24 April 12022

☉   24 April 12022 is the day the French election was held, and it looks like Emmanuel Macron has thoroughly crushed Marine Le Pen. Not as thoroughly as five years ago, mind you, but crushed nonetheless. Le Pen’s defeat is a victory for the forces of Light and Reason; Macron’s reelection not so much. All of which goes to show that you can’t always get what you need even when what you want is out of reach regardless of what the old song says.

Case in point: Terance Calhoun, still imprisoned for crimes that he (apparently) did not commit. Here’s what we have: on 26 September 12006 somebody attacked a 15-year-old girl (Victim 1) near Fenkell Avenue and Gladstone Street in Detroit. (The charges were Attempted Kidnapping, Kidnapping, and Criminal Sexual Conduct - Assault with Intent to Commit Sexual Penetration.) A month later, on 27 October 12006, somebody sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl (Victim 2) near a liquor store on Fenkell Avenue. (The charges were Criminal Sexual Conduct First-Degree, Kidnapping, Felony Firearm, and Criminal Sexual Conduct - Assault with Intent to Commit Sexual Penetration.) Victim 2 (the 13-year-old) filed a police report and helped in the creation of a sketch of her attackers. The sketch was posted at the liquor store, where Terance Calhoun was arrested on 3 November.

Both girls identified Terance Calhoun as their attacker in separate lineups. As part of a plea agreement charges of Kidnapping and Criminal Sexual Conduct - Assault with Intent to Commit Sexual Penetration were dropped in the case of Victim 1, and the charge of Criminal Sexual Conduct - Assault with Intent to Commit Sexual Penetration was dropped in the case of Victim 2; Terance Calhoun pleaded no contest to the rest on 21 February 12007, and was sentenced 28 March.

Now that no contest plea is at least slightly interesting—it means that while Terance Calhoun did not dispute the charges, neither did he admit any guilt. As this was part of a plea agreement, I can’t help but wonder whether Terance Calhoun, seeing no viable defense to the charges against him, chose the lesser of two evils in not contesting some in return for more serious charges being dropped. Assuming that he was innocent, a plea of no contest might well feel more satisfying than a plea of guilty, even if the result was basically the same.

Because here’s the thing—Terance Calhoun apparently is innocent of the charges against him. According to the authorities, DNA evidence found in the examination of previously unexamined rape kits shows that someone else—a serial rapist no less—was the actual perpetrator of the crimes in question. Not Terance Calhoun.

Now I’m taking the word of the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office Sexual Assault Kit Task Force that the evidence is as they say it is. This goes against the grain for me; I prefer to examine the evidence, or at least the results, for myself. We are told that untested sexual assault kits were responsible for the new evaluation of the evidence, but not the specifics. Was Victim 1 tested? (There is no mention of her filing a police report.) Was Victim 2? Are there two sexual assault kits involved, or one, or what? How much of this is hard evidence, and how much inference and speculation? For the moment I am assuming that a rape kit for at least one of the victims turned up, and that the DNA results exonerated Terance Calhoun and implicated somebody else. But this is speculation on my part, and nothing more.

In any case the wheels of justice have ground slowly on, and Terance Calhoun was scheduled to be released on Friday. Family members had come from out of town to celebrate—and then the unthinkable happened. Like a scene from an old black-and-white movie, a Detroit police officer—one Robert Kane—showed up with a binder of supposedly new evidence proving Terance Calhoun’s guilt. According to at least one account, the supposed evidence included confessions to both crimes. On the strength of Robert Kane’s conviction—she (quite properly) didn’t look at the binder contents—the judge delayed the proceedings until Wednesday.

Given that the DNA evidence has cleared Terance Calhoun I would hope Robert Kane has hard evidence—something more solid than confessions or eyewitness identifications. I don’t know what it could be, honestly. We hear that there is nothing new in the binder—though I don’t know if that’s the result of actual examination or just grandstanding for the crowd. But as it stands, it certainly sounds as if “a police officer acting alone with no authority [who] could not face the facts” has resulted in Terance Calhoun continuing to be “wrongfully incarcerated”.