CHAPTER 38
Grace scanned the thin crowd, looking, Sidney was certain, for her parents and her brother.
She settled on the only familiar face that was present: Sidney’s.
Sidney lifted her hand in a small wave and smiled.
Grace’s eyes displayed shock and confusion, still unsure exactly what was transpiring.
She took a spot next to the court-appointed counsel while the high court came to order. The Honorable Judge Bryan spoke.
“Mademoiselle Sebold, are you of right mind this morning and properly represented by counsel?”
“Yes, sir,” Grace said in a muted tone. She didn’t mention the fact that her actual lawyer, Scott Simpson, was in fact not present to represent her, but instead the man who stood beside her was the St. Lucian attorney who had so badly fumbled her case years ago.
Derrick captured the courthouse scene. Two other cameramen recorded from different angles to catch Grace, the judge, and Sidney.
“Under St. Lucian statute,” the Honorable Judge Bryan continued, “in accordance with the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court, as well as the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and in light of new evidence provided to the court by the government of the United States, and reviewed by the St. Lucian authorities and this high court, it is within my right and is my final decision, along with the prime minister and the governor-general, to reverse the ruling on June 29, 2007, of murder in the first degree. All previous and formal charges, as of this day, 11th of July, 2017, are annulled and removed, and you, Grace Janice Sebold, are hereby granted clemency and exoneration of formerly charged crimes.”
Despite the thin attendance, murmurs filled the court. The Honorable Bryan did not bother to silence the crowd. Instead, he offered a quick apology to Grace Sebold, directed the guards, and banged his gavel. He was up and gone through a rear door, having spent less than five minutes on the bench.
Grace looked back to Sidney; tears ran down the inmate’s cheeks as the guards pulled her toward the exit as her counsel whispered in her ear.
The entourage of constables ushered her through the side door from where she had emerged; a mere seven minutes after the court was brought to order, Grace Sebold was exonerated.
* * *
The proceedings had moved so swiftly that Grace’s parents were absent when their daughter was released from prison.
Their flight was scheduled to land that night, and without a soul to welcome Grace when she was released, Sidney found herself late in the afternoon waiting next to a taxi in the parking lot of the Bordelais Correctional Facility when its gates opened.
Clanking chain link rattled and whined in protest, but finally parted to grant the thirty-six-year-old prisoner, who had spent more than a quarter of her life within its walls, her freedom.
Along with a handful of local press, and a one-man camera crew from The Voice and The Star—two of St. Lucia’s largest media outlets—Derrick rested the camera on his shoulder and captured the gates parting and Grace Sebold’s face as she walked into the warm, sticky Caribbean air and looked up at the sky, as if she hadn’t seen it in years.
She had, though, Sidney’s voice would eventually narrate to the audience, in the prison yard and through the dirty windows of the mess hall.
But today was the first time in more than ten years that she was seeing it as a free woman.