For the first time in a decade, Justin Chapman awakens to a Sunday morning without the old dread.
No longer is his future darkened by the soul-killing prospect of a life of counting days in the aching monotony of prison.
That all ended Wednesday. The last of the very thin murder case against him evaporated. I’d like to think that the evaporation was speeded by a bright hot light of journalism cast by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That’s the movie screenplay; it’s never quite that simple.
Yet, Chapman’s case is a searing reminder of the indispensable duty journalists have to keep an eye on powerful people and systems that can wreck lives. Few systems warrant more of our attention than the judicial process, because it is so powerful and capable of stealing time or ending life.
When courts fail, the consequences for a man like Justin Chapman are nearly unthinkable – the deprivation of freedom, the waste of his precious life, even death. The system has safeguards, but, as the Chapman story shows, they fail now and again with brutal results.
Reporters stand on the last thin line against injustice.
In late 2014, Bill Rankin, our veteran justice reporter, pushed to make Chapman’s case the first venture of our new podcast initiative. Podcasts seemed the next natural extension of our best journalism beyond a website and printed page. For our journalism to persist into the future, we have to master providing it in a million different ways.
Bill sold me on the case because his reporting suggested clearly that the justice system had failed Chapman, who was rotting in prison for a crime he very well might not have committed.
From the beginning, Chapman said he was innocent. In his pitch to do the podcast, Bill and his brilliant editor, Richard Halicks, walked me through the systemic failures in Chapman’s case one by one.
At its essence, the prosecution had a bad case with unreliable evidence, suspect witnesses and an irrational narrative. The state never really explained why Chapman would set fire to his own house, a duplex in the small town of Bremen. The fire moved next door and killed his 79-year-old neighbor.
At the same time, Chapman was left essentially defenseless by a shamefully underfunded and overworked public defender system. (Full disclosure: I have a soft spot for public defenders. My son started his career in Fulton County and is now a public defender in Brooklyn, N.Y.)
Indeed, Chapman’s prime champion has been public defender Jan Hankins, who was beset with the gnawing sense that she had failed him because she couldn’t afford him the time and attention his case required. After his conviction, Hankins crusaded for him, finally persuading two private lawyers from an Atlanta law firm to take the case without charge.
For people without money, this is the rarest of all blessings – resources to combat the slow, relentless machine that seems designed to consume men and women with cold indifference.
Chapman’s new attorneys assembled a team that included an experienced criminal defense attorney, two paralegals and three investigators, including two retired FBI agents.
The team uncovered stunning new details, including evidence that the lead prosecutor withheld key facts that could have helped Chapman. It also showed how another lawyer appointed to represent Chapman botched his appeal and attempt to win a new trial.
For us, the case was a perfect opportunity to shed light on the dark recesses of the broken machine. We still believe that people will want change if they understand how badly broken something is
So, we made the podcast “Breakdown,” with the double meaning that we would “break down” what happens and, in this case, put on public view an actual breakdown of the system. Thus was born Season 1: “Breakdown: Railroad Justice in a Railroad Town.”
This year, we launched “Breakdown’s” Season 2 with a deep examination of the case against Justin Ross Harris, the young father accused of murder for leaving his son to die in a hot car.
Together, the “Breakdown” seasons have been played nearly 2 million times by people who have downloaded episodes from the iTunes store. Tens of thousands have listened to the stories via our websites.
We’ll never know for sure whether our work helped Chapman find justice. Even so, I celebrated a little Wednesday I heard this chapter of his ordeal had ended. This was good news.
Yet, the story remains troubling. Whoever started the fire that killed Alice Jackson is still out there somewhere, perhaps capable of repeating such a heinous act
But for today, I’ll try to imagine what it must be like to have such a weight removed. We can never restore all that Chapman could have experienced during 10 years of freedom he was denied. Even so, we can all revel in his future and hope in some small way the AJC has contributed just a little to reducing the chances that such an injustice will happen again.
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