From Bridge authored b
“There is a photo I kept on my desk for years. In it, three people stand in a courtroom hallway. On the left is Dwight Love, a middle-aged man from Detroit who hadn’t stood in a courthouse hallway without handcuffs since he was a young man. Love was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit when he was 21 years old. Minutes earlier, a judge had dismissed the case.
On the right is Sarah Hunter, a diminutive Birmingham attorney with cropped blond hair and a thick yellow legal pad. She had worked on Love’s case for years. By the time of the photo, it was her only case, and she had been working for free for several years to try to get Love out of prison. She’d gambled her professional career on what most viewed as a loser of a case, and she’d won.
In the middle is a reporter, with his own legal pad in a binder that displayed a Detroit News business card. I’d never asked to have a photo taken with people I was writing about before, but this was special. For years, I was the only journalist who wrote about the case. In the end, I played a role in getting Love out of prison, and I wanted a memento. Dwight put his arm around my shoulder; Sarah did the same.
In the movies, the snapping of that photo in February 2001 would be the moment the music swells and the credits roll, the happy ending.
Today, Love and Hunter are dead.”
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