Unfair by Adam Benforado Read Free Book Online Page A

doctors distinguish between those who were going to die anyway and those who could be saved; nor did it divide those willing to die from those holding hard to life.A DNR simply informs medical professionals not to engage in CPR if the person stops breathing or her heart ceases beating; the order is not meant to affect the delivery of other medical care.Moreover, a person may choose to have a DNR whether or not she is seriously ill. Using the label, however, gave the chairman the illusion of objectivity.
    The patients abandoned on the seventh floor were never just one label.They carried an almost infinite array of tags—recovering, terminal, insured, elderly, forty-something, mother, son, fat, handsome, combative, kind. A few of these were written on their charts, or read from their faces, coughs, and trembling hands. But most were invisible.
    No one deserves to be summed up in a word. And no one should die because of an acronym.

2
DANGEROUS CONFESSIONS
The Detective
    The back door of the apartment had been bashed open with a blue mop.Someone had washed bloody hands in the sink.And if you walked right up to the front staircase and bent down, you could see where those same hands had brushed the wall near the banister—streaks of red fresh against the white.
    Dawn Engelbrecht knew that something was wrong as soon as she saw her five-year-old boy walk into the bar where she worked.Holly Staker was supposed to be watching him and his younger sister, but there he was, little Blake, standing in front of her.A neighbor had noticed him playing outside in the dark and had brought him by.
    No one picked up when she called the house, but she got through to Holly’s mother, and the two of them met at 442 Hickory Street.
    The house is on the north side of Waukegan, Illinois, a classic brick two-flat set close to the neighboring houses. Most people would call it a nice street, though it has known better times. The houses have steps cut across the wide green verge between the street and the sidewalk. But 442 is different from the others: the footpath follows the left side of the house around to the back. You have to jog right if you want the front door.
    It was locked, as Dawn had left it.But when she finally turnedthe key of the second-floor apartment, she found the television on.A single white tennis shoe lay on the floor.A chair in the dining room was turned over.
    They called for Holly, but there was no answer.Taylor, the two-year-old, was fine, though—safe and sound, lying on her brother’s bed. Maybe Holly had just gotten bored and left?
    It was not until the police arrived that Dawn thought to look behind the bedroom door.
    Eleven-year-old Holly was curled in the fetal position, her hands up by her face, her black stretch pants cast aside, the missing white shoe tangled in one of the stirrups.She had been stabbed twenty-seven times and raped.
    A year later, twelve jurors fixed their gaze on Juan Rivera, the man accused of the crime.Juan—a petty criminal, barely twenty—sat motionless. They had heard the evidence, the alibis, the reports, listened as each witness and expert gave his or her account. They had seen the pictures of the bedroom and of Holly’s face, and it was time to decide.
    Guilty.
    And so it went at the second trial as well, ordered by the Appellate Court of Illinois after Juan’s initial conviction was overturned. Different jury, same result.
    For a man like Juan, sentenced twice to life in prison without the possibility of parole, to get a third chance before a jury is as rare as a snowflake in June. But his lawyers found a way: DNA evidence.
    It had always been there, those twelve years Juan sat in prison.A vaginal swab had been collected at Holly’s autopsy.But after being labeled, it sat in an evidence locker until 2005, when it was finally tested.
    The results of the analysis were startling.The semen in the sample belonged to a single man, and that man was not Juan Rivera.
    Proof. Vindication. After so