Books: ​“When Truth Is All You Have” Tells Story of the Centurion Ministries’ Role in the Modern Innocence Movement

When Truth is All You Have, a new mem­oir by Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey (pic­tured) tells the sto­ry of what many con­sid­er to be the birth of the mod­ern inno­cence move­ment. The book, writ­ten with for­mer USA Today nation­al edi­tor Philip Lerman, and released in July 2020, describes McCloskey’s per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al evo­lu­tion as he cre­at­ed Centurion Ministries in 1983, the first-ever orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to fight­ing wrong­ful con­vic­tions in the United States.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s review for the Washington Post prais­es When Truth is All You Have as ​“a riv­et­ing and infu­ri­at­ing exam­i­na­tion of crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions, reveal­ing how easy it is to con­vict the wrong per­son and how near­ly impos­si­ble it is to undo the error.” Kirkus Review calls it “[a] heart­felt and heart-rend­ing sto­ry of fight­ing wrong­ful con­vic­tions” com­prised of “[c]ompassionate tales from a ded­i­cat­ed war­rior for justice.” 

The book includes 12 case stud­ies of wins and loss­es, includ­ing two men McCloskey believes were inno­cent who were exe­cut­ed. McCloskey shared a last meal with one of them, Virginia death-row pris­on­er, Roger Coleman. Fourteen years lat­er, he helped per­suade Virginia Governor Mark Warner to autho­rize posthu­mous DNA test­ing, which impli­cat­ed Coleman. ​“I’ll be haunt­ed until the day I die about whether Roger did it or not,” McCloskey told NPR’s Terry Gross on an episode of Fresh Air that was broad­cast July 21, 2020. ​“I’ve traced Roger Coleman’s move­ments that night from 10 o’clock to 11 o’clock. The time of death was 10:30 to 11:00. … I’ve spo­ken with every­body he’s spo­ken to dur­ing that one hour, what time he was there, what they talked about. And I don’t know how he had the oppor­tu­ni­ty or even the moti­va­tion to do this.”

The book also recounts the case of Texas death-row pris­on­er, Kerry Max Cook, a case McCloskey says that test­ed his faith in God. ​“I was with Kerry through three retri­als through­out the 1990s,” McCloskey told Gross. ​“The first retri­al was a 6‑to‑6 hung jury. Second retri­al, Kerry was re-con­vict­ed and sent back to death row. I inves­ti­gat­ed that case from top to bot­tom. I sat at the defense table dur­ing the tri­al help­ing the lawyer. There was no ques­tion in my mind that Kerry Max Cook had noth­ing to do with this. I saw the pros­e­cu­tors and the police and their wit­ness­es lie after lie after lie. And we had a ter­ri­ble tri­al judge who pre­vent­ed us from intro­duc­ing excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence. The deck was stacked against us, and Kerry goes back to death row. And we have to start all over again.” 

Ultimately Cook was freed, after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals described the case as an ​“illic­it manip­u­la­tion of the evi­dence [that] per­me­at­ed the entire inves­ti­ga­tion of the mur­der,” result­ing in ​“a con­vic­tion based on fraud.”

McCloskey’s exposé of wrong­ful con­vic­tions is intend­ed to high­light what ​“a cru­el, mind­less, mean machine the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem can be” and how dif­fi­cult it is to per­suade the courts they have con­vict­ed — and in some cas­es con­demned — an inno­cent per­son. ​“Once some poor inno­cent soul is sin­gled out, and law enforce­ment is con­vinced of his guilt, the train has left the sta­tion,” he writes. ​“There is no turn­ing back. Truth has been left behind.”

Centurion Ministries laid the foun­da­tion for the inno­cent move­ment in the United States but, unlike the nation­al Innocence Project and many local and region­al inno­cence projects, it does not lim­it the cas­es it takes on to those with DNA evi­dence. The orga­ni­za­tion has freed 63 men and women in the last 37 years, includ­ing Cook and for­mer Texas death-row pris­on­er Clarence Brandley. As Brandley’s exe­cu­tion date approached, McCloskey per­suad­ed one of the wit­ness­es to come for­ward and record a video­taped affi­davit that recant­ed his incrim­i­nat­ing tes­ti­mo­ny against Brandley and named the real killers. After the wit­ness told his sto­ry on 60 Minutes, oth­er wit­ness­es came for­ward and the state’s case disintegrated. 

During his sec­ond year at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1980, McCloskey served as stu­dent chap­lain at Trenton State Prison in New Jersey. The book recounts his encounter with Jorge de los Santos, a man con­vict­ed of mur­der who pro­claimed his inno­cence. After read­ing the tri­al tran­scripts, McCloskey told de los Santos he believed he might be inno­cent. ​“What are you going to do about it?” de los Santos replied. ​“Are you just going to go back to your nice lit­tle safe sem­i­nary and pray for me? … I need some­one to free me from this hell on earth. Whether you like it or not, you are that man.” McCloskey found a lawyer for Santos, and he was freed in 1983. 

After grad­u­at­ing sem­i­nary, McCloskey found­ed Centurion. ​“I believed this was des­tiny, that this was why God put me on earth,” he writes. ​“That every­thing that came before, all the ups and downs in my life, was in prepa­ra­tion for this work.”

The Death Penalty Information Center has doc­u­ment­ed 170 cas­es since 1973 in which wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed pris­on­ers have been exon­er­at­ed of all charges relat­ed to the offense that put them on death row. However, DNA evi­dence played a sig­nif­i­cant role in only 26 of those exon­er­a­tions (15%). McCloskey believes that tens of thou­sands of inno­cent peo­ple are in jail nation­wide, and, as book review­er Hagerty writes, with DNA evi­dence avail­able so infre­quent­ly, “[p]roving a wrong­ful con­vic­tion in the future will require the kind of old-school, painstak­ing, gut­sy work of knock­ing on doors, por­ing over doc­u­ments and per­suad­ing peo­ple who have no inter­est in doing so to admit their mistakes.” 

“In oth­er words,” Hagerty writes, ​“we need many more Jim McCloskeys and his coun­ter­parts at Centurion, and a return to the past.”

A man of staunch faith, McCloskey once asked Hagerty, ​“Does God real­ly exist? And if he does, what’s the redeem­ing val­ue of all this unjust suf­fer­ing?” Now 78, McCloskey won­ders if that’s the first ques­tion he’ll ask when he arrives in heav­en. ​“It’s going to be an interesting conversation.”