“Did Your Father Touch You?”
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She’s regretted the lie that sent him to prison ever since.
It was a short drive to the station, and soon Daryl was seated inside an interview room across from Detective Thomas Mancinelli. He informed Daryl that his daughter had said he’d sexually assaulted her.
Daryl couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “C’mon, stop playing,” he said. “You’ve got to be joking.”
That day when Chaneya had stayed home from school, Charade had ap-proached him, claiming that their daughter said he’d touched her inappropriately. But at the time, his wife was drunk or high, and he thought she was just trying to antagonize him. “What are you talking about?” he’d said. “Tell Chaneya to come downstairs!” Charade had backed off: “Oh, no, no, that’s all right.”
He didn’t know that his wife had threatened Chaneya with a belt, and that a week later, she’d taken Chaneya for a late-night walk to the liquor store, asked her if her father had touched her again, and got another yes. And he knew nothing of the events that followed: His wife and her mother had brought Chaneya to a medical clinic; Chaneya told a nurse-practitioner her father had sexually assaulted her; the clinic notified child-welfare officials; they dialed the police.
...
One might expect that in a criminal case such as this—where the victim has repeatedly said the crime never happened—events would unfold in a certain way. That if Chaneya and her father joined forces and tried hard enough, they could find a path to exoneration. And that ultimately, their story would end with the front door of Green Haven swinging open, Chaneya and her father embracing in the prison driveway, brushing tears from their eyes. But that’s not what happened.
...
A few weeks ago, Phillips released their 81-page report, “Re-investigation of People v. Daryl Kelly,” signed by ten prosecutors, including five upstate district attorneys. The prosecutors described Chaneya as a “poised, mature, bright, young woman.” But they did not believe her. As they put it, she “can neither explain why she falsely advanced such a horrible allegation, nor why she adhered to it for so long and repeated it to so many different people.” The report described her father as a “pathological liar” and “ego-inflated narcissist” with a “propensity to posture and blather.”
The Orange County district attorney’s conclusion: “We find that Daryl Kelly was not wrongfully convicted.”
http://nymag.com/news/features/chaneya-kelly-2014-1/index6.html
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