TROY, MI – Seven years ago, Louise O’Connell was living the dream, and knew it. She was a successful and highly respected bank executive, an expert at investigating and finding fraud.
Her husband Jim ran a part-time construction business, but had semi-retired and spent a lot of time volunteering to help at the small Lutheran church they belonged to in Troy, a placid, affluent suburb best known for green lawns and Michigan’s most upscale shopping mall, the Somerset Collection.
They were in their 50s and had two kids in college. Mainly they lived a quiet life and indulged their passion of collecting antique marbles.
Then, disaster struck.
Jim O’Connell also volunteered at a small preschool that operated at the church. One night in 2013, a six-year-old girl who had graduated from the preschool the year before told her mother that “Mr. Jim” had improperly touched her.
The parents went to the police, and before long O’Connell was dramatically arrested and charged with four counts of criminal sexual conduct. His wife was in utter shock.
Her husband, who was then 60, had no prior record, other than a breaking and entering charge when he was 17.
“I knew – I know – he isn’t guilty,” Louise O’Connell said. “I know him better than anyone; we had been together almost 30 years.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I have no sympathy whatsoever for child molesters. They are soul-destroyers. I am the major breadwinner in this family. I’d have been out of here in a minute if I thought he was guilty. But he isn’t.”
When her husband was charged, she went into her retirement account to put up bail and find the best attorney she could. That lawyer assured her that her husband would be acquitted, since there was no evidence whatsoever of the child’s claims.
While the little girl said he had improperly touched and kissed her, she also said lots of things that clearly weren’t true, such as that Mr. Jim broke into her house at night to steal her marbles. His family expected a speedy acquittal.
But to her shock, a jury convicted him on all four counts in less than three hours. That was in 2014. Today, he is Inmate 931376 at the Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility, a Michigan state prison in Ionia.
He cannot even apply for parole until 2039, when he would be 86; the state can keep him until 2064. Odds are that he will die there, unless somehow his case can be reopened or his sentence commuted.
Yet his wife is not giving up. “People tell me I should just walk away from this, and frankly, that would be easier,” she said.
“But I can’t, because I know he didn’t do this.”
After his conviction, she accepted a better job at a bank in Houston, and moved to Texas. But she flies back to Michigan every few weeks to visit Jim and work on his case.
She estimates she has spent more than $250,000 in an effort to free her husband. Ms. O’Connell has filed appeals and been turned down, hired private investigators to try to find grounds to reopen the case, and has a team working on a video and a website.
For the last year, she has also been working on a book, tentatively titled Anatomy of a Smear. “I know a lot of people think that he has to be guilty. After all, he was convicted, and we have a fair justice system in this country, right?”
“That’s the way we felt, too – until this happened to us, and we learned that the courts, the prosecution and the judges are all part of a runaway conviction machine.”
Looking at the transcript of the trial, it is hard to see how a jury could not conclude that there was not, at the very least, some reasonable doubt about her husband’s guilt.
Whether or not he is guilty, it has become disturbingly clear in recent years that far more innocent people have been convicted than most imagined. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 2,471 people in prison were released from state and federal prisons over the last 30 years, after they were proven to have been completely innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted.
Ninety-nine of those cases were in Michigan, including Richard Phillips, now 73, who served 45 years in prison for a murder he knew nothing about, and David Gavitt, behind bars 26 years after being falsely convicted of setting a house fire that killed his family.
There was also Neal Redick, whose case was uncannily similar to Jim O’Connell. He was speedily convicted in 1991 after his girlfriend’s young son said Redick had sexually molested him.
There was no physical or other evidence, but the jury believed the boy. Fourteen years later, the young man developed a guilty conscience, and admitted he made it all up because he wanted the court to allow him to live with his father, instead of his mother.
There have been, in fact, so many wrongful convictions that when Michigan passed a law to compensate exonerated prisoners in 2016, the fund soon ran out of money!
This spring, the legislature added another $10 million to the fund, which provides completely exonerated prisoners with $50,000 for every year they were wrongly imprisoned.
Louise O’Connell wouldn’t mind the money, but mostly wants to find some way to get her husband released. She has a new glimmer of hope; Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently established a new Wrongful Convictions Unit.
Robyn Frankel, the attorney named to head it, was one of her husband’s appellate attorneys. “We have a broken system and need to fix it,” Ms. O’Connell said in an interview.
“What people need to realize is that this could happen to you.”
