Josh Bowland frees innocent man with DNA evidence in his first case By Lee Benson, Deseret Morning News
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Josh Bowland isn’t the highest paid attorney in Salt Lake City and he sure doesn’t have the most experience. He only graduated from Gonzaga University law school a year ago, and he’s been practicing law all of five months. But there wasn’t an attorney in town Bowland wanted to trade places with last week when he watched as his client, Bruce Goodman, won his freedom after 19 years behind bars. It was a scene straight out of a John Grisham novel. There was Josh, offering his sweater to Goodman as he emerged from the Utah State Prison on a crisp
Josh Bowland and a grateful Bruce Goodman. November day with nothing but the shirt on his back and a big ‘ol smile on his face. For the first time since he was 35 years old and sent to prison for a murder he steadfastly insisted he did not commit, the once-condemned man drew a breath of free air. Besides Josh, other staffers from the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center (RMIC) were there to welcome Goodman, along with a girlfriend from Indiana Goodman found via prison correspondence. She drove all night so she could pick him up and take him back to Michigan City, where a job and an apartment without 23
bars on the windows await. But first there were some loose ends to tie up, the most pressing of which was a celebratory dinner at the Red Iguana, a Mexican restaurant in Salt Lake, where Goodman toasted his lawyer for a job well done, and they both raised a toast to the science of DNA testing — for without it Goodman would yet be proclaiming his innocence from the inside of a prison cell. Last summer, Josh landed his job at the RMIC, a Robin Hoodesque foundation launched in Salt Lake City nearly five years ago for the express purpose of reviewing questionable convictions pro bono. “We focus primarily on physical evidence that can be subjected to DNA testing,” says Josh. “It’s a tangible area courts might be willing to look at. Just saying, ‘I didn’t do it,’ doesn’t get you very far.” Among the cases that landed on Josh’s desk — he’s the RMIC’s only staff attorney — was Goodman’s. In July, Josh filed the legal petitions that were successful in sending bodily fluids taken into evidence from the 1984 murder of 21-year-old Sherry Ann Fales Williams — the murder Goodman was convicted of committing — to Orchid Cellmark, a private DNA testing lab in Dallas, Texas. In September, the lab returned its findings that not only were none of the fluids Goodman’s but that DNA obtained from both a rape kit and from elsewhere at the crime scene belonged to the same man — meaning an unidentified male had been both sexually intimate with the victim and was at the place where she was murdered. A faceless, nameless suspect who was “absolutely not” Goodman. Josh won’t soon forget the visit he took to the jail to tell Goodman the news. “I was going to lay it all out for him, very legallike,” he says, “but I was as excited as a kid, and as soon as he saw my face he said, ‘See, I told you so.’ ” The same thing Goodman had been saying for 19 years. It is Josh’s and the RMIC’s hope that this is just the start of victories for the falsely accused in the enlightened era of DNA identification. When an innocent man is exonerated, the payday is enormous for everyone concerned. “It was worth it just to see the smile on his face,” says Josh, a lawyer who, no matter how many more cases he wins in his career, may never top the first one. © 2004 Deseret News Publishing Company. Reprinted with permission.
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Kelly Fivey and her husband welcomed the birth of their new baby on December 7th. Her name is Kesley Lorraine Fivey and she weighed seven pounds, 15 1⁄2 ounces and was 20 inches long. They reside in Montana.