The True Story of How a Series of Lies Sent an Innocent Man to Prison
Michael Sirois
This is just to let everyone know I won’t be posting anything here for a month or so. I’ll be doing final preparations for If a Butterfly until sometime in September. Michael Standard Disclaimer: Please post a comment below if you would like to. All comments are personally moderated by a grouchy old guy, though, …
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Søren Kierkegaard One of Hanna’s comments in Aggravated continues to resurface for me periodically. In her May 2006 interview with Tom Swearingen, less than two months before the first trial began, …
Early in Aggravated there is a scene where a sheriff’s deputy interrogates Steve, and tells him he knows Steve is lying because he had been tracking Steve’s eye movements. Steve has a glass right eye, so he took off his glasses, tapped the right eyeball with his fingernail, generating a clacking sound, and said, “Which …
In my previous post, It’s Even Harder for Innocent Defendants Now, I pointed to an article from a Houston defense attorney about how difficult the situation has become for innocent individuals who have been accused of sex crimes, especially those against children, now that Texas has adopted two Federal rules of evidence (413 and 414). …
My brother, Steve, was convicted in 2006. Part of my argument in the book has been that prejudice against people accused of sex crimes, especially against children, runs so high that it’s difficult for the innocent defendant to receive a fair trial in Texas. Here’s an interesting blog post from John Floyd, a Houston attorney, …
My Investigation Begins While I was researching Steve’s trial, I was, of course, doing regular “real life” things (helping my wife care for her elderly parents, working at Rice University until late-2009 and then retiring, writing novels, etc.), but Steve’s situation, was always in the back of my mind. I felt like there should be …
Getting More Data For the next couple of years, on and off, I worked on breaking the transcripts down and analyzing them. I found a great deal of useful information that helped me understand the trial, and why it worked the way it did (or didn’t work the way it should have), but it would …
More Piles of Paper Once I had the full transcript of Steve’s second trial, I read through it at least a dozen times, made notes, and tried to make sense of some of it; but, after a while, all the statements blended together. I had read them so many times that I often wasn’t sure …
Piles of Paper During our early discussions (circa 2007-2008) Steve had given me a basic idea of what his accuser, Hanna Penderfield, claimed, but I found it impossible to believe. She said there had been 80 to 90 incidents of sexual assault, sometimes occurring in front of Steve’s wife and children, and sometimes in public …
Getting Started How I gathered evidence for Aggravated is a topic I cover a bit in the book, but I thought if I also said something about it here it might help you see how I tried to find the truth in circumstances where it at first seemed there was little or no evidence. Over …