A nonprofit news organization named ProPublica is dedicated to uncovering instances of authority being misused. The article was initially featured in Dispatches, our biweekly newsletter containing updates from our journalists on their latest research findings. To get stories like this delivered to your email every Saturday, sign up. Allow me to introduce Fred Steese, who passed away from cancer at the age of 62 in August. Upon our initial encounter, Fred was subsisting from hand to mouth in a shabby motel located on the periphery of Las Vegas. Fred was let out of prison a couple of years ago, but he’s having a hard time securing consistent housing and employment, as his records show him as a convicted murderer. In 1995, Fred was unjustly found guilty of Gerard Soules’ murder, who used to be a trapeze artist with a dancing poodle show at a Las Vegas casino, despite the prosecution possessing proof that he was several hundred miles off at the time. He served 21 years in jail until a judge acquitted him. I covered Fred’s story in a ProPublica and Vanity Fair article with the publication number 0003. A series was conducted to explore the impact of a rare type of plea bargain on innocence-related cases and providing protection to district attorney offices that were unwilling to accept responsibility or evaluate instances of prosecutorial misconduct. Fred believed that his struggle was coming to an end when the judge declared him ‘factually innocent’ in a court session in 2012. On the contrary, the prosecutors of Las Vegas maintained his guilt, asserting that they had not erred in their decision all those years ago, and declared their intention to retry him for the murder of Soules. However, they proposed a deal; Fred could evade prosecution if he agreed to plead guilty. This proposition was something that I, as well as numerous other legal professionals I’ve consulted, had never encountered before.
