On June 21, 1990, a Virginia jury found me guilty of murdering my girlfriend’s parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom. Later that night I tried to kill myself. The injustice felt so great that I just wanted to be gone, and a plastic bag over my head seemed like the best way to achieve that end.
When I failed at suicide, I decided to fight. Not all victims of wrongful convictions—and studies suggest there are about seventy-six thousand of us in America—do. Some prefer to accept their fate rather than take up a struggle that seems hopeless.
Of course I filed the usual appeals and petitions. But I quickly realized that the justice system that had wrongfully convicted me was highly unlikely to admit its own mistake. Appellate judges almost always begin their careers as prosecutors and trial judges. They know that locking up criminals is a tough business. Sometimes, they seem to feel, you have to turn a blind eye to ensure that justice is served more broadly.
My next step was to apply to three different Innocence Projects. But their resources are so limited that they can take only very few cases. And of those, only about a hundred and fifty result in exonerations each year.
I also applied for parole—fourteen times, in fact—but Virginia has the lowest parole rate in the country, 2 or 3 percent. Also, you have to show remorse to be considered, and I could not show remorse for a crime I had not committed. So my parole hearings lasted no more than a few minutes.
The last path open to me, I felt, was the media. My 1990 trial was the second in the history of the United States to be televised live, gavel to gavel, on local TV; only the trial of Lyle and Eric Menendez in California had preceded mine. My lawyers told me that the presence of cameras in the courtroom had contributed to my wrongful conviction. Since the media had helped put me behind bars, I felt only the media could get me out of prison.
So from 1990 onward, I wrote countless letters to journalists, hoping to interest them in my story. It took me six years to find the first reporter willing to listen: Ian Zack of the Charlottesville Daily Progress. His 1996 article “Trial and Error?” won a journalism award and is still one of the best ever published about my case.
Another eleven years passed until I got lucky again, with Bill Sizemore of the Virginian-Pilot. His 2007 article “No hope for Jens Soering” won an award from the Virginia Bar Association and later led to our cooperation on one of my books, A Far, Far Better Thing (Lantern Books, 2017).
In 2013, Virginia public radio WVTF’s Sandy Hausman began publishing regular reports on my case, earning her an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2017. That same year, the Washington Post Magazine published Laura Vozzella’s long investigative piece on the case, perhaps the gold standard for this long, sad story.
All these journalists focused their reporting not on me, but on my supporters. These included a deputy attorney general, seven criminal investigators, and two DNA scientists. On April 9, 2018, four of those seven police officers held a news conference and asked the governor to grant me an absolute pardon. One of them was the original lead detective on the murders for which I was convicted.
But whenever the media call a high-profile criminal conviction into question, conservatives leap into action to defend the reputation of the legal system. They believe, perhaps rightly, that every high-profile exoneration undermines the public’s confidence in the courts. Moreover, opposing prisoners who claim to be innocent allows politicians to position themselves as tough on crime.
That’s what Kamala Harris did during her tenure as attorney general of California, as the New York Times pointed out in 2019. She fought to keep George Gage, Daniel Larsen, Johnny Bacca, and Kevin Cooper in prison even though there was compelling evidence of their innocence. In those days, Democrats like Harris were eager to appear even more pro-police and pro-prosecution than Republicans.
The Virginia media’s extensive coverage of the 2018 press conference put Gov. Ralph Northam (D) under pressure. He must have felt he needed to take some kind of action, or there would be even more news conferences with even more cops calling for my exoneration. But he also seemed to realize that, if he granted me a pardon, Republicans would accuse him of being soft on crime.
So Northam waited until after Virginia’s midterm election on November 5, 2019. Even though Democrats won resoundingly, he didn’t grant me a pardon; he released me on parole instead. I believe the same public pressure that forced his hand made it more difficult for him to give me what I wanted: an absolute pardon.
The sheriff’s department responsible for my wrongful conviction celebrated Northam’s decision: their spokesman said that my release on parole meant they had done nothing wrong. And my supporters were happy, too; they just wanted me to come home.
The only one disappointed by Northam’s decision was me. For several hours, I seriously considered turning down parole and remaining in prison, to force the governor to pardon me.
Luckily, I was able to call a friend who explained to me why Northam would never do that. The same public pressure that forced him to act on my case at all simultaneously prevented him from admitting yet another embarrassing failure of the justice system. He had to protect himself against public criticism from two different directions: my supporters and his political opponents.
The same conflicting pressures seem to exist in other media-driven cases. Leo Schofield, a Floridian convicted of killing his wife in 1987, was featured on the hugely popular podcast Bone Valley, which made a compelling case for his innocence. On April 30, 2024, Schofield was released on parole, without a pardon—just like me.
The West Memphis Three, three Arkansas teens convicted of murdering three boys in 1994, became the subject of several documentaries questioning their guilt. Eventually, they took what is called an Alford plea, which amounts to pleading guilty (while maintaining innocence) in exchange for early release. In 2011, they were allowed to leave prison—as convicted felons.
These solutions also have a pleasant side effect for the convicting states: Virginia, Florida, and Arkansas do not have to pay us compensation. Had I been granted a pardon, for instance, I could have applied for $1.4 million. Northam saved his taxpayers that unnecessary expense by paroling me instead.
In addition to emerging penniless, Schofield, the West Memphis Three, and I have to live with the stigma of being “criminals.” Of course we try to explain to everyone that this really isn’t true, but no one wants to listen to our sad stories of some long-ago injustice. Decades later, who can really tell whether we’re telling the truth?
In some cases, the media—once our great ally in the fight to be exonerated—turn against us. That is what happened to me. Once the story of my innocence had been told to exhaustion, the media machinery looked for a new angle, I suppose—a different way to market the product.
I did not fully understand the media’s need for constant novelty and artificial drama when I left prison. I thought the truth was exciting enough: a conviction that once seemed reliable became ever more shaky as new evidence emerged. That was the story Ian Zack, Bill Sizemore, Sandy Hausman, and Laura Vozzella had told. And that was the story I thought the Netflix producers wanted to show their viewers.
At least, that’s what they told me and the police officers who had supported me. On that basis, we all agreed to participate without payment for our interviews. (I received a modest sum for my legal file.) I have permission to speak for those police officers when I say that we all feel betrayed.
My sources inside the Netflix team told me that directors were instructed to leave out certain story lines that would have made the case for my innocence too compelling: my codefendant’s confession, a luminol test of the getaway car, an FBI profile, a local judge’s son as an alternate suspect. Including these elements would have reduced the dramatic tension, I was told.
Another element Netflix left out of the series was a long interview with Professor J. Thomas McClintock of Liberty University. He had reexamined DNA evidence in the case at the state forensic lab in 2022, and he concluded that none of the blood at the crime scene could be linked to me. It pointed to two unknown men, he said. In his Netflix interview, Professor McClintock explained his work in great detail, because he was so excited to have “discovered the truth through science,” as he put it. But Netflix chose someone else to present the DNA evidence, along with a more ambiguous conclusion.
At least I was able to appear in the series to give my side of the story. That is more than can be said for a story The Atlantic ran by Amanda Knox, once a friend and ally, who now says she has developed doubts about my innocence. The Atlantic never contacted me before publishing, and editors have not responded to an article I sent them rebutting many of Knox’s claims. I take solace in the fact that having doubts about my innocence or guilt is the very definition of reasonable doubt. If Knox were on my jury, she’d have to vote not guilty.
In the end, I came to see The Atlantic’s perspective, and to understand the devil’s bargain that victims of wrongful convictions strike with the media. The story of my innocence has been told; it’s become boring. A much more interesting, titillating story is the one Knox told in her article: maybe I’ve been lying all along. That seems much more likely to generate clicks.
The media giveth, and the media taketh away.
(When presented with a detailed breakdown of these allegations, The Atlantic responded that it stood by its article, which was extensively fact-checked. “We don’t discuss our editorial process,” a spokeswoman said, “but we would point out that the piece includes an exhaustive summary of all of the evidence in the case.” Netflix declined to comment.)
Jens Söring is a resilience coach, author, and YouTuber.