Resurrection Walk

The family gathered in the visitor lot. Jorge Ochoa’s mother and brother and me. Mrs. Ochoa looked as if she were going to church in 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 was 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 nearly 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 long guns.

This was a rare moment. Corcoran State wasn’t a prison where men often left on their own two feet. It was an LWOP 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 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 had been vacated after a court finding of actual 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 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 and checked their hair.

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

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

It was a moment she’d never seen coming. That nobody had seen coming. Until I took the case.

The guard unlocked a gate in the fence and Jorge was allowed to walk through. I noted that the clothes I had bought him for his release were a perfect fit. A black polo and tan chinos, white Nikes. I didn’t want him looking anything like his younger brother for the cameras. There was a wrongful-conviction lawsuit coming and it was never too early to engage in messaging the Los Angeles County jury pool.

Jorge walked toward us and at the last moment started to run. He bent down and grabbed his diminutive mother, lifted her off the ground at first and then gently put her down. They held each other for a solid three minutes while the cameras captured from all angles the tears they shed. Then it was Double O’s moment for hugging and manly back-pounding.

And then it was my turn. I put out my hand but Jorge pulled me into an embrace.

“Mr. Haller, I don’t know what to say,” he said. “But thank you.”

“It’s Mickey,” I said.

“You saved me, Mickey.”

“Welcome back to the world.”

Over his shoulder I saw the cameras recording our embrace. But in that moment I suddenly didn’t care about any of that. I felt the hollow I had carried inside for a long time start to close. I had resurrected this man from the dead. And with that came a fulfillment I had never known in the practice of law or in life.