Often, the police do their jobs well, but sometimes they don’t. The cops charged into my house one day with a warrant for my arrest. Someone had given them information that later turned out to be faulty. They did not know that when they came to my house that day. My home was searched. My family was terrified. My son wet the bed with nightmares about the police taking both myself and my wife for months afterwards. They found some things that they thought could connect me to the crime. The cops locked me up and I spent the weekend in jail because they arrested me on a Friday.

The following Monday I was questioned by detectives for over 10 hours. It was terrible. They asked me the same questions over and over. They made me repeat my alibi more times than I could count, and they questioned any tiny way I changed the story. Even though I did not admit to anything, I was arraigned and bail was set higher than my family could scrape together. So I had to go back to jail.

I sat in the county jail for the next four weeks. Jail sucks, anyone will tell you that, but the time seems to be harder if you really didn’t do what you’re accused of. I was finally released when the same crime was committed again in the same area, and the DNA results came back from the crime scene I was supposed to have been at. It turned out that the police had gone to my house because an informant had told them that they saw the perpetrator run into my house. The guy who they pulled in lived on the same street at number 521. My address was 321. They got the house wrong.

Naturally, the district attorney dropped the case before my lawyer could call them. He called them anyway, because we decided I deserved a little bit more than that for being wrongfully charged. Since I had lost my job while in prison, my lawyer had my record expunged and demanded compensation from the state for lost wages. Luckily, the paper did a story about me and I found a new position relatively quickly.