I Will Find You by Joanna Connors Page A

I do not contact any of my old friends. I live like a convalescent at a sanitarium, overseen by my mother the nurse. Not long ago, I found a photograph from that week: My mother, my sister, and I are in my mother’s backyard. I look vacant and completely spent, like I’ve recently undergone electroshock therapy. My mother and my sister have their arms around me.
    By the time I get back to Cleveland, I’m more exhausted than when I left. I get into bed, curl into a fetal position, and stay there.
    Only later does it occur to me that after fleeing my mother and her lawsuit, I try to re-create a place I cannot possibly remember: I want to be back inside my mother’s womb.

CHAPTER EIGHT
“It’s just the law”
    As I went through the prosecutor’s files in 2007, I came upon a subpoena, addressed to me, ordering me to an “on-site parole hearing regarding David Francis.” The site was within the Cuyahoga County jail.
    As I read the subpoena, I felt again the old terror lighting up my nerves. To this day, I don’t know why that hearing had been necessary.
    Up to that point in my career, I had never reported on crime. I had never been inside a jail or prison. I had never been in a courtroom. I had never spoken to a cop, except through my car window as I handed over my license and registration. I had never met a parole officer.
    I had seen this country’s justice system only in the abstract, from a safe distance. I thought I knew how it worked from news accounts and the little I learned in high school and college classes. I thought it was just, at least most of the time. This was before President George H.W. Bush’s escalation of the Waron Drugs in 1989 led to the mass incarceration of black men, before DNA testing that began in 1989 exonerated more than three hundred wrongly convicted prisoners, 70 percent of them minority. Even so, I find my ignorance back then breathtaking.
    In the summer and fall of 1984, I saw the system up close, though not entirely from the inside. I saw how the game is rigged against defendants. I saw how so many defendants are poor, and black. I saw how easily mistakes can be made, and how unreliable eyewitness testimony is. I understood how the intricate and often impenetrable network of police, prosecutors, courts, parole officers, even defense lawyers—all of whom work together frequently—makes outsiders not only of the defendants but of the victims, too.
    Six days after the lineup, David Francis’s parole officer calls. He tells me what I already knew: Francis was let out of an Ohio prison on parole on July 2, a week before he raped me.
    The parole officer tells me that I have to testify in a parole revocation hearing. He can send someone to my house with a subpoena, he says, but it would be easier and faster if he could just give it to me when I come downtown to the county jail. The hearing is scheduled for July 24 at 1:00 p.m., but he’d like me to get there twenty minutes early.
    He goes through his explanation so quickly it takes me a minute to catch on to the main thing he’s telling me: It’s a parole revocation hearing.
    “I don’t understand,” I say. “He’s already locked up, so why do you need to revoke his parole now?” As I ask him this, my anxiety flutters, ready to take wing. “I mean, they’re keeping him locked up, right? They aren’t getting ready to let him go, are they?”
    No, no, the guy says. He explains the need for the hearing, which has something to do with the fact that Francis has only been arrested for this new crime, not convicted. If he were convicted, it would be an automatic parole violation; a mere arrest demands a hearing and a witness statement.
    I still don’t understand. “Why can’t they just wait for the trial and conviction? What’s the rush?”
    The parole officer tries again, but he might as well be speaking to me in another language. He is, I will realize in 2007, when I try to read the Ohio Revised Code and Ohio Administrative