The family gathered in the visitor lot. Jorge Ochoa’s mother and brother and me. Mrs. Ochoa was dressed as if going to church, a pale yellow dress with white cuffs and collar, her hands wrapped in rosary beads. Oscar Ochoa was in full cholo regalia; baggy low-slung jeans cuffed over black Doc Martens, wallet chain, white T-shirt, and black Ray-Bans, his neck wrapped in blue ink, complete with his Vineland Boyz moniker “Double O” prominently on display.

And me, I was in my Italian three-piece, looking good for the cameras, wrapped in the majesty of the law.

The sun was dropping in the sky and coming at a flat angle through the prison’s twenty-foot exterior fence line, casting us all in the chiaroscuro light of a Caravaggio painting. I looked up at the guard tower and through the smoked glass thought I could see the silhouettes of men with guns.

This was a rare moment. Corcoran State wasn’t a prison where men often left on their own two feet. It was an L-WOP facility, for men serving life without parole. You checked in but you never checked out. This was where Charlie Manson died of old age. But many inmates didn’t make it to old age. Homicides in the cells were common. Jorge Ochoa was just two steel doors down from an inmate who had been beheaded and dismembered in his cell a few years back. His avowed Satanist cellmate had then strung together his ears and fingers to make a necklace. That was Corcoran State.

But somehow Jorge Ochoa had survived fourteen years here for a murder he did not commit. And now this was his day. His life sentence was vacated after a court finding of factual innocence. He was rising up, coming back to the land of the living. We had driven up from Los Angeles in my Lincoln, two media vans trailing behind us, to be at the gate to welcome him.

Promptly at 5 p.m. a series of horn blasts echoed across the prison and drew our attention. The cameramen from the two L.A. news stations hoisted their equipment to their shoulders while the reporters readied their microphones.

A door opened at the guard house at the bottom of the tower and a uniformed guard stepped out. He was followed by Jorge Ochoa.

“Dios mio,” Mrs. Ochoa exclaimed when she saw her son. “Dios mio.”

It was a moment she never saw coming. That nobody saw coming. Until I took the case…

Continue reading the extract here…

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