Free Jamie Snow &/or Our Twisted Judicial System

As a 20-year old Criminal Justice major at Illinois State University I needed a job.

I’d previously been a grocery store check-out clerk, made pizzas at Monical’s, built sandwiches at Subconscious Submarine Shoppe, sorted through filthy return bottles for homeless guys at a 7-11 and volunteered at Skipworth Juvenile Detention Center in Eugene, Oregon, where I got scabies and did strip searches and learned to say, “Bend over.”

This was the sparkling resume’ that scored me a Juvenile Advocate position with the McLean County Probation Department.  It’s like a Big Brother/Big Sister progam but with the oversight of a probation officer and the court.  A judge orders the number of hours spent together per week.  The pay was maybe $10/hour, great for 1980.

It was not the only time a dipsh*t would be placed in a position of authority for which they were completely undeserving.

Jamie Snow was 15.  I was told before hand that he’d already been given two prior advocates, one male and one female.  They’d shown up at his door and he’d convinced them somehow that it wasn’t going to happen.

I appeared at Jamie’s trailer, met his father and off we went.  He tells me now that he opened up to the possibility that maybe this could work when I said, “Look, we’re just supposed to hang out together and I get paid.  I’ll even give you half the money.”  I don’t remember details but it sounds like something I’d have done.

Long story short, Jamie and I spent 15 or more hours per week together for over a year before  I moved to California and lost touch.

But during that year we had some crazy times together, a lot of fun, and he tells me now that I may have been the best friend he ever had.  It’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

We went to concerts.  I did his homework occasionally.  He was with me when I opened my car door into traffic and had it ripped off by a passing vehicle.  I let him drive my brand new red car with a clutch after he swore he knew how to drive a stick shift (he did not).  He laughs like mad when he tells me about the look on my face when he began to grind the gears repetitively to excess.

I also worked in a runaway home at that time and Jamie was placed there occasionally due to problems at home.  One night I was working the midnight shift and had fallen asleep watching TV when a man entered the dark room and began attacking me, trying to put his hands inside my clothes while on top of me.  When I began screaming the huge, drunk man ran.  While I was calling 9-1-1, Jamie was the one who caught him trying to sneak back in a bathroom window and chased him away with a baseball bat.

Jamie was not someone who opened up easily or complained about his home life and I still don’t know many details.  Most of what we did together was laugh.  Sometimes you just click with someone and it’s so easy.  I wish now that I’d perhaps taken the job a little more seriously, although Jamie claims it would not have worked that way.

Fast forward 30 years and I looked for Jamie on Facebook but instead found a news article in the Bloomington Pantagraph.  He has been in Stateville Prison in Joliet, Illinois for 15 years on a sentence of life without parole.  He was found guilty of the gas station robbery and murder of an 18-year old named Bill Little for a net profit of $30.

I immediately wrote him a letter.  In the first return correspondence he told me he was innocent.  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really care one way or the other.

My naivete died a slow death during my time as a counselor in a federal halfway house, during my stint as a probation officer.  My allegiance to dysfunction and excuses had lessened after marrying a Chief of Police and wondering if he’d be shot in the back of the head while eating lunch one day like an officer in a nearby town.

I just wanted Jamie to know I still cared about him.  In our correspondence I became aware that this kid I adored had sometimes gone years without a phone call or a visit.

Ironically, we met in the exact same visiting room he’d gone to see his dad in as a little boy.  Dad did time for burglary, the same thing Jamie was in trouble for as a teenager.

Please note: the personality of a burglar is the opposite of someone who commits an armed robbery and murder during daylight on a major busy roadway.

It took me less than an hour to realize Jamie was telling the truth in his letters.  He was home with his family that Easter during the murder of Billy Little.  Anyone who takes the time to objectively look at the details of the case comes to the same conclusion.

He’d gotten his act together after having five kids and moved to Florida, had his own business as a tree surgeon.  Nearly ten years after the murder from more than a thousand miles away, Jamie was charged with a crime he didn’t commit.  It didn’t matter that he’d passed a polygraph exam.

The awful details can be found at www.FreeJamieSnow.com

It’s a classic nightmare.  Jamie’s record made him an easy target.

He was provided with a public defender who’d just had a stroke.  They then brought in an assistant who has since been disbarred and imprisoned himself.  During that attorney’s trial he admitted to drinking more than 12 hours a day and having a mental illness.

In Jamie’s most recent appeal he was again denied an Evidentiary Hearing even as one of the 3-man panel, Judge Knecht, questioned the prosecutor as to how this could have resulted in a proper defense.

Even the officer at the scene of the original crime, Jeff Pelo, is currently in prison.  More than a dozen witnesses at the original trial, many with criminal convictions of their own, have recanted their original testimony in sworn affidavits.

There is no physical evidence, only eyewitness testimony from a man who chose someone other than Jamie in a physical line-up the week after the crime, even with Jamie standing right there.  He did not name Jamie as the perpetrator until 8 years after the fact, 8 years in which he heard Jamie’s name repeated in the media and by investigators determined to clear this case.  These same investigators gave that witness’s name and number to the victim’s mother.  Even he asked them during an interview, “Why would you do that?”

This witness also did not pick Jamie’s face out of a photo book in the week after the case, but nearly 10 years later testified “I could never forget those eyes.”  This faulty testimony has put Jamie Snow behind bars with a sentence of life without parole.  It is nearly impossible to prove yourself innocent from behind bars.

My friend Jamie is so incredibly smart and funny and loving.  He once wrestled an alligator but he’s never shot anyone.  The funny smartass I knew at 15 has grown into a better man than most I meet on the street and he’s done it all on his own.

Jamie’s case is represented by the University of Chicago’s Exoneration Project.  His attorney says she’s in this until he’s released.

After 15 years hope is difficult to maintain when dealing with a justice system that is so incredibly unjust.

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