Accused at seventeen. Innocent all along.

For eight relentless months, Scott Glover and Matt Lait did the one thing no one with the power to do it had been willing to do in more than twenty years: they actually investigated. Two of the finest investigative reporters the Los Angeles Times ever put on a story, they took the case that had been used to bury me and took it apart piece by piece — the crime scene, the bloody shoe print, the second suspect who had been brushed aside, the detective’s account — and, one by one, they showed the world how little of it was true. When they were finished, the case against me lay in ruins on the front page of one of the great newspapers in America.

Their work — which earned the Times the prestigious Heywood Broun Award — did not merely tell my story; it changed the very ground I was fighting on. Prosecutors, jurors, and readers who had never once doubted my guilt were suddenly forced to look again. The retired prosecutor acknowledged his own reasonable doubt. Jurors said that had they known what Glover and Lait uncovered, they would never have voted to convict. I believe with my whole heart that without their reporting the truth would still be buried in a file somewhere and I would still be in a cell — that it helped set in motion everything that finally led a federal court to overturn my wrongful conviction and give me back my life.

So let me say this plainly, and with my whole chest: we need this kind of journalism now more than ever. Hard, patient, fearless, adversarial investigative reporting is not a luxury — it is a safeguard of a free people, and it is often the last thing standing between an innocent person and oblivion. In an age when trust in our great news institutions has been driven to dangerously low ebb, and when the powerful would like nothing better than for no one to be looking, the work these two men did is precisely the work that keeps the innocent from disappearing. Fund it. Subscribe to it. Defend it. For me it was quite literally the difference between a prison cell and freedom. My gratitude to Scott Glover and Matt Lait is total, and it is permanent.