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Windsor Man Claiming Wrongful Conviction After 27 Years Seeks Help From System

Karen Brown
/
NEPR
Mark and Mia Schand, at their home in Windsor, Connecticut.

“I knew there were programs for guys who did the crime. I just didn’t know there was nothing for guys who were wrongfully convicted.”
Mark Schand

In the fall of 2013, Mark Schand walked out of court in Springfield, Massachusetts a free man, after 27 years in prison for a murder he said he did not commit.

Two years later, Schand, of Windsor, Connecticut, is still getting his bearings. He’s living with the wife who stood by him, and is trying to find a way forward with little help from the system that locked him up.

Schand skipped down the stairs of his Windsor  home after his night shift at UPS. At 50, he is bald, muscular and fit, thanks to years of daily prison workouts. He’d just changed out of his work clothes into a fresh black t-shirt with white writing that said, “I didn’t do it.”

Schand’s wife, Mia – who’s 53, with long, black cornrows and bold silver jewelry – was wearing the same shirt. It was printed by Centurion Ministries, the advocacy group that helped get Schand out of prison.

“When we got out, everyone in court had one of these on,” Mark Schand said. “They had them for the babies, for the infants, everyone.”

Credit State of Massachusetts
/
State of Massachusetts
The Hampden County Hall of Justice in Springfield, Massachusetts.
It took investigators from a New Jersey organization to convince the court Schand did not get a fair trial.

He was referring to October 4, 2013, the day a judge vacated Schand’s 1987 murder conviction, granted a new trial, and let him go. Mia can still hear the cheers of about 100 friends and relatives in the courtroom, including Schand’s three sons and two granddaughters.

“It was so overwhelming that it finally happened,” Mia said.

That was the day Schand first saw the house where Mia raised his youngest son, and where he ate his first non-prison food in more than a quarter century.

“My wife said, here’s your lobster tail,” Schand said. “First thing I ate was lobster.’

Within two weeks, the Hampden County District Attorney decided to drop all charges, and Schand could start his life over.

Mia taught him to drive again. “It was like teaching a teenager,” she said. He learned how to use an iPhone, and opened a bank account.

“I was basically trying to feel my way, after being stuck in one building for 27 years,” Schand said. “It was a little surreal, being able to look at the bottom of a tree, which I hadn’t seen for a while -- being able to come and go when I please.”

Yet Schand did not consider this a new life so much as a return to normal. “I felt like I was yanked away from a situation where I shouldn’t have been,” he said. “So when I was released, I felt like they just put me back where I was supposed to be.”

In 1986, Schand was 21, living in Hartford with Mia, who was pregnant. He had two older sons with an ex-girlfriend. He said he was weeks away from opening his first clothing store when he was arrested.

According to court documents, a drug deal near the After Five nightclub in Springfield had gone bad. A man fired shots, one of which killed a 25-year-old bystander, Victoria Seymour.

While his lawyers push for restitution, Schand has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the cities of Hartford and Springfield.

A witness testified that Schand was the shooter, though Schand claimed he was nowhere near Springfield at the time. His lawyer, John Thompson, spent decades trying to prove that witnesses lied, and that police and prosecutors coerced testimony and manipulated line-ups.

“It’s very clear Mark was not the person who committed this crime,” said Thompson. “The evidence against him was largely bogus.”

It took investigators from Centurion Ministries — a New Jersey organization devoted to freeing the innocent — to finally convince the court Schand did not get a fair trial. Schand said that years of bitterness evaporated in a moment.

“Believe me, the day they released me, I couldn’t find it -- the anger,” Schand said. “It wasn’t there. I was just happy I was out. And I figure, I just focus on that day forth.” 

That has turned out a lot harder than Schand expected.

For one, he’s not eligible for any re-entry services from the Massachusetts Department of Correction. Only inmates who have served their sentences and are on parole get housing assistance, job training, counseling, and financial advice. “I knew there were programs for guys who did the crime; I just didn’t know there was nothing for guys who were wrongfully convicted,” he said. “That was a little shocking to me.”

A state spokesperson confirmed this. Once charges are dropped, you’re out of the system.

Schand did file a legal complaint in early 2014 with the Massachusetts Attorney General, asking for restitution. The maximum is $500,000.

Schand’s lawyer said they hoped for a quick settlement. But now they have to prove in court he was wrongfully imprisoned — a long process. In the meantime, Schand has been on his own to find work.

“I probably had a little fantasy: everybody like, ‘Oh, gosh, you were wrongfully convicted,’ and there’d be, like, 20 jobs waiting for me,” Schand said. “Nobody cared.”

With help from a teenager at the local Goodwill, he went online, a concept that didn’t exist when he was arrested. He applied for dozens of jobs, from factory assembly lines to Federal Express.

Schand said no one called him, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. Most applications ask if you’ve been convicted of a crime, and there’s no box for “wrongfully convicted.”

“If I was an employer, I’d go on to the next applicant,” Schand said. “If I got 300 applications online, I’m gonna take the two that say, yeah, I’ve been incarcerated before; I’m gonna push them aside, and go to the 298 who say, no, I’ve never been incarcerated. So I understood it, but at the same time, I needed a job.”

Mia, who works as a hairdresser, tried to keep up his spirits.

“He was getting frustrated at first,” she said. “And I said, you just have to keep trying, because it’s gonna happen.”

Schand’s first break came, he said, when he applied in person for a job at a group home for troubled kids. A manager asked why he left the “previous employment” section blank.

“I said, because I was incarcerated. She said, well sir, if you were incarcerated, you can’t work here. So I told her -- I said, listen, just Google my name, and you’ll see the story,” Schand said. “Apparently she did, because this was the lady that gave me my first job.”

Schand worked there for seven months, he said, until he was laid off. He got his job at UPS because a friend put in a good word. It’s a brutal shift. It starts around 3:00 am, emptying tractor trailers full of heavy boxes.

“Four or five hours with a ten minute break, got my body aching,” Schand said. “It’s not ideal. But it’s work.” He gets just under $11.00 an hour, and expects to qualify for benefits soon. But it’s not what he wants to do.

When Schand was a teenager, his father -- an entrepreneur -- taught him how to run a business. Before his arrest, he’d hoped to put those skills to use at his first clothing shop.

Credit Karen Brown / NEPR
/
NEPR
Mark Schand's tattoo shows the exact amount of time he spent in prison, down to the second.

“Who’s to say what that could have been right now?” Schand said. “That could have been a clothing empire. That could have been a chain of clothing stores.”

At this point, he’d settle for owning a fast food franchise if he can ever build up enough credit to get a loan. Until then, the Schands try not to obsess over what could have been. But they don’t hide Schand’s story, either.

Schand turned his forearm to show a tattoo that lists the exact amount of time he spent in prison: “Twenty-six years, eleven months, four days, 20 hours, 26 minutes, and eight seconds,” he read.

The Schands’ basement is wallpapered with photos and news clippings from Mark Schand’s prison years. He points at one. “That’s my kids in prison visiting me when they was little,” he said.

In several pictures, Schand has his arms around new friends he met through Centurion Ministries — most of them fellow exonorees, as he called them.

“He did 15 years,” Schand said, pointing to several men in a group photo. “He did 20 years; he did 30 years. There’s not a lot of guys with more time than me, but there’s some.”

Although Schand considers himself exonerated, he was not acquitted. Theoretically, the state could charge him again for Victoria Seymour’s murder, though his lawyer said that’s highly unlikely.

Even so, whenever Schand hears about a crime on the news, “the first thing that comes to my mind is: alibi. I want to make sure I know where I was, because I feel like I could be set up at any time again,” he said.

While his lawyers push for restitution, Schand has filed a separate, civil rights lawsuit against the cities of Hartford and Springfield. Even if he wins a settlement, he said, “They can’t make that whole again no matter what, but I think they deserve to try.”

Representatives for Springfield and Hartford said they don’t comment on pending litigation. The lawsuit is likely to take years.

This report was originally published by New England Public Radio.

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