He was in prison. She was in Covid lockdown. They freed each other.
Four years ago, when a deadly virus began to turn the world upside down, Jessica Jacobs was at home in Los Angeles, in a forested canyon that has long attracted people Bohemian speciesand like many Americans, he was binge-watching true crime documentaries on Netflix.
One of them would change her life.
Watching an episode of “The Innocence Files,” about a Los Angeles man who spent 20 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit and the lawyer who freed him, Ms. Jacobs felt she had found a calling . So she contacted the attorney, Ellen Eggers, and told her she wanted to help investigate cases like the ones on the show.
Ms. Eggers, a retired public defender who once worked for Cesar Chavez and helped farm workers become lawyers and now works for free on innocence cases, was skeptical of Ms. Jacobs’ overtures. But she was overloaded with cases and Mrs. Jacobs persisted. She eventually told Mrs. Jacobs about the Jofama Coleman case, which Mrs. Eggers had heard about from Mr. Coleman’s ex-wife.
At the time, Mr. Coleman was locked in a cell in Corcoran, California, a city in the Central Valley with two major industries: agriculture and prisons. He had spent years in the prison library, learning the law, studying his case and filing motions claiming he had nothing to do with the South Central Los Angeles drive-by shooting for which he was convicted as a getaway driver and sentenced to prison. 25 years to life in prison.
Getting nowhere in the courts and now facing a deadly pandemic behind bars, Mr. Coleman lost hope. Out of desperation he shared his story onlinehoping someone would read it and help him:
“I am a black man who grew up in a single-parent home without wealth and a platform. As such, the injustices I experience are easily swept under the rug. For more than 5,890 days, I have had to maintain my sanity as I fall asleep and wake up behind concrete walls and bars for a crime I did not commit.”
Little did Mr. Coleman know that help was on the way.
Working together, Ms. Eggers and Ms. Jacobs — with the help of the students Ms. Jacobs teaches — obtained a key witness who wanted to recant, and found another witness who claimed to know who the real killer in the case was. Crucially, they found an ally in George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, who has made reviewing problematic convictions a priority. And a legal motion filed by Mr. Coleman to obtain the complete investigative file of his case was granted by the California Supreme Court.
Late last month, a judge in Los Angeles declared Mr. Coleman innocent, a few weeks after he was released on parole. Along the way, Ms. Eggers and Ms. Jacobs and their student helpers also exonerated Abel Soto, who had been found guilty of the same drive-by shooting and sentenced to 72 years to life. Mr. Soto, who was accused of being the shooter, was 15 years old at the time of the 2003 killing.
The story connects many threads that have defined modern life in Los Angeles: police failures, gang shootings, racial disparities in the criminal justice system (Mr. Coleman is black; Mr. Soto is Latino), New Agey moms, Hollywood. Harriet Ryan, a reporter at The Los Angeles Times who wrote a long story about it the casedescribed the story on social media recently as “an LA-only story that, like the city, is alternately beautiful and horrifying.”
By the time Mr. Coleman heard from Ms. Jacobs in prison, he felt he was out of options.
“She’s a firecracker,” he said recently in an interview on the campus of the University of California, Riverside, where, weeks after leaving prison, he was already studying public policy and planning to pursue a law degree , and then engage in tort law. convictions. “Knowing that it got to the point where they were on the case, and they were consistently on it, and I’m hearing from them every day, hearing from them every day, it gave me hope again.”
For her part, Ms. Jacobs said the experience brought more meaning and excitement to her life and that in many ways, Mr. Coleman “kind of saved me.”
“The problem with Jofama is that he spent 20 years in prison and studied law,” she said. “And then I come in and I want to help him, not because I have a white savior complex, but I’m just interested in general. It feels like you’re watching a series.”
To adjust to the outside world and not get stuck in grudges, Mr. Coleman, now 41, said he tried to recapture the sense of humor he had as a child, when he was known as a prankster. “The system took away my childhood,” he said.
As for Netflix, when Mr. Coleman was sent to prison, the company had only been around for a decade and was still primarily a DVD-by-mail operation. “I didn’t really have much time for TV,” said Mr. Coleman, who, while out of law school, worked with disabled prisoners, taking them to appointments and helping them make their beds.
While Mr. Coleman was deep in his studies — he recently spent nearly 4 a.m. writing an article about police stop-and-frisk tactics — Mr. Soto, 36, has returned to his childhood home in South Central, a few blocks from the scene of the crime that took nearly half his life.
He left jail with the clothes on and was given a box of condoms, some Narcan and a $200 prepaid debit card. Recently, he was detailing a 1996 Suburban that his sister gave him, and that his nieces and nephew brings to school every day. He said he might move to Mexico, where his parents were from.
“One thing I’m not comfortable with, and still have problems with, is a lot of choices,” he said when asked what it was like for him to adjust to the world outside prison. ‘Just choices, period. You go to eat and there is a menu.
It will take work and time to overcome the trauma of captivity and anger at the injustice. “It looked like a war zone,” he said. “It wasn’t a place for an 18-year-old kid.”
In rustic Topanga Canyon, not far from Malibu and the Pacific Ocean, Ms. Jacobs, who taught for years in public schools, started a nontraditional school called the Slootschool out of her house. The name stands for ‘Dare to Innovate and Transcend Cultural Hegemony’. Students can study whatever they want, and many start their university education at a young age. There is a yurt for playtime.
“The idea of hegemony, that the people in power tell the rest of us a story so they stay in power,” she explained. “We try to transcend that.”
It was that spirit that fueled her efforts to free innocent people. Yet it would also mean the end of her partnership with Ms. Eggers, the former public defender who became a lawyer for both Mr. Coleman and Mr. Soto. The two women appreciated each other, but their approach was ultimately at odds.
Ms. Jacobs herself admits that she is impulsive and insists on doing things that Ms. Eggers believes no legal attorney should do — like the time she invited the homicide detective on Mr. Coleman’s case to give a talk to her students, when her real purpose was to ask him pointed questions about the case.
Ms. Jacobs, 49, and her students plan to continue investigating cases, and some of her former students have started their own innocence project, called Youth for innocence. At her home on a recent afternoon, there were transcripts of jailhouse phone conversations waiting to be scanned and photo lineups of potential suspects waiting to be reviewed.
One of the students is Azzurra Avraham, who has organized files into searchable PDF files. She is 12, has been taking college-level classes since she was 10, and plans to become a Supreme Court judge. “When I was younger, my mom told me I have a really strong voice or whatever, so I would be a really good judge,” she said.
Working with her is Angelina, her sister, who at age 14 is a junior at UCLA and an intern at the Advocates for California’s innocencea non-profit organization pursuing exemptions.
Because this is Hollywood, movie producers are already knocking, Ms. Jacobs said. And she and Mr. Coleman have started writing a book together.
“If one of the producers says we can get a book deal and a movie deal at the same time, that would be great,” she said.