Jordan Holm would like you to keep an open mind judging his bid for the U.S. Olympic wrestling team. He spent 6-1/2 years in prison for third-degree sexual abuse.

Entering this weekend’s trials in Iowa City, Iowa, Holm insists he is not looking for a forum to illuminate people about what he calls the “calamity of errors” that banished him behind bars for a crime he says he did not commit.

The 1998 and ’99 Minnesota state champion would rather talk about a lifelong dream of competing for the United States, his arm being raised in triumph, his ticket punched to London’s Summer Games as the country’s best 185-pound Greco-Roman wrestler.

“What would it mean? Man.”

Holm’s words hang in the air for 20 seconds, and his eyes well up describing returning to the city where his world crumbled a decade ago and all he has been through since.

“I can’t get to the beginning or end without tearing up or reviewing what the experience has meant to get to this point. I don’t think the cliche seems adequate: I would view it (the Olympics) as a tremendous blessing.”

Holm knows his conservative upbringing in Northfield, Minn., budding career at the wrestling powerhouse University of Northern Iowa, pre-med aspirations and emergence as a 30-year-old Olympic upstart cannot whitewash 2,360 days as prisoner No. 6016946-A in the Iowa Department of Corrections.

And winning the trials will not guarantee Holm a place with the national team. The U.S. Olympic Committee must approve the roster.

The governing body’s 15-member board would have to accept USA Wrestling’s nomination of a felon still maintaining his innocence over a late-night encounter between strangers at a 2002 University of Iowa party. He has one final, long-shot appeal pending to overturn a conviction that twice has been upheld.

“I invite everyone to have an opinion,” Holm said during an interview this week at a Minneapolis coffeehouse. “I don’t think anyone who was to look at the facts and give them real consideration would come up with a dissenting opinion. … I was wrongly convicted. But it’s not for me to judge people’s opinions.”

There is, of course, the official record, and the trial that rendered judgment nine years ago, a verdict Holm’s prosecutor maintains was just.

“This was a case based on credibility. The physical aspects of this case supported only one reasonable explanation…and that was the one provided by the complaining witness,” said former Johnson County Assistant District Attorney Victoria Cole, now a criminal defense attorney in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

And it was Holm who allowed his original defense attorney to waive his right to a jury trial and have a judge render a verdict, a risky strategy that backfired. Holm cites attorney errors as part of his petition to the state to overturn the conviction.

Holm’s primary goal is to clear his name.

Meanwhile, this weekend brings him back to Iowa City, where his nightmare began.

“I’m going to walk in there and pour out my heart,” he said, “and whatever happens. I’m going to be satisfied with that.”

HE SAID, SHE SAID

No matter what happened between Holm and a then-21-year-old woman in the early hours of Sept. 15, 2002, the circumstances that brought them together were not in dispute. (The Pioneer Press generally does not identify victims of sexual abuse).

According to Holm, he and some of his UNI teammates visited Iowa City to attend the Iowa-Iowa State football game. They ended up at a house party hosted by a friend of Holm’s teammate.

Holm’s friends went barhopping, but he stayed at the party. Sometime after 2 a.m., unable to reach his friends, Holm asked one of the housemates if he could sleep there. Sure, they said, he could crash upstairs.

The first door Holm tried was locked. He noticed an adjacent one partially open. In the darkness, Holm could make out a man and a woman sleeping on the bed and decided to lie down on the floor. He removed his shoes and T-shirt, which he used as a pillow.

Everything changed for Holm based on what did or did not happen in the next few minutes.

He testified he heard the woman moaning, sat up and saw her masturbating. Holm ducked back down, wondering if she saw him. When he sat up again, the woman was sitting near the foot of the bed. Holm testified she ran her fingers through his hair and pulled him into her lap, trying to engage him, but when he resisted, he scrambled out of the room as the woman kicked him and screamed.

The woman testified she was sleeping next to her boyfriend, woke up and saw Holm performing oral sex on her. She screamed after realizing it was not her boyfriend and pushed Holm away.

Partiers stopped Holm at the bottom of the stairs after hearing the woman screaming. Her boyfriend came down and questioned Holm about what had happened. Holm and the woman gave conflicting accounts and, according to her testimony, the woman became upset when her boyfriend disputed her version. She slapped Holm.

“I was upset due to the fact that no one believed me,” she testified.

Holm was told to leave the house. He returned later that morning to reconvene with his friends. By then, the police had been called. Holm was arrested and spent a night in jail. The case did not become public for almost a year, so Holm was able to wrestle his sophomore season.

Holm said his original defense attorney, Michael Pedersen, warned that attacking his accuser’s credibility was dangerous and that calling character witnesses on his behalf was unnecessary because DNA evidence would exonerate him.

Pedersen also insisted on having Judge Denver Dillard, a former state prosecutor, decide his fate rather than a jury, according to Holm.

“Our case was open and shut, he kept saying,” Holm said.

Still in prison, Holm hired Kent Simmons in 2007 to file a civil suit hoping to convince a new judge that ineffective counsel prevented Holm from getting a fair trial.

“I truly believe Jordan has a very strong case for post-conviction relief, and I am confident we will prevail,” Simmons said.

Pedersen declined to comment when asked about his strategy in 2003 or Holm’s charge of ineffective counsel, citing Holm’s pending appeal and attorney-client privilege.

CREDIBILITY IS KEY

During the 2003 trial, a scientist hired by Holm testified that DNA evidence could neither substantiate nor disprove conflicting testimony by Holm and his accuser.

The scientist, Robert Benjamin, a University of North Texas biology professor, has profiled DNA evidence in more than 200 criminal and civil cases since 1988. He examined forensic evidence the police collected.

“If I was on a jury and knew what I knew,” Benjamin said, “I wouldn’t have been able to convict him.”

The state’s DNA expert testified that vaginal swabs did not detect Holm’s DNA, but some was found on the woman’s inner thighs.

“It was on her thighs but it wasn’t indicative of oral sex,” said Benjamin. “The bottom line when I looked at the DNA results, they weren’t inconsistent with either party’s stories.”

In the end, Judge Dillard decided, the defense had not been able to impugn the credibility of Holm’s accuser.

“Without a firm reason to believe (the accuser) was lying or had been dreaming, the verdict in this case cannot be not guilty,” Dillard wrote.

Cole, the prosecutor, said Holm’s testimony “simply didn’t make sense.”

“His explanation that she touched his hair in some way and transferred his DNA to her inner thigh was not reasonable, and the judge understood that,” she said. “This was stranger-upon-stranger. The likelihood there would be a motive to make up the allegation is even less likely.”

Cole said the woman, to whom she has not talked in several years, was seeking accountability and contrition rather than vengeance.

The Pioneer Press could not reach the woman for comment.

When Dillard finished reading his verdict Nov. 7, 2003, he was bound by law to sentence Holm to prison. Holm dropped to his knees in the courtroom, devastated. He was given a 10-year term, of which he ended up serving 6-1/2 years. He was shackled and taken into custody, where his freedom remained possession of the state of Iowa until April 25, 2010.

DOING HARD TIME

Prison is about survival.

Day to day mostly is about preserving the soul. Holm, the extroverted son of a missionary pastor and homemaker who grew up with five siblings in the all-American nuclear family, struggled to submerge his emotions and disengage.

“I stuck out because of my discomfort in the setting. It was made clear to me that I didn’t belong here. ‘What are you, some college boy? You must think you’re better than me,’ ” he recalled. “When I was closing myself off, I wanted to make myself an observer and collect as much information as I could so I had a better understanding of how I can make things work.”

He assimilated to a revolving door of inmates in a 7x10x8 cell, exchanging life stories and rap sheets in three-man bunks. And debating, always debating.

Intimidation is currency in prison, but Holm empathized with awful childhoods spent in drug dens and flophouses. He discovered the fine line separating a productive life of accountability from the path of self-destruction.

Then there was the day Holm listened to a petty thief insisting he would have been a first-round NBA draft pick. And another when Holm was called upon to settle an argument over whether Adolf Hitler was gay.

He refused to enroll in sex-offender treatment, a steadfast refusal to admit guilt that carried harsh consequences. Holm would have qualified for a sentence reduction of up to two years. So after 16 months at Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility and Treatment Center, he was transferred in April 2005 to the maximum-security Anamosa State Penitentiary for the remainder of his sentence.

Holm earned 98 cents a day stacking pop cans in the commissary, mopped floors in the TV room and once spent 11 hours in a steam tunnel splitting a 15-foot section of pipe with a hand cutter.

Holm also spent Christmas 2007 in solitary confinement – “the hole” – with a broken nose and two chipped teeth after being jumped by a group of inmates angry about something that happened in a football game.

He also did time in the hole for getting caught with four bolts in his cell, which he had pocketed and forgotten to return to the maintenance shop.

But Holm never let go of wrestling.

He continued to work out and found willing partners to grapple, including a convicted murderer serving a life sentence. He woke up every morning and waited for his cell door to open at 6 a.m. so he could run three miles, trudging through the prison-yard snow during winter.

Holm detailed the random highs and frequent lows in handwritten letters to his family, which his older brother Jason transcribed and posted to the freejordan.org website.

The letters were Holm’s therapy, allowing him to process and endure his reality.

“That’s something that I’m proud of,” he said. “I think that the person that I was when I went in did not become degraded by my environment. I feel like today I am the same person I was before I went to prison.”

Nor does he torture himself with what-ifs about decisions he made that night and the subsequent days leading up to his trial.

“It’s what you do in the face of injustice,” Holm said. “How do you respond in the face of difficulty? What do you fall back on? What is it meant for? Yes, a calamity of errors occurred that led to this injustice. In all those errors, I believe God is at work. He had knowledge of what would be the result. I have faith in that because of what has happened in other people’s lives who have experienced injustice. Do I think God has forgotten about them?”

NEW STAR

Holm is seeded third in Greco-Roman’s seven-man 185-pound class. He needs to win his two preliminary matches Saturday to advance to the finals later in the day, when wrestlers must win two out of three matches to qualify for the Olympics.

“Anything he does is phenomenal, but all his matches are going to have to be perfect,” said assistant U.S. coach Dan Chandler. “He’s one of the most physical wrestlers in his weight class, and for him to succeed, he’s going to have to be extremely physical.”

Holm’s unlikely journey started less than three weeks after he was released from prison, winning the Northern Plains Regional tournament in May 2010. He reconnected with Chandler, a 1984 Greco-Roman Olympian who had coached Holm with the Minnesota Storm club team of Minneapolis.

They refined his technique and set a series of goals that Holm accomplished quickly.

He won the U.S. Open in April 2011, vaulting him to a No. 1 ranking. A month later, he defeated Bulgaria’s Hristo Marinov, the reigning world champion at 184 pounds.

USA Wrestling welcomed its new star, but the USOC recognized a tempest brewing.

Holm’s conviction did not preclude him from competing. However, when it comes to housing and training a sex offender in Colorado Springs, the USOC initially barred Holm before granting him limited access about nine months ago.

Holm mostly trains in Minnesota because the USOC decided he needed to be escorted by a coach or USA Wrestling staffer wherever he goes at the Olympic training facility.

“I understand it from the USOC point of view, but I feel comfortable with Jordan Holm,” said USA Wrestling head coach Steve Fraser. “He’s not a threat to anyone, and he has been around long enough where I think they should reconsider his specific scenario and consider lifting the restrictions.”

Holm knows his life could change dramatically if he qualifies for the Summer Games. His perseverance and sordid background would reach an international audience, and he acknowledges the exposure could be unsettling.

Win or go home, Holm says, he is at peace. He would like to continue wrestling and earn his undergraduate degree. Beyond that, Holm is uncertain about his next move.

For one weekend, though, the only trials that concern him are on the mat.

Follow Brian Murphy on twitter.com/bmurphPiPress.