The fluorescent lights of the Cook County Courthouse buzzed like trapped flies on the afternoon of August 14, 1986, and Ellen Cruz could not stop staring at the crack in the ceiling. It ran from the water stain above the jury box all the way to the clock that read 3:47, a fault line in the slow collapse of everything she had ever believed.
Her client, Raymond Decker, sat beside her in a brown suit that smelled of mothballs and failure. He was fifty-three years old, a machinist for thirty-one of them, and he had been fired from the Hammond Tool & Die Company for stealing equipment that he had not, in fact, stolen. The evidence against him was a single grainy photograph from a security camera, showing a man who looked like Raymond — same build, same jacket, same receding hairline — carrying a box of industrial-grade drill bits out the loading bay at 2:17 AM. The man in the photograph was not wearing Raymond's glasses. Ellen had pointed this out four times. The prosecution had smiled each time and said nothing.