Unlike the better-known no-contest plea, in which a defendant accepts a conviction without admitting guilt, the Alford plea lets a defendant actually assert his innocence for the record. The defendant acknowledges that the state might be able to get a conviction despite his or her innocence. All but three states allow the plea, but the federal government says it should be used only in “the most unusual of circumstances.” The Alford plea is most often used in bargaining before a conviction, like a typical plea deal, and could very well be taken by guilty defendants who simply won’t own up to their crimes. How often it is offered and accepted, and by what sort of defendants, isn’t tracked. Many prominent legal scholars, such as Cornell law professor John Blume, contend that prosecutors are using the plea to quickly and quietly resolve newly challenged convictions. It’s undeniably coercive for a prosecutor to tell someone who has been in prison 5, 10, 20 years that “you don’t have to admit guilt, just sign this plea and we’ll let you go,” Blume said.

Norwood questioned whether justice was served by an Alford plea, especially when it was being used to prevent the exoneration of an innocent man—and to keep what he saw as prosecutorial misconduct under wraps. But he knew it was a valid way to resolve Steese’s case quickly. Norwood gave Steese the news: there was a way for him to get out of prison almost immediately. Steese didn’t have to think about it. “Now sounds good,” he said. “I’ll take now.”

As word of the deal circulated, some who had grown close to Steese were angry. Lemcke thought he was too near the finish line to give up a sure victory. And Steese’s half-sister, Lynn Myers, who reconnected with him after he’d been incarcerated and had been writing him letters for years, begged him to turn the plea down and clear his name. But Steese believed they were wound up about nothing. Judge Cadish had said he was innocent! He’d been locked up for 7,545 days. He just wanted to get on with life.

Shortly before nine A.M. on a February day in 2013, Steese faced Cadish one final time in a hearing that lasted all of eight minutes. Under the terms of the Alford plea, Cadish accepted his guilty plea for a crime that just three months earlier she’d ruled he didn’t commit. She sentenced him to time served.

“Good luck to you,” she said.

X. “All Rise”

About a year out of prison, Steese went to Southern California for training with a major trucking company. He was a 50-year-old man finally getting a shot at his childhood dream—what he’d called at his trial “the best job in the world.” He whizzed through the written test, and when he was called into the back office one morning, he thought it was to meet about how well he’d been doing.

We’re sorry, Steese was told, but you can’t work with a felony conviction.

No, wait, that’s just a misunderstanding, Steese replied. The judge said I was innocent. You can see the news stories all about me. He jumped into the first boxcar to Utah, where the company was headquartered. Folded in his back pocket was a copy of his order of innocence. If he could just show the owners, surely they would realize he was no murderer. He couldn’t get past the lobby.

In advocacy circles, Steese is counted among the exonerees. But the exoneration is only honorary. Signing the Alford plea meant he was still a convicted murderer, except that his original 1995 murder conviction had been vacated and replaced with the new deal. To a person doing a standard background check, it could appear as if Steese had killed someone in 2013. He felt as if the state had set him up to fail. It took Steese three years to find a trucking company willing to hire someone who, technically, in the eyes of the law, was an ex-felon. When CRST International invited him on board, he packed up the very next day. His truck gives him a place to stay and offers a shot at stability. Steese knows he doesn’t have much time left to work. “I’m 20 years behind,” he says.