Danyel Joffe Never Gave Up In Years of Fighting to Free Robert Dewey
Denver Post
When Danyel Joffe was designated as a
court-appointed attorney to represent Colorado Department of Corrections
inmate Robert Dewey 11 years ago, she didn't know whether her new
client was innocent.
Not until she spent months in her office in
an old Capitol Hill home immersing herself in the case. While her cats
prowled around her rolltop desk, she examined the contents of several
large boxes of investigative reports. She read every word of the
transcript from the five-week-long trial.
She knew then that the wrong man was sitting in prison.
"He
(Dewey) had told me, 'You'll believe I'm innocent when you see all the
evidence.' He was right," Joffe said after Dewey's exoneration last
week.
Joffe was front-and-center when a large contingent of
representatives of the Mesa County District Attorney's Office, the Mesa
County Sheriff's Office, the Colorado Attorney General's Justice Review
Project, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the Innocence Project
took the rare step of holding a joint news conference Monday morning to
announce something they agreed on: Dewey's innocence.
"I am here to celebrate that my client will no longer be my client," Joffe told the packed room.
After
Dewey's exoneration became official in a courtroom later that day,
Joffe was the one Dewey singled out to include in his Native American
religious ritual.
Dewey waved a burning bundle of sage around
Joffe on the courthouse steps. The lawyer, who had visited him several
times a year since 2001 and corresponded with him regularly to urge him
not to give up hope, closed her eyes and held out her arms as the smoke
wafted over her gray suit.
The case that drove Joffe for so long
was unusual because rudimentary DNA evidence had helped convict Dewey
in 1996 and now newer and much more accurate DNA testing eliminated him
as the perpetrator and matched up to someone who previously had not been
identified as a suspect.
The case would also become a landmark
because it eventually pulled prosecutors, defense attorneys and law
officers into a team all working on the same goal — to free Dewey and
identify the real murderer.
"To Danyel's credit, she never came
across as adversarial on this, which is different," said Mesa County
Assistant District Attorney Rich Tuttle, who helped both to convict and
to exonerate Dewey. "I had a better working relationship with her on
this reinvestigation than I've had with virtually any other defense
attorney. As much of a true believer as she was, she played it pretty
well."
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