When Truth Is All You Have

Jim McCloskey was a management consultant in suburban Philadelphia when, at 37, he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary. The decision followed years of turmoil: a devastating love affair in Japan, a descent into frequenting prostitutes, and a spiritual hunger that drew him back to the church. One night in 1979, reading a passage in which Jesus tells a rich young man to give up everything and follow him, McCloskey felt the words addressed to him personally.

His second year required a field placement. Supervising chaplain Joe Ravenell assigned McCloskey to the Vroom Readjustment Unit of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, a facility housing some of New Jersey's most violent inmates, specifically to humble him after McCloskey seemed overly confident at orientation. On his first day, an inmate screamed at him; McCloskey later described the man to Ravenell as Black. The inmate was white. The episode became McCloskey's first personal encounter with the unreliability of eyewitness identification shaped by fear.

Among the inmates, McCloskey met Jorge "Chiefie" de los Santos, a man with a history of heroin addiction convicted of a 1975 murder he insisted he did not commit. Chiefie was candid about his criminal past but adamant that two witnesses had lied and prosecutors knowingly used their perjured testimony. McCloskey was skeptical but moved by Chiefie's sincerity and the devotion of his wife, Elena, who visited him faithfully. When Chiefie was sent to a fetid punishment basement, he told McCloskey, "If there is a God, He's gotta work through you."

Despite warnings never to get involved in inmates' cases, McCloskey read Chiefie's trial transcript over Thanksgiving and found the evidence troubling. The case rested on two witnesses: Pat Pucillo, who claimed to have seen Chiefie at the murder scene, and Richard Delli Santi, who claimed Chiefie confessed to him in jail. McCloskey took a year's leave to investigate. He tracked down Delli Santi, who confessed that both witnesses had lied and that a detective pressured him into fabricating the jailhouse confession. Attorney Paul Casteleiro, a former public defender, took the case pro bono and discovered the prosecutor's own handwritten notes proving he knew Delli Santi was a habitual informant. At a 1983 hearing, the judge ruled that perjury had occurred with prosecutorial knowledge and ordered a new trial. On July 26, 1983, Chiefie walked free.

That night, alone in the room of the elderly Princeton woman who had housed him rent-free, McCloskey noticed a pile of letters from other inmates pleading for help. After graduating from seminary, he founded Centurion Ministries, naming it after the Roman centurion in the Gospel of Luke who declared Christ innocent at the crucifixion. The organization would dedicate itself to freeing innocent people serving life sentences or facing execution.

The memoir follows McCloskey through decades of cases, each revealing different failures of the justice system. In the Nate Walker case, Walker, a Black man, was convicted of raping a white woman in Elizabeth, New Jersey, despite a work timecard proving he was on the job and severe myopia requiring thick glasses the victim said her attacker did not wear. Walker told McCloskey the police framed him to pressure him into informing on the killer of a local officer. When semen evidence was finally tested, Walker's blood type did not match. He was exonerated in 1986, and the resulting media coverage brought Centurion national attention.

Kate Germond, a former bookkeeper from California who saw McCloskey's photo in The New York Times, called to offer help and became his indispensable partner for over three decades. Wall Street financier Jay Regan, himself wrongly convicted and exonerated in a federal case, became Centurion's most transformative benefactor.

The Clarence Brandley case tested McCloskey's faith. Brandley, a Black school janitor in Conroe, Texas, sat on death row for the 1980 rape and murder of a white teenager. McCloskey arrived 21 days before the execution. Through patient visits with janitor John Henry Sessum, who had been coached by a Texas Ranger to implicate Brandley, McCloskey obtained a videotaped witness statement. Gary Acreman, one of the two janitors Sessum implicated, gave a separate corroborating videotaped statement confirming Brandley's absence during the crime. A stay was granted six days before the execution date, and after a lengthy appellate process, Brandley walked free in January 1990 after nine years on death row.

Joyce Ann Brown, an African American woman imprisoned in Texas for a robbery and murder she could not have committed, had an airtight alibi confirmed by timecards and co-workers. McCloskey and investigator Richard Reyna traced the real accomplice and uncovered prosecutorial misconduct. Brown was freed in November 1989 and founded a nonprofit helping incarcerated women.

Roger Coleman, a Virginia coal miner executed in 1992 for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law, maintained his innocence throughout. Fourteen years later, DNA testing matched Coleman's semen to the victim. McCloskey publicly accepted the results but privately retains reservations, noting a mixed semen sample indicating two assailants and an impossibly tight timeline.

The Kerry Max Cook case consumed two decades. Cook was sentenced to death for a 1977 murder in Tyler, Texas, based on fabricated evidence: a fingerprint expert who falsely testified he could age prints, a jailhouse informant who admitted inventing a confession, and suppressed grand jury testimony. Cook endured horrific abuse on death row, including sexual assault and multiple suicide attempts. After his conviction was reversed and retried twice with hostile judges excluding defense evidence, Cook accepted a no-contest plea in 1999. DNA testing later confirmed the semen belonged to James Mayfield, the victim's controlling, violent, married lover.

The Benjamine Spencer case stretched 34 years. Spencer, a young Black man in Dallas convicted of murder based on eyewitness testimony that forensic analysis proved impossible, was finally freed in March 2021 after a newly elected DA found the key witness had received reward money while denying it at trial. McCloskey's final major case involved the Savannah Three: three white army soldiers convicted of a 1992 drive-by shooting of a Black man in Georgia. McCloskey obtained the sole eyewitness's recantation and discovered a suppressed police report showing other armed men threatening violence in the area while the soldiers were already in custody. The Georgia Supreme Court unanimously vacated their convictions in 2017.

Throughout the memoir, McCloskey interweaves personal struggles with professional crusades. His faith, once certain, grew complicated over decades of witnessing injustice. During a retreat after Cook's reconviction, he read Jesus's words that God "sends rain on the just and the unjust" and concluded that God does not intervene directly; justice is humanity's responsibility.

The book closes with an accounting of the exonerees' fates. Some thrived; others did not. Chiefie returned to drugs and was found murdered. McCloskey retired from active management of Centurion in 2015, turning leadership over to Germond. As of the book's writing, Centurion has freed 65 innocent people. McCloskey identifies the persistent causes of wrongful conviction, including coerced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, and racial disparity, and calls for reforms: open-file laws requiring prosecutors to share case files with the defense, mandatory videotaping of interrogations, and elimination of procedural bars that prevent courts from considering new evidence of innocence. "The justice system is not just," he writes. "But it could be."