“Well,” he said. “That’s something.”
Russell introduced me to Helen Marsh a few days later.
Helen was a criminal defense attorney in her fifties, with short gray hair and a voice like gravel. She’d spent twenty years as a public defender before going into private practice. Her office walls were
covered in framed newspaper clippings about cases she’d won. And a few she’d lost, which surprised me.
“I keep those up so I don’t get cocky,” she said when she saw me looking.
She agreed to review my entire criminal case. All of it. The trial transcripts. The evidence. The appeal my first lawyer had filed and lost.
“I’m looking at whether we can file a petition,” she said. “A request to vacate your conviction based on new evidence of actual innocence. That’s a very high bar, Rebecca. Courts don’t like to undo jury verdicts. We would need to show that there’s new evidence, evidence that couldn’t reasonably have been found at the time of trial, and that it’s strong enough that no reasonable jury would have convicted you if they’d seen it.”
