In 2008, Emanuel Fair went to a party at an apartment complex. That night, a woman was murdered. Fair, the only Black man at the party, was accused of killing her.
He sat in that jail for eight years, seven months, and 14 days without ever being convicted of a crime. With an insurmountable seven-figure bail hanging over him, he waited in a facility that was never meant for long-term stays – largely in isolation – and maintained his innocence every day.
“I’ve never seen a worse case,” says Corinne Sebren, one of Fair’s lawyers, who specializes in civil rights cases. “There’s very little justice left to salvage.” There is, however, a person trying to salvage a life interrupted, trying to return to life after a decade in purgatory, thanks to a legal system that still won’t concede it’s done anything wrong.
The party started around 8 p.m. There were drinks and snacks set up on tables outside, and according to witness statements, people passed between apartments and balconies pretty freely. Most people at the party remembered Fair as relatively quiet — it was a close-knit group of neighbors, and he only knew Potts. But some people said they talked to him about his work as a welding apprentice, and about the hip-hop production that he was particularly proud of lately.
Fair was still staying at Potts’ apartment when Jinaga’s body was found two days later. According to police records, her father asked a family friend to check on her because, for several days in a row, she’d missed her daily call with her family back in India, and hadn’t shown up to work on Monday morning. The friend ran into her neighbor outside of her door. The two knocked and it swung right open: the door was splintered at the jam, and the lock was broken.
Either way, the police seemed to use that warrant to their advantage. Rather than knocking on his door, like they did with the dozens of witnesses they’d interviewed in the previous three weeks, the detectives staked out Fair’s friend’s mom’s house in the Central District, where he’d been staying, in plain clothes and an unmarked car. When Fair walked out of the house, he says, the unmarked car started rolling toward him. “I thought I was gonna die,” Fair tells.
It’s true that there are no witnesses to the murder and no one ever confessed, so DNA was the strongest card in their hand. And the DNA that detectives found at the crime scene made Fair an obvious person of interest. At the end of the interview, when investigators had started putting pressure on him, he asked investigators to turn off the recording, and he discussed something that can’t be found in the police record.
Singling out the only Black man at the party, when presented with multiple other white suspects, “can only be viewed as racial discrimination,” Fair’s lawsuit alleges.
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