Barbara Gibbons and Peter Reilly: 35 years after

Thirty-five years ago, it was the widely accepted claim of our justice system that wrongful convictions were rare and police-coerced false confessions rarer still. Surely what happened in 1973 to 18-year-old Peter Reilly of Falls Village, condemned for the brutal slaying of his mother, Barbara Gibbons, was just an aberration.

All of us now know better. Or so I would like to believe.

Only slowly have we begun to realize that the United States not only imprisons far more people than any other nation (2.3 million) but that the number of innocents among them number not in the hundreds or thousands but in the many tens of thousands. Forced false confessions account for a quarter of unjust convictions.

Awareness that the justice system is severely broken began with the start of the DNA revolution in the 1980s. This giant leap forward in forensic science flowered in the 1990s. More and more of the wrongly imprisoned were set free while, quite often, the newly identified actual criminals took their place.

As innocence projects sprouted across the land and as the real-life play, "The Exonerated," was widely produced and acclaimed, we became accustomed to reading heart-wrenching stories of individuals rescued after years or decades behind bars for crimes they did not commit. DNA saved Connecticut’s James Calvin Tillman, a black man, after 18 years of unjust confinement for raping a white woman. Unlike the vast majority of the exonerated nationwide, who receive neither apologies nor compensation, Tillman was granted $5 million by our Legislature.

Over the years, few Connecticut citizens have watched violations of "presumption of innocence" as closely as Peter Reilly, now 53. Compared to the suffering of others, he had been "lucky" in the mid-1970s. The extraordinary outpouring of support in this community had saved him from years in prison. In the public mind and in the legal annals, he had since become a poster boy for the erroneously accused and convicted.

His story was told in two books, a television docudrama, and an oft-repeated "American Justice" report on A&E cable network. His ordeal is offered as a false-confession classic in legal works and in conferences on mistaken convictions. His brainwashed teenager’s voice can still be heard on audiotape saying, "I definitely did do what happened to my mother last night. But the thing that I don’t realize is the exact steps that I took doing it."

Yet Peter’s frustration with a justice system deep in denial gnawed on his insides. He wished for privacy yet he also wanted justice for his mother and reform of law enforcement attitudes and procedures. He berated the state police hierarchy for taking the stance that the Barbara Gibbons homicide was solved and closed, and for encouraging the legend of his guilt within the department.

Over the years, Peter sought compensation, without result. He fought for and finally gained DNA testing of crime-scene hair evidence, without result. He fought for and won, by way of a Freedom of Information appeal, access to the full state police file on their two investigations, but again without result. The mountain of documents, while indicting the cops for incompetence, yielded no smoking gun pointing to his mother’s murderer.

Peter testified several times at the state assembly about the need to compel police to fully record interrogations and confessions, true or false, a reform still widely resisted by Connecticut lawmen. He addressed high school and college assemblies about the constitutional rights of crime suspects. He spoke up for persons he understood to be wrongly convicted, especially brain-damaged, mentally challenged Richard Lapointe of Manchester, still behind bars for the 1987 murder of his wife’s grandmother.

"I killed her," Lapointe told detectives, echoing Reilly’s interrogation-room confusion, "but I don’t remember being there."

In his private life, Peter has been a good son and the prime caregiver to Marion Madow and the late Mickey Madow, formerly of East Canaan, who had instantly welcomed the orphan into their family all those years ago.

Now living in Tolland, he is a salesman for Juliano’s Hot Rod Products in Ellington and still plays guitar in a rock band (once nicely named "Voodoo Justice"). As for being law abiding, he has yet to receive a speeding ticket.

Just days ago, Peter and I drove into Manhattan as guests of Martin Tankleff, New York state’s most famous "wrong man," for a celebration of his newfound freedom. Only 17 in 1988, Marty had been forced to falsely say that he had attacked his parents in their Long Island home. Peter, having corresponded with Tankleff during his long imprisonment, had attended a critical court hearing identifying the actual killers.

At this "Marty Gras" organized by the ex-inmate’s legion of supporters, I watched the embrace of the two teenagers, each now middle-aged. They had lost their parents, they had lost their liberty, yet here they were, made whole again because of "the will of ordinary people," as William Styron wrote of Peter’s experience, "in their ever astonishing energy and persistence, to see true justice prevail over the law’s dereliction."