He’s wrongly convicted of murder. She’s a California hippie mom. Can they prove his innocence?
LOS ANGELES -- When the COVID shutdown began, Jessica Jacobs Dirschel, a mother of four in Topanga Canyon, was one of the many millions of people who staved off boredom by binging on Netflix.
Five hours into a documentary series about wrongful convictions, Dirschel hit pause and Googled the phone number of an attorney on the show who worked on exoneration cases.
When the lawyer answered, Dirschel said, “I want to help.”
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Jofama Coleman had served 14 years of a life sentence for murder when the pandemic lockdown came to the state prison in Corcoran, Calif. Almost every day behind bars, he had taken some step to try to prove his innocence, researching case law, drafting court filings and writing letter after letter asking innocence groups and appellate lawyers to review his case.
“The vast majority of people just don’t believe you,” he said. As the years went by, he said, “I gave up the idea that someone out there would actually do what was necessary to help.”
Yet, as he lay quarantined in his bunk, cut off from the law library, Coleman knew that without someone on the outside, he would never leave prison.
It was, he thought, “kind of an impossible situation.”
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Ellen Eggers answered the phone in her Sacramento home in March 2020 and heard an unfamiliar, high-pitched voice, swollen with emotion, telling her what a great lawyer she was.
Then 68, Eggers had spent the years since her retirement from the state public defender’s office working on exoneration cases without charge at her dining room table.
“It’s the best thing that a lawyer can do with their bar license: to get an innocent guy out of prison,” she had said in the Netflix series “The Innocence Files,” clenching her fist while her eyes welled with tears.
Her passion seemed to leap up from Dirschel’s laptop screen. She thought, I want to know her.
When she got Eggers on the phone, Dirschel said she was willing to do anything — absolutely anything — to assist. Eggers heard the words, but after decades in the criminal justice system, she couldn’t quite make sense of them.
“I don’t have people [calling] like that. People who want to help,” she recalled.
Eggers assumed Dirschel had a husband or brother locked up.
No, Dirschel told her. She didn’t know anyone in prison.
Was she some sort of attorney, Eggers wondered.
“I’m a teacher,” Dirschel told her. “In Topanga.”
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Coleman’s ex-wife was watching Netflix that spring too. Evelyn Medina knew Coleman was not guilty of the drive-by shooting in South Los Angeles in 2003 that had landed him in prison, because she had been with him in his green Toyota Camry that night.
The jury hadn’t believed her story, and their marriage fell apart with him in prison. But they had a daughter together and stayed in touch.
Medina had sent Eggers’ name to Coleman, but he sat on it awhile, doubting he could endure another disappointment. Eventually he wrote a letter.
Eggers was swamped with two big cases — both would end in exonerations — and did not have time to answer all the inmate mail she got. She scanned Coleman’s letter and set it aside.
Sometime later, Deandre Coleman called Eggers
