![]() She stepped away from basketball in 2019, in large part to focus on and call attention to his case. Moore bankrolled a team of lawyers that would ultimately helped set Irons free. The duo clicked, and after a series of messages-many reprinted in the book-and conversations, they began to develop an intimate bond. When Moore met him, she was about to begin her college basketball career at the University of Connecticut. ![]() Despite a lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime, Irons was convicted by an all-white jury in 1998 and was given a 50-year sentence. Irons was 16 when he was arrested in 1996 for a nonfatal shooting. He was released from the hole, and continued exchanging letters and other correspondence with Moore, whom he had first met in 2007 at the Jefferson City Correctional Center in Missouri, through her godparents, who had taken an interest in his case. He woke up vowing to fight on, and things soon turned his way. “I couldn’t take the pain anymore,” he writes. ![]() “The air reeked of body odor and urine and fecal matter.” A defeated Irons contemplated suicide. “You never got used to the hole,” Irons writes in Love and Justice, a new memoir he co-wrote with Moore, who played an instrumental role in getting his conviction on burglary and assault charges overturned after he spent some 23 years in prison. But this latest indignity, another trip to the “hole,” to solitary confinement, was just too much. He had fought an injustice with far too little to show for it and fallen in love with a woman-WNBA superstar Maya Moore-whom he could hug for only two seconds during her occasional visits to see him. For nearly two decades, Irons had lived with the physical and mental assaults of life in a maximum-security facility. He tore the threads off a worn sheet, tied it up, and even tested that it would hold his own weight. Eighteen years into a prison sentence for a crime he did not commit, Jonathan Irons made a rope.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |