Four days later, Coppola and his partner, detective Al Vasquez, paid a visit to Crimley’s home, along with two other NHPD officers. They had also identified her brother, 19-year-old Ray Caple, as a potential witness and wanted to get both siblings’ statements of what they saw. Crimley was to be interviewed for the second time, but on that afternoon, Caple was first. According to Vasquez’s later testimony, Caple was “reluctant” to leave his house to talk to the police and had to be persuaded by his mom. Despite numerous attempts to contact them through social media and mutual connections, I was unable to get a hold of the two eyewitnesses on the case. However, even as they eluded my outreach efforts, their words in these police recordings, as well as court transcripts and original eyewitness testimonies, endure and provide captivating context to the story.

In between the shooting and the following interviews, the police had created a photo array that included the picture of their prime suspect, J’veil Outing, along with seven other photographs of similar looking boys. The photo array was a yearbook of sorts, pictures of eight Black boys, all in a suit and tie and sporting a low-cut trim, all from the Hillhouse Highschool catalog. It would be later revealed in Outing’s murder trial that, before making their statements on this day, both Caple and Crimley had unrecorded “pre-conversations” with Coppola and Vasquez. These “pre-conversations” are a common practice  in the NHPD, Vasquez would later say in the trial, and he would describe them as a harmless way to  “just hear what they have to say,”— Outing’s attorney would describe them as a “dress rehearsal.” After the pre-conversations, each was shown the photo array, and each picked Outing. The second set of recorded interviews, which were eventually played by the prosecution at Outing’s trial, document what happened next.

When Caple’s voice carries through the static, he is on edge. He begins. He saw the shooter biking up the street from his porch and  immediately identifies him as “Outing” for the police. He is asked to repeat, and emphasizes “Outing, number seven.” He picks up where he left off. Kevin Wright — “Kev” — was hanging out at his house, and he did not know that Kev had gone outside. When Caple heard the first gunshot he was looking for his daughter. He did not go out onto the street, but instead, went to the corner of his porch to protect himself.

“Could you see up Canal Street?” Coppola interrupts. “Slightly,” Caple responds. He saw his sister Crimley, and the baby in the carriage, and heard the bike drop. He heard his sister yelling “he hit, he hit, he hit.” Three more shots went off, and he saw the sparks. He went back to the corner, then he heard “like six more shots.” He estimated that between eight to ten shots were fired in total. After the shots went off, he rushed to Kev and “[the shooter] ran away.” Caple scooped up his dying friend in his arms, and told him, “Kev, please don’t die on me.” He spells it out for his interviewers: “I was begging him.”

Nadine Crimley is brought in after her brother, but her second interview is brief. She is asked about the photo-identification she just made, and points to “number 4,” — Outing, in this new array — as “the shooter.” Coppola notes the beginning time as “1:30 p.m.” and wraps up by saying “1:26 p.m., statement now complete.” It was over before it even began.

The statements given by the siblings were not entirely consistent. Crimley recalled that the shooter wore a black Yankees hat, but when asked about the appearance in his interview, Caple said that the shooter was wearing no hat and had a “low hair-cut.” Crimley said the shooter was wearing a sleeveless “wife-beater”; Caple said the shooter was wearing jeans and a sleeved t-shirt. Crimley recalled another person accompanying the shooter on the bike, whereas Caple remembered the shooter being alone. Caple confirmed that Outing is the shooter and that he has known him for “about three and a half years” because they went to school together; his sister first denied any knowledge of the shooter, yet admitted to recognizing him in the second interview, after the photo identification, “just from being in the neighborhood.” She was never questioned on the identity of the second man. Detective Coppola, who interviewed both Caple and Crimley, fudged the victim’s name repeatedly in Caple’s interview, misidentifying him as “Kevin Williams” instead of “Kevin Wright” twice. Despite knowing the victim well, Caple does not point out the mistake.

_____

In February 2005, a month before J’veil Outing was slated to go on trial for murder, both witnesses recanted their testimony to the police. Crimley and Caple both held that they were coerced by the police to give their statements. In light of this, Outing’s attorney, Auden Grogins, filed a motion to suppress the statements before they went to trial, and both siblings were called to the suppression hearing to testify to their experience.

Caple testified at the suppression hearing that he did not actually witness the shooting at all and was threatened and coerced to make a statement by the police. Even from just the text in the hearing transcript, his agitation is clear. “I was forced,” he said. “They told my mother it wasn’t going to be done. I was forced. When they came, they told my mother one thing. We got there, they was yelling at me. They tried to give me cigarettes and stuff so I would say stuff. I told them I didn’t know nothing. They forced me.”

Caple said that Coppola was the main aggressor. “He said he was going to put me in jail. He said he got some boys downstairs, he’s going to bring them upstairs … He told me I got to do something or I aint going home … they threaten me in a whole bunch of different ways … He just got in my face … yelling at me, like spit, little spit balls coming out of his mouth … He was saying mad stuff … what he told me was that he went eleven for eleven, he is going to go twelve for twelve.” According to Caple, the Detectives were focusing on a few pictures from the line up — “Number 2, Number 4, Number 7 and Number 5 — and mentioned a couple of their names to him including J’veil Outing’s. “That was one name, because they was telling me he got shot … that is how I know he been shot in the foot before.”

On her part, Nadine Crimley testified that during the police interview, she was receiving pressure from the police officers to make an identification, despite the fact that she did not actually get a good look at the shooter. When she was making the photo-identification, “it [was] like they just kept focusing on that one picture,” she said. They did not point at it explicitly, “[but] they were like is that the one? That’s the one, huh?” Vasquez would later testify that “she was very nervous … hesitant to sign the photo board” and even “started crying.” Crimley also testified that she recognized a lot of the people in the photo array from her brother’s yearbook, but not Outing. 

Both siblings deny that J’veil Outing, who was sitting across from them as they took the stand, was the shooter. While they both felt generally fearful to be involved in the identification of a shooter who potentially had gang affiliations, they said, both confirmed that they hadn’t received any threats from Outing. Caple was especially insistent that he did not know much, and did not want to have anything to do with the trial. “[State’s Attorney Baran] kept telling me I have to do it,” he pleaded. “I told her I don’t want to do it. I want to go home … it wasn’t right. It wasn’t nothing right. I told them. I told her that.”

With no physical evidence tying Outing to the crime, the state had been relying heavily on witness testimony to get their conviction. But with these sudden recantations, what had felt like an open and shut case was becoming far more complicated and quickly falling apart.

_____

However, in the State of Connecticut, a special case allows prosecutors to use their witnesses’ original testimony, even if the witnesses recant. Shortly after midnight on Feb. 24, 1980, a man named John Matulionis was fatally stabbed in the bathroom of a Bridgeport bar following a physical fight. By the time of the murder trial in 1986, the state was sure that it had nailed its prime suspect, defendant Joseph Whelan. After presenting other evidence that tied Whelan to the place and time, the state’s attorneys called Louis Garassino, a bar patron who had signed a witness statement, to the stand, to prove that Whelan was indeed the aggressor. But, when Garassino took the stand, he claimed that he suddenly could not remember anything. He was drunk at the time of the fight, and a recent car accident had deteriorated his memory. Although he acknowledged that he had made and signed the previous statement, he “did not know” whether the statement refreshed his memory. The prosecution was running out of time—  their eight-ball witness was drawing a blank, even though the details Garassino provided in his first statement were crucial to securing a conviction.

Usually, courts do not permit hearsay. That is, you cannot say during a trial that “so-and-so said this out of court and I swear it’s true.” The basic idea is that it would be impossible for the other side to cross-examine this testimony. What happened next at the Whelan trial changed the trajectory of criminal trials in Connecticut forever. The prosecution introduced Garassino’s out-of-court statement — the signed one alleging Whelan was the aggressor — into the trial, and the judge allowed it. Whelan was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison. When Whelan pushed back on the move in an appeal, the courts affirmed that “a prior inconsistent statement may be used at trial” if the statement was signed by a witness that has personal knowledge of the facts, and the witness can be present at trial to be cross examined, even if their testimony in court is different. The Whelan ruling provided an exception to the hearsay rule. From then on, lawyers had an explicit avenue to introduce a witness’ previous testimony into the trial, even if the witness recanted on the stand.

In J’veil Outing’s case, the Whelan precedent allowed the prosecution to use Crimley  and Caple’s original testimony in trial, given that these statements were not viewed as resulting from coercion. Coppola and Vasquez followed the siblings’ recitations at the suppression hearing and denied unequivocally that any coercion took place in the interview room. Both detectives acknowledged that the witnesses were nervous but maintained that each made the positive photo identifications without any outside influence, and, according to Coppola, in a matter of “seconds” and “without hesitation.” The detectives were not threatening anyone, they alleged, and they didn’t single Outing’s picture out. At the conclusion of the suppression hearing, Judge Licari, in outlining the court’s capacity as the “fact finder” and arbiter of the credibility of evidence, decided that no part of that tape suggested coercion, even though the hearing had also included testimony about the unrecorded “pre-conversations,” which would have taken place outside of the tape. Following this, Judge Licari maintained that the tape-recorded statements met the requirements for admissibility under the Whelan precedent and denied Outing’s  motion to suppress. 

So, mere weeks before the trial, it was decided. The state would plow forwards with or without the current corroboration of the witnesses. The jury would hear two versions of the story from each eye-witness’ voice and would have to decide for themselves which story would stick. 

____

I first met Outing some 16 years later in a small, suffocating concrete box of a room at the MacDougall Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut. He, his lawyer Alex Taubes and I crowd around a wooden table, below the hot, white glow of an overhead lamp. Before this meeting, I knew him only from a single phone call and the cover of his Change.org petition, “Justice for J’veil Outing.” which has so far collected 1,500 signatures of people that demand justice on behalf of Outing. He looks far more hardened on the cover of the petition than he does in this interview room. In the petition’s picture, he holds his fingers to the chin as he looks directly at the camera, unsmiling: he is pensive and fighting his conviction. In the interview room, he is softer somehow, worn out perhaps. He is in the same prison khakis — a greeny-beige against the deep brown of his skin. His head is shaved bald, close to his scalp, but his beard is a little more grown out and the tips of his mustache graze the corners of his mouth every time he grins. Black, thick-rimmed glasses frame his large eyes that flit between me and Taubes as he tells me what has happened to him. He begins with a deep breath. “I played no part in this crime at all,” he says, shaking his head. “They just straight up set me up, I don’t even know why.”

Outing is less interested in walking me step-by-step through the events of the fateful summer evening in 2005 as he is in pointing out what he sees as unbelievable injustices in the handling of his case — and Outing can list many. A thick manilla folder sits on the table in between us, bursting at the seams with the papers — briefs, transcripts, letters, decisions, statements — that Outing has been pouring over for over a decade, consulting them like a devout Catholic would a Bible, or like a starving wanderer might a map, searching for all-seeing answers, or perhaps just a drop of something, anything, that would signal relief.

In a later conversation with Outing’s mother, Ms. Angelina Outing, I would learn that Outing was the second of four siblings and the only son. He and his three sisters grew up on Harding Place, in Newhallville, a neighborhood in New Haven where almost everyone is either relatives or playmates or church-kin — where everybody is somebody’s cousin. When he was seven years old, his grandfather enrolled him in karate. Ms. Outing smiled at the memory, and told me, “Oh, he loved it. He thought he was the man when he was in there.” When he was nine, he was in Linda Thorpe’s fourth grade class at the Martin Luther King School. Thorpe describes him as a “sweet and lovable student,” who was part of her “little family of kids” in that class. Around Christmas-time that year, Thorpe’s class performed the poem ‘Twas the night Before Christmas, and Outing was one of the characters on stage. “I still have that photo,” says Thorpe, “You will [sic.] see a small smiling pajama wearing angel in it. That’s my fondest memory of him.”

But Outing’s childhood was not easy. During the same year of his debut as a pajama’d angel, Outing’s father was murdered. He quickly had to become the protector of his sisters, in the real world, and outside of karate. From my conversation with Ms. Outing, I got the sense that her son’s settling into his teenage years as a Black boy in the Ville during those times inevitably meant hardening to violence on the streets, which included interactions with street-gangs, but also rough-ups with the police.

Through our conversation, J’veil Outing tells me how survival in those days meant “know[ing] how to handle yourself in the streets” and how even his clean arrest record did not spare him from the violence. In the year before his arrest, he was shot twice, mere months apart. 

He brings me back to the small park by the Lincoln-Bassett Community School in Newhallville, on July 4, 2004 — a year before the Kevin Wright murder. Then, an 18-year-old Outing witnessed an argument between two kids he did not recognize. Suddenly, one of the boys pulled out a gun and began to fire at the other. “So when he pulls out the gun,” Outing continues, “he starts running away … and he’s not paying attention to what he’s shooting at.” Unknown to the boy with a gun, a four-year-old kid was nearby, within the range of the bullets. “I rushed to try and grab him, and someone beat me to it, but the minute I got right in front of him — I got hit on the back of my leg.” Outing grabs the side of his thigh, slack in prison khakis: “Boom.” 

Six weeks after the first shooting, Outing was shot again. This time it was in the foot, and it was as he was leaving the corner store, by “a kid [he] had problems with,” he said. The NHPD presented Outing with two suspects for identification, but none ended up being the perpetrator. At this point, Taubes chimes in with a theory of what that might have looked like to the police at the time. “They knew you, you’re getting shot at, you’re not giving up names, you’re a bad guy,” Taubes said. In fact, Sgt. Andrew Muro told the New Haven Register after arresting Outing on June 27, 2006  that “Outing is well-known to the police from his activities in Newhallville”. 

Outing agrees with his lawyer’s estimation, “Yeah definitely, they built up this image of me.” 

_____

The four detectives working the Wright murder did not even have to leave the station to arrest Outing. Outing explains that all they had to do was take an elevator. Coppola and Vasquez, as well as detectives David  Falcigno and Clarence Willoughby, found the 19-year-old was conveniently already on site — anxiously drumming his fingers on a table in a holding room on the second floor, after having been brought in on a drug possession charge.

Life after the two consecutive shootings had not been easy for the teenager. He had wanted to follow in the steps of his late maternal grandfather, the one who paid for his karate lessons, and join the Air Force, but the injuries derailed him. When the Detectives charged him with murder, he was shocked. “I ain’t even know the dude,” Outing said. “I didn’t know what they was talking about … I didn’t have no reason to kill him.” After making the arrest, Willoughby allowed Outing one phone call. Outing gave the detective his mother’s number to dial, got on the phone and managed to get out a quick “Ma, they tryna charge me with a murder,” then click, Willoughby had already hung up for him.

Just after Outing was arrested, the state offered him a deal: plead guilty and serve eight years in prison, or go to trial and face up to fifty years. Even after sixteen years behind bars, he stands by his initial commitment to proving his innocence. “My innocence was more important than anything,” he told me. “I’m not taking no time for something I didn’t do.” This was not only for his sake, but for his family’s. He had to go to trial.

_____

There was no forensic evidence that tied Outing to the crime, so the majority of the trial hinged on scrutinizing the eyewitness testimony of Caple and Crimley. The trial began on March 13, 2006 and lasted seven days. And, just like they did at the suppression hearing, both siblings took the stand and stated — more adamantly than they did in the suppression hearing, the court noted — that they were coerced into making an identification and that the defendant sitting in front of them was not the shooter. The police detectives denied any coercive practices outright, and the state prosecutors doubled down behind them. 

At MacDougall, Outing runs me through the other facts of his case. The lack of forensic evidence was proven in court. Not only did the bike used by the murderer not have Outing’s fingerprints, it also contained someone else’s fingerprints altogether — those of a local resident who claimed the bike was stolen from him prior to the murder. According to Outing, even the descriptions of the bicycle did not match up either. Caple and Crimpley reported that the shooter was on a trick bike, but Outing owned a mountain, or “baja” bicycle, a fact which would later be confirmed by the testimonies of his alibi witnesses in his habeas corpus trial, 11 years later. Furthermore, all that the ballistic reports could prove at his trial was that the bullets were fired by a 9mm gun, but Outing finds fault in this description too. The witnesses saw a silver gun, and “everyone knew [he] carried a Black 9mm.” 

His first attorney, now-Judge Auden C. Grogins, represented him at his murder trial. Outing told me that she failed to investigate and call to the stand any of the six alibi witnesses Outing provided to her, all of whom were at the birthday party with Outing, and most of whom were with him at the time of the fight and scooter chase. Grogins did not mention the party, the fight or the scooter chase, at all, Outing said, nor did she attempt to construct some sort of timeline in order to show that Outing could not have done it. Grogins later said in the habeas trial that those choices was part of her “trial strategy,” and that she did not want to place Outing too close to the murder. Outing seems unconvinced — the murder was close to his house anyway. 

However, Grogins did try to push back at the credibility of the eyewitness testimonies by calling an eyewitness expert, Jennifer Dysart, to give a testimony. Dysart, a professor of psychology at John Jay College, was an unusual kind of expert to call during this time, according to Taubes. The attorney explained that, due to this unfamiliarity, the judge had her introduce her testimony in a pretrial hearing, to determine if it was relevant for the case. “The courts then didn’t even allow experts to weigh in on witness testimony because they thought it was common knowledge,” he continued.

In her pre-trial testimony, Dysart ran through a number of factors that could affect a witness’s credibility. For a case where even the initial testimonies deemed credible by the courts still had significant inconsistencies, an expert like Dysart could provide some insight as to why. Dysart’s prepared testimony identified eight situational factors present in Crimley and Caple’s experiences that could have impaired the accuracy of their testimony. She talked about, for example, the weak correlation between confidence and accuracy in eyewitness identification: the “disguise effect” where “the use of hats or wigs makes it more difficult for the witness to be accurate at a later time” and “unconscious transference” where if a “person looks familiar to you, it’s not always the case that you are able to accurately say where you encountered that person on previous occasions.” Dysart also highlighted the need for photo-arrays to be administered double blind— if the administrator knows that the suspect is in the array, and more than that, knows who the suspect is — as was the case here — they can act in ways during the photo-identification process that subconsciously signal that to the identifier. Dysart’s testimony also covered the “weapons effect” — the idea that it is difficult to get a good look at a shooter when you are fearing for your life. Outing has studied the details of his case, and breaks it down. “It’s this simple,” he told me. “You see it in the movies all the time. If someone pulls a gun on you, you’re looking at the gun! You’re running the other way! You’re not looking at the details of their face.”

The judge ruled after the hearing that Dysart could only present half of her testimony at the trial, but when it came time to do it, Grogins decided not to call on Dysart at all. The jury heard none of her testimony, despite expert consensus that points to the fallibility of eyewitness testimony and the ways it can be susceptible to outside influence. 

The single bulb in the MacDougall interview room illuminates Outing’s face from above as he and the attorney laugh at the absurdity of it all. Here we are, in a box, with a man who could have taken an eight-year plea deal but now has 50 years because he decided to stick with his claim of innocence instead of saying he was guilty. He has seen people who brag about all the harm that they have done or the people they have killed get out of prison after much less time than he will have to serve. Taubes quips that they teach “the Outing case” at workshops and reference it in papers, as an example of what not to do as a public defender. Outing even remembers Grogins said something in an ensuing hearing that seemed as though she thought he was guilty. Grogins declined to comment.

While telling this story, Outing smirks while shaking his head. “Isn’t that crazy? And that’s why she threw me under the bus.” When the tops of Outing’s cheeks crinkle into a smile, his whole demeanor relaxes. It is not there for long, but just in the moments after he laughs, in the seconds before we have to steer our conversation to yet another horrible thing, something brief and unguarded flashes in his eyes. Perhaps it is youth or perhaps it is its memory, fleeting and unreachable, thrown unceremoniously from atop a baja bike to behind prison bars — the young boy who never got to grow up.

______

Caple and Crimley are part of a growing list of New Haveners who have accused the NHPD of witness coercion. All 30 official exonerations in Connecticut since 1973 are captured on the National Registry of Exonerations, and every one of them involves either “Mistaken Witness ID” or “Perjury or False Accusation” as contributing factors. These are just state-recognized exonerations — this data does not capture the many cases, like Outing’s, where defendants have been working to prove that they were wrongfully convicted yet remain unheard by the State. The bulk of the exonerees were convicted in the nineties and early aughts, just before and right around when J’veil Outing was being put on trial for murder.

The same database provides this statistic: New Haven has three percent of Connecticut’s population but 34 percent of its exonerees. So what was happening specifically in the NHPD? Just over a decade before Outing’s trial, a Connecticut judge of the Appellate Court wrote that “the seemingly intractable behavior of the New Haven Police Department with respect to witness[es]’ statements is deeply disturbing.” Vernon Horn, a recent exoneree who was wrongfully convicted mainly due to witness coercion, cites this opinion in his brief accompanying ongoing civil litigation against the City of New Haven and specific NHPD police officers. The brief delves deeply into the history of witness coercion in the department, and details at least fourteen known cases, including the following examples, as well as Outing’s case.

In 1985, Jerome Downing, cooperating witness in an investigation of a robbery and sexual assault case, testified that the NHPD officers had “suggested to him that [the defendant, Leroy Harris] was involved in the crimes and that he was “coerced into making the statement implicating [the defendant], and that he never read the witness statement that he eventually signed. Leroy Harris served thirty years of his eighty year sentence, before getting out of prison on a plea deal.

In 1991, Eric Ham was set up by the NHPD. Detective Joe Greene of the NHPD pressured witness Timothy Davis, a 100-pound teenager at the time, to identify Eric Ham. Greene threatened Davis, yelled at him, slammed his hands on the table, and told him that if he “didn’t cooperate, that [he] would receive forty to sixty years in jail.” Davis said that Greene’s threats happened off the record, when the tape was not recording, similar to the claims made by Caple and Crimley.  Eric Ham was exonerated in 1996, and is now serving time related to another charge.

Also in 1991, two witnesses who testified against Daryl Valentine in a murder case testified later that they had been coerced by and bribed by Greene and Anthony DiLullo of the NHPD. Higgins said at the trial that Joe Greene had threatened them with jail time and then given them money to buy cigarettes and cocaine afterwards. These witnesses’ previous statements to the police were also admitted into the trial under Whelan. Valentine has served 32 years of his 100 year sentence and still remains in prison. 

Again in 1999, the FBI found evidence that NHPD detective Vincent Raucci had coerced and “improperly coached several witnesses into providing false statements” that implicated Scott Lewis in a murder. In an unrecorded “pre-interview” Raucci threatened witnesses with false charges unless they implicated Lewis in the crime, and also fed them specific details of the crime that they could not have known otherwise. Lewis has since settled a wrongful conviction case with the city for $9.5 million. 

In fact, just after the NHPD finished processing J’veil Outing for a murder conviction, certain detectives in the Department, including Clarence Willoughby, were also engaged in pressuring a sixteen-year-old Bobby Johnson into falsely confessing to a murder he did not commit. Willoughby also claimed then that he had “a 100 percent success rate in solving homicides.” Johnson served eight years of his 38 year sentence before his case was looked at again, and the charges were dismissed.

Like Willoughby, Coppola also makes an appearance in the history of NHPD police coercion, as outlined in the brief that Vernon Horn presented to the city. In 1998, when interviewing a key witness during his investigation of the Philip Cusick homicide, Coppola himself admitted that he told the witness that “if he didn’t help [Coppola], someday he’d be locked up for that murder.” The witness started crying in the interrogation room in response to the threats. Coppola testified that his handling of this witness was “good police work” in an ensuing deposition.  This coercion also happened off the record, when the tape recorder was off.

While interviewing Outing, I quickly learned of his catchphrase of sorts: “It’s no secret.” As in, “I owned a gun— it’s  no secret”, or, “I sold drugs— it’s no secret.” At this point he has spent almost the same amount of time incarcerated as he has lived in the outside world, and in his struggle to prove his innocence, he does not see a point in hiding anything — the truth will come out some day, he said, and it will set him free. While a lot of his dirty laundry was aired at the trial, Horn’s brief details another open secret of sorts which was woefully absent throughout Outing’s proceedings— the NHPD had a pattern of misconduct, which included disturbing trends of coercing and threatening witnesses.

From listening to Outing’s friends and family who were around here during that time, a strong sense of this misconduct and intimidation emerges. Outing described an incident to me in which he had encountered Willoughby before his arrest, and according to him, the cop told him that “I’m going to send you to jail” as he patted him down on the street. His mother, Ms. Outing, tells me that it was normal to hear of young men being harassed by the police, describing the officers as “so corrupted they all just stuck together.” She said recourse was nearly impossible: “There was nothing you could do, it was your word against the police [sic.] word.” This feeling was common. Everett Alexander, the cousin who kickstarted the scooter chase the day of the Wright murder, testified in a later Habeas hearing that although he would have cooperated as an alibi witness had he been approached, he did not voluntarily try to share the information because “the police don’t want to hear a young 19-year old. You think they gonna believe something I say?”

Sixteen years in prison has given Outing time to reflect on this. He even tried to contact Crimley, to let her know that he was not angry with her. “When she came to testify at the habeas trial, she was up there crying, and I’m like, I hope she don’t think that I’m mad at her,” he said. His message to her is very clear: “The fact of the matter is, I blame the police, not you. You didn’t come up with me … They produced me and made you sign my picture.”

______

The toll that incarceration has taken on Outing hangs heavy in the air throughout the interview. It sits on the slump of his shoulders and in the folds of the small towel he uses to dab the beads of sweat off of his brow. He slouches in his chair a little when looking back, and says, “Every time I find a path that I think is gonna lead to my freedom, it’s another roadblock.” He is still trying to advocate for himself, through looking into new attorneys and raising awareness on social media with the help of his family, but the more the court has denied him, the bleaker things look.

Outing shares that he has struggled severely with his mental health and feelings of despair and turned to working out regularly to find some sort of routine.  “This stuff destroyed many lives, not just mine,” he tells me. His best friend overdosed last year. And before that, Outing explains that every letter he received from him was the same. “Yo my life’s been destroyed cause you incarcerated,” his friend would say. Outing adds, “He didn’t know how to find his way, cause we was each other’s crutches.”

Outing’s son, who is referred to as “Little Outing” by his grandmother and whose father has been in prison almost his entire life, is now also incarcerated himself. He is doing time for an armed robbery that he participated in with some other kids. 

When I interviewed Ms. Outing, two weeks after I visited her son, she told me that Little Outing will be seventeen in just a couple of days. Her expression was caught somewhere between exasperation and disbelief.

  Ms. Outing had always been the matriarch of the family — warm, but stern. Thorpe, Outing’s third grade teacher, even told me that “Ms. Outing’s kids was always the best behaved.” When her son Outing was first incarcerated, Little Outing’s mother left the picture, and Ms. Outing had to take custody of her grandson. She moved to North Carolina for a little while to be with her extended family, and Little Outing seemed to be doing alright there, but everything changed when her son lost his recent habeas petition and asked her to move back up to be closer to him. Ms. Outing prefers the slower Southern life but does not mind New Haven at all— that is until she saw her grandson falling in with the wrong crowd. 

Now that he is in prison, her grandson calls her and tells her that he will straighten up when he is out, but sitting across from me, with her soft smile and fuzzy slippers, Ms. Outing looks tired. She is raising multiple generations of children who have all had something taken from them one way or another — children who lost their father, daughters who lost their brother, a young boy who lost his young dad and a son who lost his childhood. She can’t give them those things back. 

______

The jury delivered their verdict on the morning of March 29, 2006. As the jury filed through the brass doors of the New Haven County Courthouse that morning, the dense clouds of dawn-break would have slowly begun opening up to reveal the cerulean sky. The jurors would have followed a court marshal up the stone steps of the building, trailing in behind the spectators, legal counsel and court employees. 

A discerning, assured Lady Justice figurine would have sat among the marble carvings atop the entrance to the building. She presides over the courthouse and has done so since the building’s completion in 1914. The light catches on the folds of her robe and a netting has recently been installed to prevent birds from nesting in the dark crevices of her billowing skirt.  Designed by J. Massey Rhind, she sits in the center of the tympanum, balanced and stern, adorned and omniscient, surrounded by her compatriots, each representing an aspect of the proceedings down below: Victory, Precedence, Accuracy, Common Law, Statutory Law, Progress and Commerce. She would have caught a glimpse of all those that were involved in the murder trial that was taking place, except for the accused himself. 

Like most being brought to the courthouse from a prison, Outing had begun what would become some of the most confusing and painful days of his life by entering a side door that led into the basement. For the seven days of jury deliberations leading up to his conviction on March 29, he had trailed through the side doors to change out of his prison uniform before being led upstairs to wave hello to the jurors. “I was like the welcoming committee” he jokes with me. He makes a point to say that he waved to them every morning except for the day he was convicted. “I don’t know why,” he told me. “I just didn’t do it.”

 On the sixth day of deliberations, the jury sent a note to the judge indicating that they were “hopelessly deadlocked” and that they requested, amongst other things, that the judge read them the charge on determining proof beyond reasonable doubt. The judge reaffirmed that it is a “a real doubt, an honest doubt, a doubt that has its foundation in the evidence or lack of evidence. It is doubt that is honestly entertained and is reasonable in light of the evidence after a fair comparison and careful examination.” A day later, the jury found J’veil Outing guilty of murder in the first degree. He was brought back down to the basement to be escorted to the prison. He did not see the tympanum, or Lady Justice, once.

"I had to choose between my education and my safety"

How Yale's withdrawal and readmission policies leave students no choice but to stay.

Story by Serena Puang, Investigations Editor

Cover illustration by Zoe Berg, Photo Editor

Published on January 31, 2022

Content warning: This article contains references to suicide and self-harm.

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The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255.

Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To speak with a trained listener, text HELLO to 741741. It is free, available 24/7 and confidential.

To talk with a counselor from Yale Mental Health and Counseling, schedule a session here. On-call counselors are available at any time: call (203) 432-0290. 

Students who are interested in taking a medical withdrawal should reach out to their residential college dean.

Additional resources are available in a guide compiled by the Yale College Council here.

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As is explored in the following story, Yale’s systems for withdrawal and reinstatement are surrounded by misconceptions and confusion. For clarity, much of the policy for Yale College — which differs from policies across the University, is included at the bottom of this story.

***

Before the start of the spring semester in 2o21, Serena Riddle ’21 and her therapist were at an impasse. Riddle had been living with depression since her sophomore fall, and she wasn’t doing well. Her therapist voiced concerns about her wellbeing and laid out her options: do an intensive outpatient program, start medication or go to the hospital.

“She said that preferably, more than one of these things would need to be true,” Riddle recounted.

If she chose none, her therapist said she would hospitalize her involuntarily. So, Riddle looked into her options. Could she do the intensive outpatient program while being enrolled? Absolutely not — it is impossible to do both, she realized. What if she started new medication? Her therapist felt she was too unstable to gamble on the possibility of side effects. Several people recommended that she withdraw from school, but that didn’t seem like an option for financial reasons. Riddle decided to enroll and spend the first few days of the spring semester in the hospital, hoping that she would be okay afterward to power through her last semester at Yale. 

Had she known that she would later have to completely withdraw from the semester, and navigate the murky waters that would come with that decision, she may have chosen differently, she said.

Last semester, I spoke to six students about their experiences with Yale’s withdrawal policy and spent over two months retracing their steps, searching for answers to their lingering questions about what Yale’s policy actually is. Whether because of specific University policies, failure to communicate these policies to students or longstanding rumors, many feel they have no choice but to remain enrolled, even when it might not be in their best interest. As a reporter, I’m trained to find and sift through documents, to comprehend and explain them to people. Still, despite  hours spent on policy websites, calls and long email exchanges, I was constantly redirected and confused by the contradictory information I was finding. 

At one point I was attempting to determine whether students can receive financial assistance for funds spent on community college classes necessary for reinstatement — Riddle is still unsure if she can get reimbursed for the $1,200 she said she spent on Gateway Community College classes. 

But when I called the financial aid office to clarify their policy, the representative who answered the phone redirected me to the withdrawal policy website. She said that the financial aid office could not answer questions about how students would be billed in case of a withdrawal or if their aid would cover those bills. According to her, that is a question that would involve contacting the registrar’s office, bursar’s office, Yale hospitality and a student’s residential college dean. When asked how a student could find out what specifically would happen with their financial aid if they withdrew, she said, “you wouldn’t know that until you withdraw.” When I sought to clarify further, she hung up on me. Alexander Muro, the associate director of financial aid, declined to comment about the lack of information. 

The hoops I jumped through seeking information about Yale’s policies are just one element of the issue, though. Because once someone does come to understand the policies, they are often more intimidated. 

A 2018 paper for the Ruderman Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on disability advocacy and inclusion, graded schools’ leave of absence policies with the help of national college mental health experts. No school received above a D+, and Yale received an F, which was one of the worst grades in the report.

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

“This is a problem that’s plaguing higher education in general,” explained Miriam Heyman, one of the coauthors of the paper and senior research associate at Brandeis University’s Lurie Institute for Disability Policy. Heyman and her coauthor concentrated on the Ivy League hoping that as leaders in higher education, if they started making strides on this issue, other institutions would follow.

Taking a break from Yale

At Yale, students can take time off in two ways: through a leave of absence or withdrawal. Students “in academic good standing” can petition to take a leave of absence for any reason on or before the fifteenth day of each semester. According to the Yale College Programs of Study, students who opt for a leave of absence may return at the beginning of the next semester without further application and have the right to stay on the Yale Health Plan during their time away. But after the 15th day of each semester, students who need to take time off must withdraw, and they’re permitted to do so for disciplinary, financial, personal, medical or academic reasons.

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

As soon as the withdrawal is in effect, students have 72 hours to move out and are barred from reentering campus during their time away unless they have explicit permission from their residential college dean. According to the Programs of Study, students are required to remain away for at least one semester, not including the semester during which they withdrew. When a withdrawn student wishes to return, they are subject to a reinstatement process which involves taking two courses at another college or university as well as submitting an application, a personal statement, letters of support and a letter from a clinician in the case of medical withdrawal. They must also be interviewed by the Committee on Reinstatement.

A wide variety of unforeseen circumstances can leave students with less emotional or physical capacity to do the work needed to continue their studies. Death in one’s family, accidents, sexual misconduct/stalking, mental health symptoms and chronic illness diagnoses don’t operate on the academic calendar. For many students, the circumstances which make it hard for them to stay in school happen in the middle of the semester, so they can’t choose to take a leave of absence. These students have to navigate a complicated process to take time off.

Choosing between Yale and your life

“It totally freaked me out,” Griffin Wilson ’24 said of the reinstatement process. As an international student from Canada, he worried that he wouldn’t make the grades he needed during his time away to be reinstated. Grades of B or higher are required for reinstatement.

“I felt like I had to choose between my Yale education and my safety — my Yale education and my life,” Wilson said. After he was hospitalized following a panic attack, his father flew to New Haven to stay with him. At this point, he was severely depressed.

“I was self-harming and suicidal,” he said. “I felt like if I was going to keep going with school, then there was a good to fair chance that I would end up dead.” 

“I felt like I had to choose between my Yale education and my safety — my Yale education and my life.”

But after looking into his options, he realized that he’d missed the leave of absence deadline, and he didn’t want to withdraw. On top of the reinstatement process, he would be required to remain away for an entire year, which was longer than he thought he needed. “I couldn’t do what was in my best interest without risking something that I had worked so hard for,” he recalled.

Last March, after a first-year student died by suicide, many students expressed grievances with Yale’s medical withdrawal policy. Students shared their fears about involuntary withdrawal and how that impacted the ways they sought treatment, the financial barriers created by Yale’s policies, their worries about not being able to return and their experiences of having their reinstatement applications denied.

Melanie Boyd, dean of student affairs, declined to comment for this article, but she wrote in an email to the News last semester that involuntary withdrawals are “exceedingly rare.”

“Stepping away from college to focus on mental health is the right decision more often than not, even if it may not seem so at the time,” Risa Sodi, assistant dean of academic affairs and chair of the Committee of Reinstatement, wrote in an email to me. “Yale College wants all withdrawn students to return to Yale when they are ready.”

But students can only return from withdrawal once. Yale’s policy stipulates that “A student is eligible to be reinstated only once; a second reinstatement may be considered only under unusual circumstances, ordinarily of a medical nature.”

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

Authors of the Ruderman Foundation’s white paper criticized minimum leave time policies and the capped number of withdrawals and reinstatement. “Trajectories of mental illness vary from one person to the next,” said Heyman, the paper’s co-author. Many students, she said, “get their sense of identity and purpose from being students. If that’s taken away, then it will take away a guiding structure in how you see yourself…. Any sort of finite number of three leaves or three months is completely arbitrary. And it’s counter to what we know about the individualized trajectory of mental illness.”

Tweaks but not comprehensive reform

Yale College Dean Marvin Chun oversees withdrawal policy. He isn’t directly involved with setting reinstatement policy, but major policy changes for both withdrawal and reinstatement are only made with the help of college-wide input in the form of a committee appointed by the dean.

When asked if there were any inconsistencies or problems he saw with the current policy, Chun said that he worries that “there’s this perception out there that withdrawal is scary and that reinstatement is scary, and I think students feel discouraged from taking a withdrawal because of these perceptions.”  Chun asserted that over 90 percent of students who apply for reinstatement are reinstated. I was unable to independently verify this statistic, but in an email, Sodi put the figure at approximately 80-90 percent. 

“I’m very willing to keep thinking about improving our policy so that students don’t feel that,” Chun continued. 

In his time as Dean, Chun has never made major changes to withdrawal policy — though there were some tweaks due to COVID-19 — nor appointed a committee to review the current policies.

The last committee formed to review the policy was appointed by Jonathan Holloway, Chun’s predecessor, in the fall of 2014. After meeting 11 times, the committee produced a 4,300-word report with recommendations to clarify and refine the process, including changing the name of the “readmittance process” to the “reinstatement process” to clarify that temporarily withdrawing does not nullify one’s initial acceptance. 

But the committee didn’t address the root of current student complaints. For example, the committee proposed “a clarification of the time such students have to leave campus, which is no more than 72 hours” but didn’t address the more fundamental requirement that gives students three days to pack, move out, arrange travel — in some cases internationally — and leave.

When asked for the reasoning behind this 72 hour policy, Mark Schenker, dean of academic affairs and member of the committee, declined to comment. 

“I don’t think we would extend the time,” said Chun. “It’s just good to have deadlines, so that students can know what to expect, and so that we know what to expect.” Extending the time, Chun said, “just drags on the move out process.”

According to a 2018 article about Yale’s reinstatement policies, Holloway endorsed all the 2015 recommendations, which means they could be enacted as policy, but while some changes were put in place immediately, others are still to be implemented. For example, the committee recommended that withdrawn students be given the right to petition for the use of the University library. But in 2021, this is still absent from the withdrawal policy website. The committee also recommended that all materials for the reinstatement application be made available on the Yale College website. As of January 2022, the application form is only available upon email request. 

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

When asked about further implementation of the now six-year-old recommendations, Chun pointed to the progress that had already been made. In response to the committee’s findings, Yale College extended the last day to take a leave of absence from ten to 15 days, eliminated the $50 reinstatement application fee, offered a teleconference option for reinstatement interviews (which students previously had to fly to New Haven for), and altered the role of the residential college deans in the reinstatement process. He said, “If there were to be further changes to be made, I think we would appoint a new committee.”

The need for transparency

“Regardless of how fantastic or horrible things are on the ground, knowledge is power,” Heyman said. In response to the white paper, many administrators told her about specific support they have for students, like a point person who could answer questions about the withdrawal process. “If that stuff isn’t written out in a transparent way, then students don’t know that they have the right to access those things,” Heyman continued. “And then [the universities are] not doing all they could to empower students.”

“Regardless of how fantastic or horrible things are on the ground, knowledge is power.”

At Yale, the policies are anything but clear. Before starting to report this piece, I spoke to friends, three professors, a dean, and Amelia Davidson ’24, who wrote the News’ piece on medical withdrawal in March 2021, just to see where I should start looking. In ten separate attempts to get answers from administrators, I was repeatedly referred to either the reinstatement FAQs or the leave of absence, deferral, withdrawal, and reinstatement policy webpage. These are considered the authoritative and current documents for what taking time off from Yale will look like. However, they conflict — both internally and with each other — and don’t contain some vital information.

For example, several changes made due to COVID-19 are displayed at the top of the reinstatement FAQs, but those changes are not reflected on the policy website. The website says that online courses “do not fulfill” the reinstatement requirements even if they’re taken at Yale Summer Session. However, the FAQs say that synchronous online classes do count. According to the FAQs, students seeking reinstatement for Spring 2022 whose withdrawals were processed through Yale Mental Health & Counseling should have their clinicians submit a clinician’s letter to Amy Perry of MH&C. The next section in the FAQs directs those same students to have their clinicians submit letters to Paul Hoffman, director of MH&C.

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

According to Chun, withdrawal is primarily processed through the residential college dean’s offices. Their role, according to Chun, is to be a “portal” to connect students with campus resources and help them find the answers if they don’t know it themselves. 

For Riddle, the student who opted to spend the first week of what was supposed to be her last semester in the hospital, the lack of clear information was a deterrent to even considering withdrawal in the first place. From the time she was diagnosed with depression as a sophomore, she’d heard from other students that she wouldn’t have financial aid when she came back, or that she would be required to pay for the time she spent at Yale before withdrawing for the semester. As a student on full aid, that was not feasible.

Riddle’s health insurance, therapy and psychiatric care were covered through Yale. But could she stay on the Yale Health Plan if she withdrew? That information is nowhere to be found on the Programs of Study website or in either of the documents I was referred to. 

(Isaac Yu, Production & Design Editor)

After returning from the hospital, Riddle felt worse, not better, so she looked into medical withdrawal just a few days too late to take a leave of absence. After meeting with her residential college dean and spending over three hours with her housemates reading the policy online, she still didn’t have answers.

“If I could have gone to my dean and asked all my questions or got them all answered, I could have had all the information I needed to make my decision in one day,” Riddle said. “But instead it was dragged out over like two weeks or three weeks.”

When asked about how deans might help students find answers to the questions like the ones Riddle was asking, Chun said, “To make it easier for students, deans usually have all that information.” I emailed Riddle’s dean twice and called the residential college office multiple times and never got a response. 

Riddle started calling and emailing around. Yale Health Insurance Member Services told Riddle she could stay on her insurance plan provided that she purchased it for “some thousands of dollars” but she doesn’t recall the exact amount. And after many redirections and incomplete or inaccurate information, she was told in an email by Muro, the associate director of undergraduate financial aid, that she would have financial aid when she got back and wouldn’t have to pay for the semester she withdrew from.

“I was misled at literally every step,” Riddle said. After filling out all the paperwork and not doing her school work in anticipation of withdrawing, Riddle had a meeting with Paul Hoffman to make sure she understood what withdrawal would entail. He informed her that she couldn’t stay on Yale insurance after all, contrary to the information she had received when she called.

When I called Yale Health Member Services to inquire about students’ ability to stay on the health plan during a withdrawal, I was told that once students have withdrawn, “their plan ends at the end of the term.” This is not only different from what Riddle says she was told, but it’s also not what happened. Instead, Riddle lost her therapist and psychiatrist almost immediately — she saw them each one last time — and spent two months without insurance or treatment during the pandemic.  

After digging around online, two phone calls and an email exchange with Ariel Perez, assistant manager at Yale Health Member Services, I found the policy laid out online, but it’s not easy to find. 

When asked about the discrepancy in information, Perez wrote in an email that he “could not speak to specific instances” but explained that while “the process for petitioning for a leave or withdrawal are similar…the coverage pathways and termination periods are significantly different.”

“When my office receives call [sic] from students we find that at times a student presents with questions about a leave, but it is really a withdrawal or vice versa.”

‘Horror stories’ deter students from even asking questions about withdrawal

Gaps in written policy which necessitate these phone calls sometimes act as a deterrent to students who are not ready or able to dedicate time and energy to call around in the first place. 

When a student, who is currently a junior, was in her first year at Yale, she went to a cast party for a play and drank for the first time. She doesn’t know what happened after that, but she woke up in the hospital with abrasions on her chin. Her doctor told her she might have fallen and ordered a CT scan to make sure she didn’t have a concussion.

 She didn’t. She had an unusual growth in her brain.

The student, who has been granted anonymity due to fear of professional repercussions for her health issues, took a week to process and grieve before telling her parents. They wanted her to come home for treatment immediately. She looked into the policy online and felt intimidated about asking her dean for help or taking time off.

“My hope was just that I could take a leave until Christmas break and then come back in January,” she explained. But under the withdrawal policy, that wasn’t possible. “I was worried about coming back. I’ve heard so many horror stories of people that had issues that were even worse than mine and then being asked not to come back.”

Concerns about her financial aid, the reinstatement process, and not being able to live with her suitemates in the next year swirled in her mind as she went through a month of MRIs and doctor’s visits to try to diagnose what she now knows to be a cyst in her brain. At the time, she didn’t know if it was malignant or benign, how big it was, if she’d need surgery, or what signals to look for to indicate that her situation was serious.

“Every time I had a headache or brain fog or anything, I would get really worried,” she said. 

Bureaucracy and change

As the chair of the reinstatement committee, Sodi does not handle or influence withdrawal policy. These are separate processes. Yale University also doesn’t have a unified policy. Yale College, the graduate school, and each of the professional schools have their own individual policies. 

The representative from the financial aid office who hung up on me said she couldn’t speak to how withdrawal would impact what a student pays because billing doesn’t happen there. Financial aid only determines how much aid students receive to help with the bill.

According to Heyman, the researcher at Brandeis, needed changes include removing the prohibition on visiting campus during students’ time away and allowing withdrawn students to access campus resources.

Students and alumni are pushing for change. And according to Jasmine E. Harris, a professor and expert on disability and antidiscrimination law at the University of Pennsylvania, the changes that have been made were student-driven.

“The reason we’re doing much better is because students have made it a priority,” she explained. Students, she said, are “best positioned” to understand their needs and know if proposed modifications would be helpful, so solutions should start with them and keep the lines of communication as direct as possible. Playing a “game of telephone” with administrators to change or even just clarify policy can be a huge disincentive for students to seek help and is “completely inefficient,” she said.

“By the end of that game of telephone,” she said, “you’ve wasted time that the student may not have.”

Editor’s Note: Here is the information we could find to clarify Yale’s withdrawal and reinstatement policies.

When a student withdraws from Yale College, their financial aid is adjusted proportionately to the adjustment of their tuition. These adjustments are determined based on the time in the semester when the student withdraws, and more information can be found in Section D. on the Financial Services page of the online publication of the Yale College Undergraduate Regulations. This may or may not result in a balance due to Yale depending on their financial aid package and the point in the semester they withdraw. 

Once a student has withdrawn, they have 72 hours to leave campus. Withdrawn students cannot visit campus without permission from their residential college dean. 

Withdrawn students cannot stay on the Yale Healthcare plan. According to Yale Health’s website, students who withdraw from the University after the fifteenth day of the semester will be covered by Yale Health for 30 days after their withdrawal date or through the last day of the term, whichever comes first. 

“Fees will not be prorated or refunded. Students who withdraw are not eligible to enroll in Student Affiliate Coverage.” the website continues, “Regardless of enrollment in Yale Health Hospitalization/Specialty Coverage, a student who withdraws from the University will have access to services available under Yale Health Basic Coverage (including Student Health, Athletic Medicine, Mental Health & Counseling, and Care Management) during these thirty days to the extent necessary for a coordinated transition of care.”