanently thus besotted. But prison can be a very sobering experience, offering a cruel internal light to pierce the fog of self-pity.
It came late at night, like Dickens' spirit triad. Much like the popular accounts of near-death, my life played out before my unwilling mind like a movie. But not my whole life; only the wrongs done, the mistakes made, the regrets earned, the dreams forfeited. It all returned, no matter how long forgotten, no matter how seemingly inconsequential; and the shame of the smallest sleight was equal to that of the most heartless betrayal.
My first reaction was to object that this was not really me; at least not in this purely negative presentation. I had done much good in my life. But the moral onslaught was relentless, and each event so vividly represented that there came to be no ground left for denial to the merciless string of charges paraded before my raw conscience.
What I had managed to compartmentalize in the hectic careen of liberal existence, I was bound to see holistically in my new contemplative vocation. As it happens, character cannot be compartmentalized. A man who treats his wife kindly and gently when present yet defrauds her of unconditional honor when absent in a bad husband--an abuser. The same man, though he lavish love and tenderness on his children, is not a good father.
All of this had to be conjugated in the first person, and that had been my problem all along: seeing myself accurately. In short, my self had been the problem: selfishness, self-indulgence, and now, (God help me!) self-pity. Accepting this--saying this--was the necessary stroke to complete my demise and allow me to begin a posthumous existence, rather than to persist indefinitely in a living death.
None of this should be taken as mitigating, in the least degree, the guilt of those who have made themselves murderers along with the psychotic demon(s?) who committed the very act. By this I mean the suborners of perjury, obscurers of truth, robbers of children, exploiters of grieving parents, the liars, the cowards, the silent, and the willingly deceived. Above all, those who orchestrated and presided over the gang-rape of justice by one perjurer after another. Their guilt will deliver them either to destruction or redemption. But I can no longer decify myself as to determine which.
Reclamation:
Nobody likes prison...or do they? Whenever somebody released from prison comes back for some new crime, we say tongue in cheek, "He must like it here." The truth is, obviously, they don't like prison, but no other state holds a realistic place in their pitifully narrow worldview.
Victor Hugo wrote, roughly, that to open a school is to close a prison. Like Hugo, I believe one of the primary causes of serial incarceration is a certain intellectual narrowness which attends lack of education. I first saw the correlation in the awakening of curiosity and wonder I witnessed in a couple of illiterate men I was teaching to read. Just a hint of a new perspective on the world had them thinking in a universe of possibility outside the confines of their intellectual prisons.
I saw an exponential flowering of this in the eyes of those whom I later would tutor in pursuit of college education. In almost every case, the student was looking to become the first in the history of his family to earn a college degree. (Ironically, my own degrees, earned in prison, make me the last of my family to so achieve). Without exception, these unlikely scholars begin to envision a state of affairs in which crime makes little sense.
Some criminals are irredeemable for societal purposes; and I am happy they are in prison, though some be my friends. But the majority--the vast majority--can benefit from the reforming power of intellectual expansion. I find that I am particularly effective at teaching, tutoring, and mentoring them.
Simply put, I am a crime fighter. It would appear that it remains my calling in the underworld, as it was in life.
As Is:
As to my crime fighting career in its former iteration, I have no need of a defense. The record is clear, and I in no way aggrandize myself in maintaining that I distinguished myself according to a fine tradition. My record stands on its own against the effete coward who, in a shameless political play, from his artificial moral height, would accuse me of betraying the public trust.
Having thus purged, however, I observe that, from an ideal perspective, it would always be in a community's better interest if the breasts upon which it would pin its medals were to beat only with pure hearts. But I know cops, and so I am sure that the caveat will always be "as is".
Patrick Bradford
1/1/2012
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