‘I was out, but I was still locked up’
Exonerated man finds freedom, love — and a pandemic
March has brought both sorrow and salvation for Jeremy Puckett.
Consider his history: On March 14, 2002, Puckett, then 25, was sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. The victim’s body had been discovered on a Rancho Cordova (Sacramento County) road four years earlier, to the date. Puckett proclaimed his innocence for two decades, but justice — true justice — didn’t come until March 13, 2020.
On that date, Puckett stepped through a hidden door into a cage in a downtown Sacramento courtroom. He wore street clothes and
the halfhaggard, halfwired look of a man lacking sleep. Through bars, Puckett saw family and friends packed tight on the benches of the lowslung gallery. He saw a grown daughter and son who were just toddlers when sheriff ’s deputies arrested him 19 years earlier.
The hearing went quickly. His attorneys from the Northern California Innocence Project and Palo Alto law firm of Simpson Thacher had already demonstrated that Puckett had an alibi that his jury never heard, and that the prosecution’s star witness, a drug dealer implicated in the crime, had recanted his claim that Puckett had any involvement in the drug slaying.
Puckett listened as a prosecutor moved to dismiss the charges. The judge granted the motion and turned to the innocent man in the cage.
“You’re a free man,” the judge told him.
Gasps sliced the air. Puckett clenched his jaw; tears slid down his cheeks. “I tried to hold it in,” he later recounted.
Six days later, California entered an emergency lockdown to stem the tide of the burgeoning pandemic. This is the world Puckett was reborn into — of fraying economies and safety nets, of unprecedented restrictions and uncertainty.
Some might call that bad luck. Puckett, he will call it a miracle.
From lockup to lockdown
Puckett handed a spare pair of shoes to an arrested homeless man with ravaged feet and passed through two security doors leading into the Sacramento jail’s lobby. Beyond the thick, smudged glass he heard shouting. Outside the jail, they were chanting his name.
Puckett had arrived there six months earlier, handcuffed and driven in through a sally port gate around the side. He left through the front door.
Relatives and friends he hadn’t seen in years, including one he entered prison with, mobbed Puckett as soon as he emerged into the blustery prespring air. His daughter leaped into his arms. His mother buried her face in his chest. Puckett clasped his brow as shutters snapped and his father cried.
His eyes glisten recalling those first moments of reclaimed freedom.
“That was probably the greatest day of my life outside of having my kids,” he told The Chronicle. “Can’t nothing explain the emotion I was going through that day.”
On the 14mile drive to his sister’s place in south Sacramento, Puckett experienced more complicated emotions. He craned his neck eyeing all the new buildings, vanished storefronts and jagged outcroppings of tarpcovered tents.
The changes were disorienting. “You feel like everything just went from here to boom. You’re there.”
Puckett didn’t feel such a big change within himself, but he was different, too. American penitentiaries teem with bodies and noise, not intimacy. That first night in his sister’s home, Puckett didn’t sleep. The quiet wouldn’t let him.
“You’re used to hearing music, used to hearing TV, used to hearing people talk, used to hearing the C.O.s walk, their keys clanging or doors shutting,” Puckett said. “You’re used to that.”
At his welcomehome party, Puckett dined on pork chops and Brussels sprouts and tried to ignore his “prison instincts” when loved ones drew close, approached from behind or touched him without warning. He disappeared into his room to breathe. His tightknit family noted his absence.
“We all thought he was grumpy!” his sister Charon Knox said lightly. “I think it was him adjusting . ... When there was a bunch of people, you could see that he got overwhelmed.”
Knox had relocated from Seattle to help her brother find his legs in a society set adrift by the coronavirus. For about six months last year, they shared a house in south Sacramento with Puckett’s daughter.
“I didn’t know what to expect when he came home,” Knox said. “Our lockdown and his lockdown seem totally different.”
In her brother, Knox saw a man who was understandably eager to jumpstart his life — and frustrated when those plans splintered against the pandemic. Puckett had been away for so long that there was little record of his identity not associated with prison life. He no longer had an ID or a Social Security card. He had no rental history, his only credited work experience a warehouse job back in the 1990s.
Puckett wanted a car, a job, his own place. But when the DMV closed its field offices last March due to the coronavirus outbreak, he couldn’t even obtain the documents that proved he existed.
“It felt like I was out, but I was still locked up,” Puckett said.
A few days after California’s stayhome order took effect, Puckett and his father went to the grocery store. Told to stock up for the lockdown, Puckett said he came close to having a panic attack.
“I’m ripping and running around the store with my head cut off,” Puckett recalled. “Like I’m just grabbing everything. Everything.”
He piled boxed rice and frozen chickens — “damn near all the chicken” — into his shopping cart. “When I brought all this stuff home, I laid it down and my sister’s like, ‘What is all this?’ I said, ‘They’re fitting to put us on lockdown!’ She’s like, ‘Man, it’s not going to be like that,’ ” Puckett said, breaking
into laughter.
The term evoked a harsher reality in the prisons of the Central Valley.
Puckett’s prison term was divided between Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad (Monterey County), High Desert State Prison in Bakersfield and Wasco State Prison in Kern County. When the facilities locked down following riots or security breaches, inmates weren’t told how long they’d be confined to their 6by8foot cells. He and his fellow inmates might spend months in limbo, let out only for showers and medical appointments, always handcuffed.
“Imagine being on lockdown for two years straight,” Puckett said. “You start getting used to living in this little box.”
Puckett planned to put that box behind him. He left prison wanting to ride a roller coaster and fly to different countries. He imagined road trips with his sister and outings with his children.
The global pandemic proved the biggest obstacle to those ambitions, but not the only one.
His children were in their 20s. His son was about to become a father. Puckett’s sister was a corporate project manager, not the teenager he left behind. Less than a month after his release, Puckett acknowledged the difficulty of adjusting to lives that had reluctantly pressed on in his absence.
All those years he was wrongfully incarcerated, Puckett and his closest relations stayed in each other’s lives through prisonread letters, monitored phone calls and occasional visits. Knox saw
how hard her brother was fighting for his freedom. So she edited out her troubles. She shared the parts of her life she thought he could handle.
When he got out, Knox said, “He basically had to relearn us all over again.”
And it was the same for her. One morning shortly after her brother’s release, Knox exited her bedroom to find him standing in the hallway. The realness of him staggered her. She’d never given up on his innocence, on the idea that he’d return home. But the simple fact of him awed her, she said.
“It felt like so many years of prayers had been answered,” she said.
Knox returned to her room and wept. Puckett tried to figure out what to do next.
‘Long, hard journey’
Puckett’s bags were packed. He still needed to get a haircut and a rapid COVID test before work. It was March 11. In two days — on the oneyear anniversary of his release from prison — he would be in snowy Denmark. A chance at love awaited.
“We found each other. I’ll say it like that,” Puckett said of the woman he met online while in prison two years ago. “We didn’t know if it was going to go anywhere ... but as time moved on, things changed and now we’re fitting to meet for the first time.”
Like the rest of California, things started opening up for Puckett over the summer.
He finally got his driver’s license. In June, he landed a job through a temp agency at a cardboard manufacturing company. His supervisors took
quick notice of his work ethic and moved him from the assembly line to quality control.
In July, the organization Exonerated Nation helped Puckett rent a threestory townhome in a gated culdesac not far from his cousin’s home. Because of state legislation enacted last year for the wrongfully imprisoned, his first four years of housing costs are covered.
“It’s nice; I won’t lie,” Puckett said.
He jokes that it’s clear a single man lives there. An aromatherapy diffuser fills the house with a scented mist while a Bluetooth speaker and his bedroom television keep the quiet at bay.
In January, Puckett returned to court. This time he left with a declaration of factual innocence, an explicit acknowledgment that the justice system got his case colossally wrong. Puckett told his attorneys they were the reason he could hold the grandson who was born in September and bears his name. They told him he was their inspiration.
Before the NorCal Innocence Project took his case, Puckett petitioned state and federal courts nine times between 2005 and 2013, said Karyn SinunuTowery, a retired Santa Clara County assistant district attorney who represented Puckett.
“That’s the battle that this man did,” SinunuTowery marveled. “Jeremy is an extraordinary person.”
Knox, who recently moved to Reno, said her brother is in a good place.
“I think he’s honestly living his best life right now,” she said.
Despite everything he was forced to surrender, Puckett feels blessed, not bitter. He expresses gratitude for all the people who stuck by him during his long march toward justice.
“I look at it as nothing less than basically a miracle,” Puckett, who turns 45 in May, said the day before his flight. “It was a long journey — a long, hard journey.”
Now he’s on another journey — this time of his own choosing.