Secondary characters in narratives of wrongful conviction

Abstract

Research on wrongful convictions has focused mainly on the relationships and interactions among wrongfully-convicted persons and state actors, perpetuating an overly-simplistic understanding of the harms of wrongful conviction. In this article, I analyze narratives of wrongful conviction obtained through in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the U.S. to shift attention toward these stories’ “secondary characters”—those individuals who were neither the main protagonists nor the key antagonists in participants’ narratives, but who nonetheless significantly shaped how the men made sense of their experiences of harm and their journeys from victimhood to vindication. Drawing on research in narrative victimology, I argue that focusing on the secondary characters in wrongful conviction stories facilitates a more nuanced understanding of how the injustice of wrongful conviction is experienced and processed—one that avoids reproducing the binary logic of the criminal legal system, which too often reduces wrongful conviction cases to one-dimensional stories of innocent people versus the state.

Keywords

Narrative victimology secondary characters wrongful convictions wrongful imprisonment

Introduction

Wrongfully-convicted persons are victims of state harm (Westervelt and Cook, 2010), and it is therefore unsurprising that much of the existing research has focused on the relationships among wrongfully-convicted persons and the state actors who play pivotal roles in the wrongful conviction process (such as police officers, lawyers, and judges) (Covey, 2012; Joy, 2006; Scherr et al., 2020). Wrongful convictions research also continues to be largely disconnected from “mainstream” criminology, resulting in calls to “criminologize” this body of work by integrating it within the broader field (Leo, 2005; Naughton, 2014; Norris and Bonventre, 2015). In our efforts to do so, however, it is important to move beyond a singular focus on the role of state actors in the wrongful conviction process. This focus improperly casts the state as the only impactful entity when examining notions of harm in the criminal legal context, and it elides the significance of those individuals whom I call the “secondary characters” in wrongful conviction stories. These characters are neither the protagonists (who are most often wrongfully-convicted persons themselves) nor the most prominent antagonists (who are typically state actors). What roles do secondary characters (such as other incarcerated men, co-defendants, witnesses, and the original crime victims as well as the true perpetrators of crimes that resulted in wrongful convictions) play in stories of wrongful conviction, and what “work” (Sandberg, 2022) do narratives about these secondary characters do when exonerated men talk about their experiences?

In this article, I draw on narrative victimology to shift attention away from the state actors responsible for wrongful convictions and toward the secondary characters in the stories of 15 wrongfully-convicted men in the U.S. Narratives are tools with which individuals make sense of the temporality of their lives (Bruner, 1986), and we can learn a great deal about how storytellers process their experiences by exploring what narratives do (Sandberg, 2022). I illustrate how participants’ constructions of secondary characters anchored and aided how they discussed their experiences of harm as well as their journeys from victimhood to vindication. In so doing, I draw attention to the significance of secondary characters in exonerees’ efforts to make sense of the “ontological assault” (Van den Ven and Pemberton, 2021 : 1) generated by their wrongful conviction and imprisonment.

By focusing on those characters that occupy more tangential positions in wrongful conviction narratives, I respond to Fleetwood et al.’s (2019: 16) call to consider “which individuals or groups our research makes visible, or invisible.”Questions of visibility and invisibility are particularly important in narratives of wrongful conviction because they draw attention to characters who are involved in wrongful conviction cases as perpetrators, witnesses, and victims of harm, but who are nonetheless typically sidelined in analyzes of wrongful convictions. Most importantly, an exploration of how the wrongfully convicted invoke these characters as they tell their stories sidesteps the tendency (evident in much of the socio-legal scholarship in this area) to reproduce the logic of the criminal legal system by reducing wrongful conviction stories to simplistic tales of adversarial relationships among innocent people and the state actors that harmed them.

Whereas traditional wrongful convictions scholarship has focused primarily on how investigations that culminate in wrongful convictions harm innocent people, scholars and advocates alike have recently argued for the need to pay more attention to the “circles of harm” connected to wrongful convictions (Norris et al., 2020; Thompson and Baumgartner, 2018). Although wrongful convictions most directly harm the innocent, they also affect original crime victims, family members (of both the wrongfully convicted and the original victims), other victims who are harmed when the actual perpetrator is not apprehended, and community members whose trust in the legal system is eroded when miscarriages of justice occur (Norris et al., 2020; Thompson and Baumgartner, 2018). Scholars describing the “web of impact” of wrongful convictions have thus argued that we must pay more attention to the “rippling damage” engendered by wrongful convictions (Norris et al., 2020: 39; Westervelt and Cook, 2012).

I build on efforts to consider how wrongful convictions “[entangle] an array of people” (Norris et al., 2020: 39) by exploring not only how the harms of wrongful convictions reach beyond exonerees, but also by examining how harms borne by exonerees themselves are perpetrated by individuals other than state actors. I thus extend existing research on how wrongful conviction harms are experienced, how blame is assigned, and how victimhood and triumph are interpreted. Ultimately, I argue that our understanding of (in)justice, victimization, and vindication in the context of wrongful convictions is incomplete unless we attend to characters who occupy more peripheral locations in wrongful conviction stories.

Narrative victimology

Narratives are defined by their temporality as well as the moral meanings they contain (Presser, 2009), and a narrative approach is particularly useful for analyzing experiences of victimization because these experiences carry a heavy “moral and normative load” (Hourigan, 2019; Pemberton et al., 2019: 395). Victimization ruptures the continuity of individuals’ life stories, and repairing the ensuing damage to the self is a crucial dimension of victims’ healing process (Crossley, 2000; Pemberton et al., 2019). Narrative work can facilitate such healing by providing victims with a space to offer their perspective “in their own terms” as they make sense of the reality of their new sense of self (Cook and Walklate, 2019: 241; Hourigan, 2019; Van den Ven and Pemberton, 2021; Zehr, 2000).

The experience of victimization cannot be separated from the social context in which it occurs (Herman, 1997), and the “ontological assault” that victimization triggers is likewise fundamentally social in nature because it threatens victims’ sense of belonging in their surroundings (Pemberton et al., 2019; Van den Ven and Pemberton, 2021: 3). Although the experience of victimization is difficult to express (Langer, 1991; Levi, 1985), its articulation can be cathartic for victims, and it can offer them a way to re-embed themselves in their social worlds (Van den Ven and Pemberton, 2021).

Narrative victimology, according to Pemberton et al. (2019: 394), should focus on how “people experience wrongdoing” and on “what is done” to those who experience victimization. As is true of the broader sub-field of narrative criminology from which it stems, narrative victimology is not focused on factual accuracy; instead, it seeks to understand the processes of meaning-making that are revealed through how victims create and communicate their stories of victimization (Van den Ven and Pemberton, 2021). Pemberton et al. (2019) further argued that narrative victimologists must explore the relationships among the many stories that are connected to the central victimization event, and they should also pay attention to the narrative consequences of victimization—the impact of victimization on the stories that victims tell about themselves.

The relative youth of narrative victimology means that there is much room to build on explorations of how victims—including the wrongfully convicted—construct stories about themselves and their experiences (Van den Ven and Pemberton, 2021). The wrongfully convicted represent a distinctive group of victims in part because they are victims of state—rather than only individual—wrongdoing, and exploring the narrative structure and content of the stories that exonerees tell facilitates a deeper understanding of their experiences of harm and injustice (Hearty, 2021; Rajah et al., 2021). For instance, Rajah et al. (2021) argued that death-row exoneree activists rely on well-known tropes in their more general critiques of the criminal legal system, but they use specific rhetoric techniques (such as metaphors, sarcasm, and litotes) when discussing their own suffering in particular. In this article, I build on recent efforts to integrate wrongful convictions research with narrative victimological research by exploring the significance of secondary characters in how wrongfully-convicted men talk about their wrongful conviction journeys.

Secondary characters in narratives

Whereas social scientists have devoted remarkably little attention to the role of secondary characters in the stories that people tell about their lives, scholars have extensively explored the significance of these characters in, for example, biblical (Jacobs, 2008; Simon, 1990) and literary (Field, 1968; Makarichev, 2015; Propp, 1968) narratives. Although both primary and secondary characters may appear in the background or foreground of narratives in varying “gradations,” secondary characters typically occupy a more peripheral location in narratives, working mostly in the background to advance narrative plotlines in distinctive ways (Makarichev, 2015: 28). These characters (also often referred to as “minor” characters) are distinguished from protagonists who function in the “foreground” of a narrative (Makarichev, 2015), and audiences often recognize their narrative contributions only upon rereading a text multiple times (Reed, 2019).

Secondary characters are interesting because of how they are “absorbed into” or “expelled from” the wider narrative, which includes multiple characters “jostling for space” (Woloch, 2003: 13, 38). Secondary characters are significant not only because they can be used to advance main characters’ journeys, but also because of their expressive function, which they realize by adding depth, complexity, and meaning to a narrative (Field, 1968; Simon, 1990). These characters help to clarify situations by offering important contextual information, and they facilitate moral evaluations of main characters by, for example, serving as contrast points to main characters to highlight the moral strength or wickedness of the latter (Field, 1968; Simon, 1990). Finally, secondary characters are important because they add a social structure to the worlds presented by narrators (Field, 1968). In his analysis of the role of secondary characters in the biblical story of Saul, for example, Jacobs (2008: 505) argued that these characters function as “a device that the narrator uses in order to direct Saul toward his fixed destiny.” Unlike “foreground characters” who are in many ways constrained by plot lines and structures, secondary characters in narratives are unbound by “plot-related obligations” and can thus be used in more flexible ways by narrators to propel main characters’ storylines (Makarichev, 2015: 28; Simon, 1990).

Secondary characters are often overlooked because they become “drowned out within the totality of the narrative” (Woloch, 2003: 38). These characters are largely invisible in conversations about the injustice of wrongful convictions in particular because of scholars’ and advocates’ understandable commitment to uncovering and addressing the problematic legal and social processes that generate wrongful convictions in the first place. However, erasing the secondary characters in wrongful conviction narratives flattens our understanding of how the wrongfully convicted experience and process the harms they have endured. Dismissing the secondary characters of wrongful conviction stories thus prevents deeper explorations of, for example, the symbolic meanings attached to victimhood as well as of exonerees’ interpretations of different forms and sources of harm. In drawing attention to how secondary characters animate wrongful conviction stories, I explore the significance of these characters in participants’ narratives of their journeys from victimhood to vindication.

Methods

I collected data for this study through in-depth, remote interviews with 15 exonerated men in the U.S. over a period of 4 months. Each of these men was wrongfully convicted for a violent crime and served a period of incarceration that ranged from 4 to 30 years. Six men identified as White, six identified as Black, and three identified as Hispanic. The men were between 27 and 69 years old at the time of the interview, with a median age of 49. Further details on participants’ demographic information can be found in Table 1.

Table 1.

Participant information.

Name	Race	Age	Age at incarceration	Sentence	Time spent in prison
Tony	Hispanic	45	18	Life	25 years
Alfred	Black	46	18	Life	17 years
Diego	Hispanic	57	20	15 years	9 years
Vincent	White	64	24	35 years	11 years
Daniel	White	69	36	Life	14 years
Fred	White	61	35	Life	21 years
Tim	White	49	19	50-life	17 years
Samuel	Black	38	21	Life	15 years
Steve	Black	45	18	Life	26 years
Billy	White	54	21	55 years	30 years
Alexander	Black	45	21	100 years	16.5 years
Simon	Black	49	22	Life	26 years
Benjamin	Black	27	19	60 years	8.5 years
Benito	Hispanic	52	22	23-life	18 years
Christian	White	38	27	26 years	4 years

Exonerees constitute an exceptionally hard-to-reach population (DeShay, 2021), and recruiting participants for this study was very challenging. In fact, one participant (Samuel, 38, Black) informally told me that “it’s nearly impossible, if not impossible” to reach wrongfully-convicted men to talk to them about their prison experiences. Recruiting participants for this study was especially difficult because the traumas attached to their wrongful imprisonment experiences (the focus of the interviews) may have made exonerees understandably hesitant to revisit these memories even if they were amenable to discussing other dimensions of their wrongful convictions. Before beginning recruitment, I obtained Institutional Review Board approval from my home institution, and I also submitted a research proposal to the Innocence Network Research Review Committee, which consists of exonerees, exonerees’ family members, advocates, and lawyers/staff at organizations connected to the Innocence Network—a loosely-affiliated network of organizations supporting exoneration efforts in the U.S. Members of the Innocence Network Research Review Committee provided feedback on my research proposal and suggested some minor modifications to the study design before approving the study.

I began recruitment by reaching out to staff and lawyers at individual innocence organizations and by posting recruitment flyers in social media groups devoted to supporting exoneration efforts. When these recruitment strategies proved largely unsuccessful, I constructed my final sample through a combination of snowball and theoretical sampling. The former strategy was necessary because of the difficulty of reaching exonerated men, and I pursued the latter because of the constructivist grounded theory methodology I employed (Charmaz, 2014). Relying on my professional network, I connected with several exonerees, some of whom participated in the study. Other men with whom I met did not themselves participate, but instead introduced me to other exonerees who became participants. One participant also forwarded my recruitment flyer to a listserv of exonerees with his endorsement of the study, which facilitated recruitment of several more participants.

Race and class emerged as important themes in preliminary analyses of the data¹, and I therefore deliberately recruited men of color to diversify the sample, which up to that point consisted mostly of White, middle- to upper-middle-class men. Including a wide range of perspectives shaped by participants’ different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, prior incarceration histories, and early life-course experiences was crucial to my exploration of the varied ways in which participants processed their experiences of harm. For example, whereas some exonerees drew on their experiences to engage in very public vocal advocacy for criminal justice reform, several men told me that other exonerees they knew actively avoided attention as they recovered from their wrongful conviction experiences. In narrative victimology, “breadth in our collection of narratives is invaluable” (Hourigan, 2019: 267), and in this study specifically, it was important to ensure that the victimization experiences of those exonerees who had withdrawn from the public gaze were not erased. To include the perspectives of those men who did not want to be in the public eye, and to sample based on emerging themes rather than exclusively through snowball sampling, I reached out to several innocence organizations that were unaffiliated with the Innocence Network. I also relied on case details described in the National Registry of Exonerations—the most comprehensive database documenting U.S. exonerations—to reach out to specific exonerees’ lawyers, requesting that they forward my study flyer to their clients.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to eliminate geographic restrictions on sampling an already hard-to-reach population, I conducted interviews on the phone or on Zoom (a password-protected video conferencing platform), depending on participants’ preferences. On average, the interviews lasted approximately 1.5 hours (with some extending over 2.5 hours), and they consisted of mostly open-ended questions related to three thematic areas:

(1) Participants’ early life-course years: In addition to requesting some basic demographic information, I asked participants questions such as “can you tell me what your childhood was like?,” “can you describe what your relationship with your parents was like when you were growing up?,” and “can you tell me what kind of a neighborhood you grew up in?”

(2) Participants’ experiences being wrongfully convicted and thereafter wrongfully imprisoned: Here, I asked participants questions such as “can you describe the circumstances of the crime for which you were wrongfully convicted?,” “how did you feel when you learnt that you were being accused of this crime?,” “what was it like entering prison after you were wrongfully convicted?,” and “what was it like being an innocent man in prison?.” In this portion of the interview, I also asked participants about their relationships with other incarcerated men, correctional officers, and their loved ones outside prison during their period of imprisonment.

(3) Participants’ release and reentry experiences: In the final segment of the interview, I asked participants questions about their pathway to release and exoneration, the challenges they faced upon reentry, and their present-day wellbeing. Questions here included, for example, “can you tell me how you came to be released from prison?,” “can you describe any challenges you have faced since being released from prison?,” and “how do you think being wrongfully convicted has affected your life?.”

Interviews were recorded with participants’ consent and subsequently transcribed verbatim. As a small token of my appreciation for participants’ time and their willingness to share their stories (and in accordance with the guidelines offered by the Innocence Network Research Review Committee), participants received a $20 e-gift card. As expected, discussing their prison experiences was taxing for many participants, but several men who became emotional during the interview remarked that talking to me about these experiences was helpful for them. When participants became distressed, I offered to skip questions, pause the interview, or finish the interview in a separate session another time if they wished. None of the men chose any of these options, but the emotional toll of the interviews on participants underscores the importance of sensitivity, reflexivity, and compassion when conducting field research with wrongfully-convicted persons (Westervelt and Cook, 2012).

I employed a constructivist grounded theory approach to data analysis (Charmaz, 2014). The findings I discuss next emerged through an inductive, iterative process of data collection and analysis involving the search for reappearing themes in the data until I reached saturation—the point at which continued data collection was unlikely to yield new findings. Using Atlas.ti—a qualitative data analysis software—I first developed initial codes and searched for emerging patterns in codes across interviews. At this stage, codes were both descriptive (e.g.— “marital status” or “parental status”) and analytic (e.g.— “resistance to control” or “reentry stigma”). Next, I performed focused coding to develop more abstract categories, and I used analytic memos to draw connections between codes and categories. In analyzing the data, I paid particular attention to the specific words that participants used, and I focused on when and how they introduced characters in their stories. Throughout the analytic process, I also deliberately searched for negative (anomalous) cases that represented divergences from emerging patterns in the data, and I used these cases to refine themes and return to the field to collect more data where necessary. Finally, I synthesized the data to develop discrete themes, which form the basis of the findings I describe in the next section.

Findings

In this section, I first describe how participants constructed secondary characters (such as co-defendants, witnesses, and original victims) as antagonists in their narratives of wrongful conviction. Next, I discuss the significance of secondary characters in participants’ narrative sense-making efforts as they processed their overwhelming journeys from wrongful conviction to exoneration. By examining the role of secondary characters in participants’ wrongful conviction narratives, I focus especially on how participants’ framing of these characters was tied to their own experiences of victimhood and vindication.

Secondary characters as narrative antagonists

Secondary characters revealed the narrative pathways that participants used to “story” blame, and they highlighted the importance of narrative temporality as they advanced the wrongful conviction “plot”—the structure of the story through which specific moments unfolded (Bruner, 1986; Polletta et al., 2011). Simon (49, Black), for example, described his complicated attitude toward his co-defendant, who was the perpetrator of the murder for which Simon was wrongfully convicted. Simon introduced this secondary character as an old childhood friend rather than a co-defendant, thereby commencing the narrative work of painting the social world in which his wrongful conviction story began (Field, 1968). Simon’s shared history with this friend was important because it explained why he unquestioningly followed him into the situation that eventually led to his wrongful conviction. Despite being the obvious protagonist in his story, Simon pulled himself into the background of his own narrative while pushing his friend into the foreground, thereby portraying himself as a naïve accomplice in the violent situation in which Simon and his friend beat the person who they believed had stolen his friend’s television.

I had this one friend, best friend of mine actually, close friend, he and I was close all the way from like the eighth grade. And once I returned from the military, I wanted to come home and when I came home back to [city and state], the job opportunity was scarce, and my friend, he lived in [a different city and state]. And so he told me, he was like, man, I can come down here and look for employment. And once I went down there, the day I went down there with him, my friend ended up getting into it. Someone that broke into his house. Someone broke into his house.

(. . .)

And so, the guy who he thought broke into his house, the victim. . .may he rest in peace, and want peace and blessings to his family. . .the victim came in and I didn’t even know who the victim was because I had only been there for a day. I was talking to him just like, “Hey, you want a beer?” Because my friend had went across the street to his house to retrieve something, and when he came in, he seen the guy sitting there and so they started fighting and they went outside. As they were fighting, some of the other guys who was his friend tried to get in it. And so, I got involved like, “Hey, you all can’t get involved. I won’t get involved.” And so, we ended up having a little scuffle and a fight and then my friend and the other guy that I’m not familiar with, I didn’t know this guy, we all ended up accompanying the victim across the street to my friend’s house. My friend was like, “You’re going to tell me where the TV at.”

Secondary characters give narrators’ worlds “solidity and complexity” (Field, 1968: 39), and Simon revisited the significance of his friend in his social world when he stated, “I kind of said something was amiss, something wasn’t right, but I wouldn’t think that he would murder someone. I didn’t think my friend would do that.” Simon’s friend later turned himself into the police for killing the victim, and when the police arrested Simon as a co-defendant in the incident, his friend tried (to no avail) to retract the statement he had earlier made implicating Simon. The shift in this character from friend to co-defendant underscores the complexities in how participants interpreted and storied the harm that they and others experienced during their wrongful conviction journeys. Simon emphasized the culpability of the police officers (the primary antagonists throughout his narrative) who questioned his friend about Simon even after being repeatedly told that Simon did not participate in the murder, but he also stated, “my co-defendant, I was upset with him, so I didn’t talk to him.” The changes in Simon’s construction of his friend/co-defendant reflects how one character in a story can perform multiple narrative functions (Propp, 1968). As Simon’s friend, this character played the role of helper and confidante in Simon’s pre-wrongful conviction social world; but as Simon’s co-defendant, he transformed into a secondary antagonist whose deception cost Simon years of his life.

When he was eventually wrongfully imprisoned, Simon deliberately immersed himself in the violent prison subculture², and in justifying this choice, he described the difficult lesson he had learned from his relationship with his old friend: “At this time, what I’m saying is I’m in prison for following people, being loyal to people. So in here, I had to grow up fast. It’s either this person’s going to tell me what to do or I’m going to tell the next person what to do.” Simon’s friend and co-defendant ultimately became a forceful symbolic reminder of the betrayal and injustice that Simon had endured, and he shaped Simon’s story of his own social transformation in prison. Whether as an ally or antagonist, Simon’s friend/co-defendant thus propelled Simon’s life story forward as he transformed from passive victim of circumstance to powerful protagonist in his own narrative.

In most other cases, the actual perpetrators of the crimes for which participants were convicted were not within participants’ inner circles, and the absence of the shared history that Simon described meant that these perpetrators were unequivocally negative characters in participants’ stories. Tim (49, White) was wrongfully convicted of murder, and he served 17 years of what could have been a life sentence in prison. Throughout his ordeal, Tim was certain that James³ (a man who worked with Tim’s father) had actually committed the murders for which Tim was wrongfully convicted. Although his greatest frustration was with the “level of corruption, dishonesty with the law enforcement” that did not seriously investigate James as a suspect, James himself was an important figure in how Tim processed his experience of victimization. Tim forcefully stated, “I was a patsy. I was a scapegoat” before contrasting his own helplessness with James’ deliberately nefarious behavior, underscoring how secondary characters can function “as a means for the moral evaluation of the main character” (Simon, 1990: 16).

All of a sudden then, James cleaned out a joint bank account, told his family he’d be swimming with the fish, changed his life insurance policy, faked his death, fled from [original state] to [a second state], ripped off a chain to make it look like he was kidnapped. He fled from [original state], eventually to [a third state], under one of five aliases he had. When he was out there, he changed his wig, because he had a hair weave. He had a codeword when he called home to let his family know he was alive.

In addition to the actual perpetrators of the crimes for which the men were wrongfully convicted, participants also introduced witnesses as secondary antagonists. In the excerpt below, note Alfred’s (46, Black) two-pronged condemnation. On the one hand, (like Tim) Alfred continued to portray the state actors as the primary antagonists in his story because of their decision to “let” this particular witness testify against him. Simultaneously, however, Alfred framed this witness—who also may have been the perpetrator of the crime for which Alfred was wrongfully convicted—as a secondary character that typified the harms perpetuated by a flawed and corrupt criminal legal system. This secondary character thus functioned not only to highlight the injustice that Alfred himself endured; he also represented the perversity of a criminal legal system that cynically supported someone whom Alfred perceived as morally reprehensible while condemning Alfred himself to a sentence of life without parole.

They let a guy get up there who was the pimp of the brothel. You can reasonably show this guy was probably the one who did this crime. They let him testify. The same guy killed his wife, shot her twice in the head while he was holding her with their baby. All of these things, and they let him testify. They gave him a deal to testify against me.

At several points in the interview, Billy (54, White) described the importance of Bruce—a key witness who testified against him in his wrongful conviction case. Bruce’s role in Billy’s story reveals how Billy conceptualized notions of innocence, guilt, victimhood, and vindication. Billy’s attitude toward his own innocence was complicated by the fact that he was committing burglaries at the time of his wrongful conviction, and he expressed an awareness of “how bad of a person I was.” Despite his own law-breaking behavior, however, Billy constructed Bruce as a profoundly villainous character whose immorality contrasted with Billy’s own principled nature, as someone who had never physically harmed another person and who took responsibility (and served time) for the crimes he did commit.

And then that was the extent of the evidence that they had against us was that we had a loud car, neighbors heard a loud car, and two convicts came and said that we did it. And they both received extreme leniency on their sentences for their crime. One of the people named Bruce Pasotti, he was doing a 17-year sentence as a juvenile. He was only 17 when he committed the crime, but him and three other people heard that this prostitute in [city] was running drug money. So they scooped her up and pulled her into a van and raped her and then shot her in the head with a 0.22 when she didn’t have any money and then dragged her out in the woods and buried her in a shallow grave. Well, what happened is the bullet hit her skull and traveled over it. It didn’t puncture her skull. So she wasn’t dead. She crawled out of the grave that they buried her in and went to a farm house right near where she was and she knew who they were and they got arrested and they got 17 years. Two of them were 17 years old. So they got 17 years each. The other guy was like 28 years old and he got 35 years.

Billy’s anger toward the state actors most responsible for his wrongful conviction could not be disentangled from his anger toward Bruce, as was evident when he finished recounting the violence Bruce perpetrated with one final denunciation of both Bruce and the criminal legal system: “[T]hat’s the person that they let go. They brought him in to testify against me saying that I told him I did it and let him go.” Bruce thus continued to direct his anger toward the state actors who could have prevented his wrongful conviction but chose not to do so. Like Alfred, however, he also invoked a secondary character that symbolically represented the failures of a criminal legal system that was woefully mismanaged at best and horrifically corrupt at worst.

Bruce’s narrative function extended beyond capturing the injustice that Billy felt when he was wrongfully convicted; through his expressive function, Bruce also anchored Billy’s narrative of his own growth into a powerful hero figure. Bruce was eventually reincarcerated because he committed another crime after being released in exchange for his false testimony against Billy, and when Billy found himself incarcerated in the same facility as Bruce, he shrewdly leveraged his relationships with important leaders within the prison to exact his revenge on Bruce. In Billy’s narrative, Bruce was thus the secondary villain that underscored Billy’s own victimhood, but he was simultaneously the character through which Billy filtered his narration of his own journey from victimhood to triumph:

I said, “Hey, I just heard something today. I heard that you guys got a guy that you call an enforcer over in [another wing], named Pasotti, and you got him running shit over there.” I said, “That dude’s a fucking rat, man.” He said, “What?” “He’s a rat. He testified against me. He’s a rat.” He said, “Well, you better have some paperwork to back that up or you’re in real trouble.” I said, “Alright, well, wait right here.” And I went down and I got my transcripts and brought them up and I gave them to him. I said, “Read those tonight while you’re in your cell.” He went up and he read them, and the next day he came back and he said, “Thank you, bro. I appreciate that. That’ll be handled.” I said, “Alright.” The next thing you know, I heard that Bruce Pasotti got booted and he got canned up really, really good over there.

Finally, participants’ narratives illustrated the entanglement of their own victimhood and that of the original crime victims in their wrongful conviction cases (Williamson et al., 2016). In recounting his wrongful conviction story, Benjamin (27, Black) discussed the testimony of Mr. Peter, the original victim of the crime for which Benjamin was wrongfully convicted. Benjamin described how he was initially skeptical that the armed robbery charge he was facing would be pursued seriously because “it’s just somewhat like if you read the narrative on the story, to me, it looked like some children [committed the crime].” Benjamin’s “reality check” came when Mr. Peter pointed him out in court as the man who robbed him. Although Mr. Peter later said that he “wasn’t sure” that Benjamin had robbed him, the moment Mr. Peter pointed at Benjamin was when “the nightmare first started.” Mr. Peter was therefore a key character in Benjamin’s narrative because his testimony in court represented a pivotal turning point in Benjamin’s experience of victimization:

And I saw that he was serious. Because I never saw him before. I never met him before. And like I told you, it was like that was the reality check right there. And that man really pointed me out with a serious face. And he dead serious on the witness stand honestly telling these people that I robbed him out of his money. That’s when my reality check came in.

The role of the original crime victim in Fred’s (61, White) story reveals the complex intersections of blame and victimhood in participants’ narratives. Fred harbored a great deal of animosity toward his friend’s daughter, who was 13 years old when Fred was wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting her. For Fred, the “ontological assault” of being wrongfully convicted was exacerbated by the specific offense he was accused of committing (Van den Ven and Pemberton, 2021: 1). To cope with this intense threat to his sense of self, Fred emphasized the moral boundaries between himself and other men who harmed children when he stated, “it was just so bizarre because that’s not who I am for one thing.” Several years into his sentence, Fred learned that the medical evidence that had been used to support the victim’s allegation against him stemmed from the abuse her stepfather had perpetrated against her. This knowledge, however, did little to quell Fred’s anger when his appeal was rejected because she maintained her initial allegation despite acknowledging her stepfather’s abuse. Throughout Fred’s narrative, he depicted the original crime victim as untrustworthy, unreliable, and inexplicably vengeful. Fred’s resentment toward the victim was evident when he described how—16 or 17 years into his wrongful imprisonment—she repeated her testimony that Fred had raped her:

So the girl testifies, she maintains her lie that I raped her. But she admits she’d lied about never having sex before. In my case, in my trial, she said she was a virgin. Turns out she had sex with her stepfather for 10 years. So she admits she lied about that, but she maintains her lies that I raped her.

Fred’s agency as a victim in his own right was clear when he explained how (after he was finally released) he had his lawyer serve his accuser with papers threatening a lawsuit “to see if that would scare her,” but ultimately abandoned this idea when he learned that “she had nothing.” The anger, resentment, and hostility that Fred expressed toward the original crime victim underscores the importance of more fully exploring the “circles of harms” associated with wrongful convictions to understand the blurred boundaries in exonerees’ interpretations of innocence, victimhood, and blame.

Maybe she transferred what her stepdad did to her. I don’t know. She could have easily said. . . Because her first outcry was to a school counselor. She could’ve said to the school counselor, “My stepdad’s abusing me.” Why did she pick Fred Jones? I have no damn idea.

Secondary characters and narrative sense-making

In this final section, I explore the role of secondary characters in the narratives that participants constructed to make sense of their traumatic journeys through wrongful conviction, imprisonment, and eventual exoneration. In discussing the period immediately preceding his wrongful conviction, Alfred described his anxious interaction with Ronald, his co-defendant who eventually was wrongfully convicted along with Alfred. Ronald’s expressive function was evident in how Arnold described their interaction as a way of capturing how he processed the emotional trauma he experienced when he began to realize he was going to be wrongfully imprisoned:

I have a co-defendant Ronald, who also was framed. I kept telling him, “Look, bro, we finna go to jail. We going to jail. We are going to jail, bro.” I don’t know how we going to be able to beat them back when we was sitting in the county jail for 22 months. I just kept telling him that “We finna go to jail, bro. They sending us to prison. I don’t know how and when. We coming home, but they finna send us to prison for a long time.” I just knew it, because it was like they hurtling in.

Although Alfred did not dwell extensively on him during the interview, Ronald reappeared as a secondary character when Alfred recalled his pathway to exoneration. Just as Alfred described sharing with Ronald a desperate helplessness in the period immediately prior to wrongful conviction, Ronald symbolized the triumph of justice over injustice in Alfred’s narrative of exoneration. In explaining how he came to be released from prison, Alfred reintroduced Ronald at the same time that he introduced another secondary character: “The Demon.” The Demon was a fellow prisoner who was bullying Ronald in prison, prompting Ronald’s retaliation in a violent incident that came to represent a turning point in Alfred’s exoneration journey. Ronald was facing a possible death sentence for killing The Demon in prison, and in trying to keep Ronald off death row, his lawyers began to look more deeply into his original case file, at which point Ronald’s pathway to exoneration crystallized—as did Alfred’s because of his role as Ronald’s co-defendant.

As Alfred reflected on the fact that a “loss of life” triggered his release, he engaged in moral assessments about himself, his co-defendant, and The Demon. He described The Demon as someone who “wasn’t a bad guy,” but he simultaneously expressed an appreciation for the karmic irony of two innocent men being released from prison because a “well-known prison gang men” who was “in prison for stabbing people” was himself stabbed to death. As can be seen in the excerpt below, Alfred’s narrative of his journey to exoneration contained echoes of themes related to destiny and spirituality found in the narratives of other victims as they attempt to give meaning to victimization experiences that may otherwise be difficult to process (Cook and Walklate, 2019):

. . .it gets back to me knowing my Creator and that was the way that He did, like the way that it was supposed to happen. Not to say. . .but the guy was in there for killing a woman, stabbed her to death and he dies from being stabbed. Not to say that, like damn, but then on top of that, it’s around a guy who was innocent in prison in the first place. (Alfred, 46, Black)

After trying unsuccessfully to prove his innocence while incarcerated, Vincent (69, White) was paroled after serving 11 years of his 35-year sentence. Although Vincent had transitioned away from his religious beliefs in prison to “focus on the inside,” like Alfred, he reflected deeply on how his exoneration reawakened “spiritual questions” because of its fortuitous development. Vincent’s exoneration was successful because of the discovery of the actual perpetrator in the crime for which Vincent had been wrongfully convicted. This perpetrator took on a symbolic significance in Vincent’s narrative as the character whose discovery represented a longed-for sense of closure. In Vincent’s words, once he was paroled, “it didn’t matter whether the courts exonerated me or not”; he simply wanted to know conclusively who was responsible for the crime for which he served so many years in prison. Despite finding out that the actual perpetrator was deceased, Vincent described the sense of peace he felt even before they went to court to overturn his conviction because he was “satisfied that we found the actual perpetrator, and we knew exactly what had happened.”

When a judge overturned Vincent’s conviction immediately after reviewing the evidence, Vincent explained how the same existential questions that vexed him when he was wrongfully convicted re-emerged: “Just a crazy time. And to the question of ‘why is all this happening now?’ all came back. Religious questions or not religious as much as spiritual questions.” Both Alfred and Vincent thus relied on a narrative framing centered on the circularity that defined their journey from victim to beneficiary of destiny. In the course of this narrative arc, both participants invoked secondary characters whom they did not even meet in person but who nevertheless were key figures in their efforts to make sense of their wrongful conviction experiences.

In describing his journey from wrongful imprisonment until exoneration, Billy (54, White) described in detail how close he had come to committing murder or being murdered himself in prison. In the excerpt below, for example, Billy vividly described a confrontation with Pablo (another prisoner), in which he was almost killed. Pablo had nothing to do with Billy’s wrongful conviction case specifically, but he was still an important part of Billy’s reflections on his wrongful imprisonment experiences because he represented the close calls that could have fundamentally altered the trajectory of Billy’s life story:

There was another incident where I was in segregation and a tier man, his name was Pablo. He was a [gang member]. I don’t even remember what the incident was because it was such a minor incident. I can’t even tell you what the whole thing started over, but he came to my. . . I was in a cell with just bars in the front of it. He comes over and he says, “come here, let me talk to you for a minute.” So I walked up to the bars and he reaches in and he tried to stab me through the bars. I backed up and I got away and he said, “motherfucker, next time you come out of this cell, you’re a dead man. I’m fucking killing you when you come out of this cell.” That’s what he told me. Luckily one of my friends was like two cells away and he heard the whole thing, and he was friends with Pablo. He called him over there and he talked to him. I don’t know exactly what he told him, but Pablo come back and he said, “You’re lucky, man. Your boy just talked to me so we’re just going to let this slide. We’re going to let it slide this time. Don’t ever disrespect me again,” he said. I don’t even remember what it was about.

Echoing Alfred’s and Vincent’s sentiments, Billy felt there was a “divine intervention” that saved him while he was wrongfully imprisoned. In his words, “it’s just like somebody was watching out” for him until he could successfully prove his innocence. The men’s journeys from wrongful conviction to exoneration were so complex (temporally, emotionally, and psychologically) that they seemed “transcendental” in their magnitude and impact (Cook and Walklate, 2019; Zehr, 2000). To process these experiences in story form, the men thus turned to beliefs centered on karma, destiny, religion, and spirituality (Cook and Walklate, 2019). Notably, themes related to spirituality and destiny emerged primarily in narratives related to the secondary characters in their wrongful conviction stories rather than in their narratives of anger and betrayal when discussing the state actors that had harmed them. Secondary characters in stories of wrongful conviction are thus significant not only because the men positioned themselves vis-à-vis these characters when narrating their stories of victimization and triumph, but also because they shaped participants’ efforts to make sense of their entire journey from the moment of wrongful conviction to their final release and exoneration.

Conclusion

The recognition that wrongfully-convicted persons are victims of state harm (Westervelt and Cook, 2010) may tempt researchers to focus exclusively on the wrongdoing of state actors in wrongful conviction cases. Yet the narratives I have described in this article reveal that secondary characters who occupy more tangential spaces in wrongful conviction narratives played an important role in how wrongfully-convicted men processed experiences that were emotionally, psychologically, and socially overwhelming. Most importantly, they underscore the importance of widening the scope of wrongful conviction research to understand how wrongful conviction cases are shaped by—and in turn affect—individuals other than the innocent and the state actors most directly involved in these cases. Through an analysis of the role that secondary characters play in narratives of wrongful conviction, I have argued that participants’ constructions of secondary characters captured their efforts to make sense of their traumatic experiences. The connections participants drew between themselves and secondary characters in their wrongful conviction stories allowed participants to convey both the extent of the harm they experienced as passive victims of wrongdoing and their resilience and tenacity in the face of harm.

Above all, these findings highlight the importance of allowing victims of harm to tell their stories in their own terms (Cook and Walklate, 2019), and to thereby resist the tendency to center state actors who already have a monopoly on how social problems are defined and interpreted (Christie, 1977). Participants’ use of different voices, their narrative sensemaking through notions of karma and spirituality, and their richly-textured storytelling all reflect the important “work” that narratives perform for those who are victims of egregious miscarriages of justice. Consistent with the experiences of other narrative victimologists (Cook and Walklate, 2019; Hourigan, 2019), interviews in this study became so deeply immersive at times that (often after talking for over an hour or two) participants would comment on the cathartic impact of telling their story. Although the importance of constructing a space that facilitates storytelling of this depth cannot be overstated, narrative victimologists must also remain reflexive about how and why participants construct the narratives they do (Hourigan, 2019), and they should be particularly thoughtful when considering which characters and voices should be the focus of their analyses.

If the purpose of narrative victimology is indeed to provide “the space in which the voice of the victim can be heard in their own terms” (Cook and Walklate, 2019: 241), then we must critically consider which parts of victims’ narratives we choose to center as researchers. As I have demonstrated here, the “side” stories that wrongfully-convicted men tell are deeply connected to their “central” experience of victimization, and they reveal a great deal about these men’s processes of sensemaking (Pemberton et al., 2019). Future researchers should thus make a more concerted effort to explore the role and salience of secondary characters in the narratives of other victims of harm and injustice.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Armstrong and the anonymous reviewers at Crime, Media, Culture for their supportive and constructive feedback during the review process. Thanks also to Kimberly J. Cook, Jeffrey Deskovic, Liz Franklin, Andrew Madrigal, Rafael Madrigal, Maurice Possley, Allison Redlich, Alex Sinha, Catherine Tan, Sarah Trocchio, and Elizabeth Webster for their help during the early stages of this study. I am especially grateful to Robert J. Norris for his helpful insights as I wrote this article, and to Arden Richards-Karamarkovich for her fantastic research assistance.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Janani Umamaheswar

Notes

Author biography

Janani Umamaheswar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University. Her research interests are in the areas of punishment, gender, the life course, and qualitative research methods. Her work has appeared in journals including Justice Quarterly; British Journal of Criminology; Theoretical Criminology; Punishment & Society; Ethnic & Racial Studies; Incarceration, and Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology.

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