Righting Wrongs Part 3: David Shepard
New York, NY —
Earlier this month, Scott Fappiano was released from prison, after DNA tests cleared him of a rape conviction that had put him behind bars for the last 21 years.
FAPPIANO: There was times I gave up hope, that I wasn’t gonna be exonerated. I never gave up hope I was gonna come home. I always knew I was gonna come home.
Fappiano is the latest person to be exonerated with the help of the Innocence Project. And although he’s free, his new life on the outside will be far from easy. David Shepard can attest to that. He got out of a New Jersey prison in 1994, after serving ten years of a 30 year sentence for an abduction and rape he didn’t commit. WNYC’s Amy Eddings has his story.
REPORTER: You don’t see the prison time in David Shepard. The 39-year-old has warm, brown eyes and he comes across as a tall, big, teddy bear of a man. We’re sitting in a public park in East Orange, New Jersey, near the county welfare office where he works. He doesn’t strike you as someone who learned in prison when he was 18, that you have to have a cold heart.
SHEPARD: For example, if I saw someone taking advantage of someone on the street, I might say, yo, man, why you doing that? But in jail, you have to look the other way.
REPORTER: Or, you have to be prepared to take matters firmly in hand.
SHEPARD: There was an incident, a guy took my cigarettes. When lunchtime came, I took a tray to the guy. So…after that…I just started to blend in.
REPORTER: Like most people, David Shepard never thought he would end up in prison. He grew up in Newark, and knew his share of neighborhood troublemakers, but he wasn’t one of them. In 1983, he was working as a baggage handler at Newark Airport. He was making 15 dollars an hour, and was due for a promotion. His girlfriend, Erica, had recently given birth to their son, and the two were planning on getting married.
SHEPARD: My life, prior to my arrest, was going the way you’d want your life to go. As far as I was concerned, there was no clouds. All sunny. Then my whole life came crashing through the floor.
REPORTER: Around Christmas of 1983, a woman was abducted from a parking lot near the airport. Two men forced her into the back seat of her car, and drove her to a residential area, where they both raped her. They dumped her out of the car, and drove away. The victim could not identify the faces of her assailants…but she remembered one of them had called the other, “Dave.” A police officer asked David Shepard if he would come to the station house to answer questions about a stolen car. He soon learned he was being charged with rape.
SHEPARD: I must’ve been in there for about eight hours? They talked to me about the incident, and where I was at, and how I lied to them, how I didn’t get my stories straight….
REPORTER: Shepard had alibis…his little sister, whom he babysat that night. The driver of the bus he took to work. But his sister was too young to be a reliable witness, and the bus driver didn’t remember him. DNA testing was not available at the time for the semen samples. So blood type testing was done, and the tests indicated it could have been Shepard. There were fingerprints, too. The ones that were legible did not match David Shepard’s prints. The ones that were smudged – prosecutors said those prints were his. In this case, reasonable doubt was not the basis for acquital. A jury convicted David Shepard of rape, robbery, weapons violations, and terrorist threats.
SHEPARD: It was like somebody hit me in the head with a hammer. And all I could see was stars. I had to like, sit down, as they were leading me out. I felt like I was going to faint
REPORTER: According to the Innocence Project, the nonprofit legal clinic that helped David Shepard eventually get out of prison, wrong identifications are a factor in 75 percent. Roughly 50 percent include police or prosecutorial misconduct.
Shepard was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
SHEPARD: You go, you retrack your trial, what could I have said, or what could I have done different. And then it comes sometimes when you doubt your own self. You know, maybe I blacked out. Maybe I did something, and they remember, and I don’t. Maybe I was sleepwalking
REPORTER: He spent lot of time in the law library. When some of the first cases using DNA testing came to trial around 1989, David Shepard noticed. And he waited for the technique to come to New Jersey. In 1992, with help from the Innocence Project, he filed for access to the rape kit, so he could do DNA testing. The evidence contained two DNA profiles. Neither of them matched David Shepard. He was released in May, 1994.
58/SHEPARD: I was totally, totally tired. I went home, and I went to sleep! (laughs) I got in my mom’s bed, like I was a little kid again. She sat up there with me, and held me and I went to sleep. (laughs) That’s how I spent my first four hours home.
REPORTER: He married his girlfriend, and they had another child, a daughter. He got a job with the city of Newark, after then-mayor Sharpe James heard about his exoneration. Shepard says not a lot of ex-cons, even ones like him who were innocent, get that kind of second chance; people usually think he had to have done SOMETHING to have spent all that time in prison.
SHEPARD: And I got caught up in what people term as trying to get back? Sayin, I didn’t miss those 12 years, I’m going to get that 12 years back. I’m not 29, I’m 18 again, and I’m gonna do what an 18 year old does.
REPORTER: He straightened up, after his family reminded him that he was setting a bad example for his kids. With the Innocence Project, he’s creating a National Exoneree Council. The goal is to help other wrongfully convicted people, and their families, prepare for life on the outside. He’d like to go back to school and become a lawyer. He says even though our criminal justice system can get it wrong, and send an innocent man to prison…even though wrongfully-convicted people like him have to rely on journalism students and law school clinics like the Innocence Project, for help….it’s still the best system in the world, because it can be changed.
SHEPARD: I think that we have to be diligent, and when we see something wrong, we have to band together as a community, and say we’re not gonna let this happen.
REPORTER: For WNYC, I’m Amy Eddings.
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