Meet the Ungers
Merle Unger escaped from jail for the first time in 1967, when he was an 18-year-old dropout with an interest in petty crime. People in his native Greencastle, Pennsylvania, saw him as a harmless character—a scrawny kid who figured out how to tie his bedsheets together and climb out of the nearby jail at night so he could see his girlfriend and play bingo at the Catholic church before climbing back into his cell in time for roll call. He did this until a sheriff’s deputy went to play bingo, saw Unger sitting there and was like, wait a minute.
Whenever jail officials increased security, Unger found another route out. A local radio station started a Merle Unger Fan Club. His public defender made T-shirts that said, “Merle, baby, where are you?”
In 1975, after more escapes and arrests, he found himself locked up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, fixating on a skylight in the lunchroom, 45 feet up. Early one morning he tied a piece of rope to a 5- or 10-pound dumbbell and wrapped the other end of the rope around his neck. He piled up some tables, put a small step ladder on top of the pile, climbed atop a beam, pulled up the ladder, set it up again, reached higher, hurled the dumbbell through the skylight’s glass, and climbed through the broken window into the December cold, wearing a short-sleeved shirt. “I mean, I’m not proud of that,” Unger told me last month. “I just wanted my freedom.”
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In the middle of all this, in the ’80s, Unger happened to meet a woman. A fellow inmate in Florida had put a personal ad in Mother Earth magazine, and he got so many responses that he sold the extras to other prisoners for a dollar apiece. Unger bought a few, sent letters and a woman from Illinois came to visit. They ended up getting married in 1988 and had two children, both conceived in prison. He says his life changed when he held his infant son for the first time: “I didn’t want to commit no crimes anymore.”
In Unger’s telling, this is the moment he developed an obsessive interest in the American legal system. Another friend worked in the prison’s law library and told him about a case in which a federal inmate earned his freedom by challenging the constitutionality of the jury instructions in his trial. Unger spent hours studying the case. It was all he could talk about. And the more he read, the more he thought he might have a shot at winning a new trial on the murder charge if he came back to Maryland to fight it.
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Unger v. State doesn’t say that these prisoners should be freed, only that they can ask to be retried. In practice, though, there’s a strong incentive to settle cases where the defendant has a clean prison record. Re-trying a case that’s 30 or 40 years old can be tricky: the witnesses have moved away, the detectives are dead and the case file is skeletal, or missing, or destroyed. Since the decision came down, 142 of 231 prisoners have negotiated their freedom, almost all of them getting probation. One was acquitted at a new trial. Another eight have died behind bars before they could get a hearing. There are still about 70 prisoners with open cases, which means that even more may yet go free.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/meet-the-ungers/
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