For the past twenty years, Daryl Kelly has been imprisoned in New York
State for a crime that may never have happened. He was living with his
wife and five children in Newburgh, New York, in the fall of 1997, when
he was arrested for rape and sexual abuse. The supposed victim was his
oldest child, Chaneya, who was then eight years old. Chaneya testified
against her father at trial; the jury convicted him; a judge sentenced
him to twenty-to-forty years in prison. At the time, Chaneya’s mother
was addicted to crack cocaine, among other drugs, and Chaneya and her
siblings went to live with her grandmother. The following year, when her
grandmother asked her what exactly had happened with her father, Chaneya
told her that, in fact, there had been no rape or sexual abuse.

In the fall of 1999, the judge ordered a hearing, and Chaneya returned
to the witness stand. This time, Chaneya testified that she had lied
during the trial. The judge did not believe her, however, and Kelly has
remained in prison ever since. An attorney named Peter Cross agreed to
represent Kelly, pro bono, five years ago, but he has been unable to get
him out of prison. I wrote about Kelly’s
case for New
York, in 2013, and in January, for the first time, Kelly will appear
before the state Board of Parole.

His attorney has sent the parole board a packet on his behalf, which includes a
letter that Chaneya wrote to her father in prison in 2002, when she was
thirteen years old. Her schoolgirl handwriting fills each line of a page
of three-ring-notebook paper. “Dear Daddy,” she wrote. “I do feel bad
about telling a lie. All I want to do is put it all behind. You want the
truth. I’ll tell you the truth.”

She recounts the day of the alleged assault—a Friday in October of
1997—when she stayed home from school sick and hung out with him in the
living room. “I went upstairs to where mommy was,” she wrote. “I went in
my room and laid down. All of a sudden, I guess Mommy was drunk or
something. Mommy came in with a belt asking me, ‘What did your father do
to you? What did he do?’ I said ‘Nothing.’ She said, ‘Tell me or I’ll
beat you.’… I didn’t want to get beat so I made up a lie that I’d take
back any day. I regret everything I said.” She added: “I feel guilty
when I talk about it. I feel that I should be in prison instead of you.”

Not long after the trial, Chaneya’s mother, Charade, gave a sworn
affidavit confirming her daughter’s version of events: “Her statement
that I had threatened her with a belt after she came upstairs while
apparently I was in a drug induced state is in fact accurate.” Reached
by phone this week, Charade said that she hopes Kelly receives parole.
“I’m just sorry about how things went down,” she said.

Child-sex-abuse cases in which victims recant their testimony are
especially challenging for the criminal-justice system. Determining
whether the recantation is genuine can be extremely difficult, and, in
many cases involving family members, it raises the question of whether the
victim is being pressured by relatives to help bring a loved one home
from prison. Since 1989, courts have exonerated two hundred and
forty-seven people convicted in child-sex-abuse cases, according to the
National Registry of Exonerations. Samuel R. Gross, a co-founder of the
registry and a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, has
calculated that, of these exonerations, a hundred and twelve involved a
recantation from at least one victim.

In 2013, the Texas Observer investigated the phenomenon of victim
recantations. The
article examined a case that in some ways echoes Kelly’s. “In 2011, a man named
Tony Hall was freed after spending fifteen years in prison for molesting
a young boy in Hudson,” Maurice Chammah, then a reporter for the
Observer, wrote. “After Hall finished his sentence, he moved back to
Hudson and eventually crossed paths with the accuser, then 23 years old.
The accuser admitted that his mother had coached him. ‘I was very scared
and told my mother what she wanted to hear so that I would not get a
beating,’ he later wrote in an affidavit.”

As Chaneya has grown older, she has become more assertive in her efforts
to undo her trial testimony and help free her father. In 2012, she wrote
a letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo about the matter. The letter sparked a
reinvestigation by a group of prosecutors, but, in the end, they did not
believe her recantation, instead concluding that “Daryl Kelly was not
wrongfully convicted.” Chaneya pressed on with her efforts and started a
petition on change.org— “Free my innocent father”—that eventually
garnered nearly two hundred thousand signatures. For many years, Chaneya
was haunted by a sense of guilt for the role she played in sending her
father to prison. As she has become older, she said, her perspective has
shifted. “I’ve grown to be just be like, You know what? It was my fault.
But I was young at the time,” she said. “So I have to forgive myself.”

Kelly, who is now fifty-eight years old, is currently confined in Collins
Correctional Facility, in Erie County, thirty miles south of Buffalo. I last heard from him a few months ago, when he sent me a letter. For
Kelly, and for all the other prisoners who say they were wrongly
convicted, a parole hearing poses an unusual conundrum; in a typical
case, a prisoner must admit guilt and express remorse in order to
convince a parole board to release him. In recent years, however, there
have been a small number of inmates in New York State who have insisted
on their innocence and still managed to be paroled. (One was a jailhouse
lawyer named Derrick
Hamilton,
who spent nearly twenty-one years in prison for murder before he was
released on parole, in 2011; he was exonerated in 2015.)

Chaneya is now twenty-eight years old, with a husband, two young sons,
and a corporate job in Indianapolis at a company that sells sports
apparel. This summer, she sent a typed letter to the state Board of
Parole. “I am the ‘alleged victim’ in the case and I feel it necessary
to let everyone know my father did not do the acts that he is charged
with,” she wrote. “I was never molested, raped, and/or sodomized.” Her
father’s hearing before the Board of Parole was originally scheduled for
this week, but it was then delayed. I reached Chaneya on the phone at
work recently, and she sounded emotional. While she was “smiling on the
outside,” she said, “I’m hiding what I really feel because it’s nothing
but anxiety. I’m just waiting.”

Kelly’s appearance before the Board of Parole is now scheduled for the
third week of January. At that hearing, he will try to persuade board
members to grant him parole, but, even if he succeeds, he will not be
completely free. If he leaves prison, he will have to comply with strict
rules—report to a parole officer, obey a curfew, and follow myriad other
restrictions. He will also have to register as a sex offender. “To me,
that is the part that makes it bittersweet,” Chaneya said. Nevertheless,
she continues to hope that one day her father will be able to clear his
name and live free from any supervision from the criminal-justice
system. “He’s an innocent man,” she said, “and he deserves to be free.”