Pastor Embodies Liberty, Justice for All

Jim McCloskey remembers the rage boiling inside him as he read the paper on the train to work one morning in 1978. An 11-year-old girl in a Philadelphia housing project had been raped and stabbed to death with an ice pick. A man named Matthew Connor had been charged.

“I hope they burn that son of a gun,” McCloskey recalls thinking.

Little did he realize how dramatically his opinion would someday change: McCloskey would trade his high-paying job and comfortable house for the austerity of seminary life. He would found a prison ministry. And he would help free Connor from prison.

McCloskey, 57, grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia without a thought of prisons or courtrooms. He seemed destined for a successful business career.

After graduating from Bucknell University in 1964, he spent three years in the Navy, including a tour in Vietnam. He returned to college to get his master’s degree and then set out for Tokyo, where he landed a market-research job.

Four years later, he returned to the United States and a job with Hay & Associates, a Philadelphia management-consulting firm. He helped build its business in Japan and reaped the rewards of success.

But he also developed a nagging sense, after six years with the firm, that material riches weren’t enough.

“The fuller I got, the emptier I became,” he said.

He decided to reconnect with the faith he had abandoned in his teens. At Paoli Presbyterian Church, he grew fascinated with the sermons of pastor Dick Streeter, who exhorted his congregation to serve others.

The pastor noticed McCloskey too.

“He was a very prosperous young businessman, making a significant amount of money and traveling the world, and it wasn’t really as fulfilling as he thought it would be,” Streeter said. “He knew there was something more to life than that.”

A Saturday night spent reflecting and reading the Bible convinced McCloskey that to heed the call to serve, he would have to turn away from his secular life.

“I thought Christ was speaking directly to me,” he said.

His boss, William Dinsmore, “just about had a heart attack,” McCloskey recalled. “He said, ‘Jim, I didn’t know you went to church.’ I was very much in the closet as a Christian.”

At Dinsmore’s request, McCloskey stayed on another year. But in August 1979, he put the house up for rent and drove his Lincoln to Princeton Theological Seminary.

He imagined he would eventually become a church pastor, but the seminary’s fieldwork requirement derailed that plan. Out of curiosity, he chose prison ministry and was assigned in the fall of 1980 to Trenton State Prison.

There he met Jorge De Los Santos, who was serving a life sentence for the 1975 murder of a Newark used-car salesman. De Los Santos insisted he was innocent and relentlessly made his case to McCloskey.

“He figuratively grabbed me by the throat. He said, ‘What are you gonna do, say a prayer?’ ” McCloskey recalls.

McCloskey, a legal novice, decided to read the trial transcripts. He struggled mightily with the notion of challenging the system that had determined De Los Santos to be guilty.

Then he took another leap of faith. He decided to take a year off from his seminary studies and devote the time to freeing De Los Santos--on one condition.

“If I ever catch you lying, we’re done,” he told De Los Santos.

McCloskey moved out of seminary housing and rented a room that doubled as an office. He assembled a defense committee and raised $25,000 in contributions.

One lawyer who worked on the case was Paul Casteliero. He thought McCloskey had unrealistic expectations, but he was impressed by the divinity student’s conviction.

“He was so outraged by the injustice,” Casteliero said. “I thought, in some sense I knew, he was absolutely, positively, right.”

The key was tracking down a jailhouse informant, Richard Dellisanti, who McCloskey believed had lied on the stand. McCloskey eventually reached Dellisanti through his mother and persuaded him, after several visits, to recant his testimony.

De Los Santos was freed in July 1983, after U.S. District Judge Frederick B. Lacey said Dellisanti’s testimony “reeked of perjury.”

McCloskey thought freeing De Los Santos would be a one-shot deal. But then De Los Santos introduced him to two other inmates who also believed they were wrongly imprisoned.

Two things held McCloskey back: He had spent his life savings freeing De Los Santos, and he was not entirely convinced that trying to clear the wrongly convicted was his true calling.

The financial dilemma was resolved by a gift of $10,000--McCloskey calls it “manna from heaven”--that his parents decided to give to each of their children.

It took a vivid dream to answer his remaining question:

“I’m in Vietnam, standing on a riverbank with someone, and we see a boat with refugees on it, and the boat sinks. We just kind of throw up our hands and say, ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

“But then out of nowhere come these helicopters, and these Navy SEALs go down into the river and come up with people and save them. To me, this was a strong metaphor that I had to go into the bowels of these prisons and bring out the dying.”

McCloskey formed Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit organization that seeks to free inmates wrongly convicted of capital crimes. Through its work, 21 men and women in the United States and Canada have been exonerated, and six others have won early parole.

One of those released was Connor. McCloskey took his case after receiving a letter in 1984 from a fellow inmate who believed Connor’s claims that he didn’t rape and kill Corinthea Fields. With an attorney’s help, McCloskey uncovered evidence that the girl was actually killed by her half-brother. He also interviewed witnesses who had placed Connor at the scene; they recanted. The evidence helped exonerate Connor; he was freed in 1990. The victim’s half-brother was never charged; he has since died.

Joyce Ann Brown swears she saw “a glow like a halo” around McCloskey when she first met him in the visiting room at Mountain View Penitentiary in Gatesville, Texas.

“It was as if God had sent this angel,” she said.

In 1980, Brown began serving a life sentence for the robbery and murder of a Dallas fur-store owner. Appeals courts denied her claims of innocence.

She obtained a list of prisoner-advocacy groups from another inmate. Three responded, including McCloskey, who said he didn’t have the resources to take her case but would keep her in his files.

Brown continued to write McCloskey over the next two years and finally met him in 1987, when he was in Texas to interview potential clients.

Thirty minutes into their 3 1/2-hour conversation, McCloskey asked her to hold her train of thought. She worried that he had changed his mind. Instead, he said he would commit to her case.

“He promised me one thing--that if I didn’t commit that crime he would help me to be free,” Brown said.

Two years later, McCloskey delivered on his promise. His investigation found that a witness had lied and that another woman who bore a striking resemblance to Brown had committed the murder.

After her release, Brown founded her own inmate-advocacy group in Dallas.

“I wanted to make sure he was always proud of what he had done,” she said.

With a staff of five and an annual budget of about $650,000, McCloskey doesn’t make commitments lightly.

“The whole thing with Jim is that he has to feel you were totally innocent before he’ll take your case,” said James Landano. He was convicted in 1977 for the murder of a Newark police officer, freed in 1989, re-indicted in 1996 and acquitted two years later with McCloskey’s help.

It can take as long as six years from the time an inmate first writes seeking assistance to the day Centurion decides to take a case. From that point, grinding through the courts can take three to 10 more years.

There have been disappointments. One person died in prison in 1994, and two others were executed despite McCloskey’s efforts. To this day, he believes those two were innocent.

McCloskey acknowledges that such situations have tested his faith. But he says he has come to accept that he can’t base it on how cases turn out.

“If I get a bad result, what do I do, fire God?” he asked. “What kind of faith is that?”

He has no regrets for spurning the corporate world.

“I consider myself to be very lucky to have found a real, authentic, purpose in life, because I was so empty before. My life is rich and full of meaning.”

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Soldiering On for Justice

People freed by Centurion Ministries of Princeton, N.J.

Vindicated and Freed:

* Jorge De Los Santos, Newark, N.J., imprisoned 1975, freed 1983.

* Rene Santana, Newark, N.J., imprisoned 1976, freed 1986.

* Nate Walker, Elizabeth, N.J., imprisoned 1975, freed 1986.

* James Landano, Hudson County, N.J., imprisoned 1976, freed 1989 and 1998. *

* Joyce Ann Brown, Dallas, imprisoned 1980, freed 1989.

* Damaso Vega, Long Branch, N.J., imprisoned 1982, freed 1989.

* Clarence Brandley, Conroe, Texas, imprisoned 1980, freed 1990.

* Matthew Connor, Philadelphia, imprisoned 1978, freed 1990.

* Charles Dabbs, Westchester County, N.Y., imprisoned 1982, freed 1991.

* Clarence Chance, Los Angeles, imprisoned 1975, freed 1992.

* Benny Powell, Los Angeles, imprisoned 1975, freed 1992.

* David Milgaard, Saskatoon, Canada, imprisoned 1969, freed 1992.

* Eddie Ryder, Philadelphia, imprisoned 1974, freed 1993.

* Edward Honaker, Nelson County, Va., imprisoned 1984, freed 1994.

* Earl Berryman, Irvington, N.J., imprisoned 1985, freed 1995.

* Richard Johnson, Chicago, imprisoned 1991, freed 1995.

* Steven Toney, St. Louis, imprisoned 1983, freed 1996.

* Geronimo Pratt, Los Angeles, imprisoned 1970, freed 1997.

* Kerry Max Cook, Tyler, Texas, imprisoned 1977, freed 1997.

* Ellen Reasonover, St. Louis, imprisoned 1983, freed 1999.

* Eddie Baker, Philadelphia, imprisoned 1973, freed 1999.

Early Parole and Freed:

* Milton Hernandez, Jersey City, N.J., imprisoned 1981, freed 1986.

* Jerry Wayne Moore, Prince William City, Va., imprisoned 1982, freed 1994.

* Gregory Benson, Newark, N.J., imprisoned 1978, freed 1991.

* Nick DeSousa, Washington, D.C., imprisoned 1974, freed 1995.

* Michael Damien, Washington, D.C., imprisoned 1974, freed 1995.

* Paul Burricelli, Woodbridge, N.J., imprisoned 1985, freed 1997.

* James Landano was freed in 1989, retried and acquitted in 1998.

Source: Associated Press