I was accused of two counts of attempted murder, another one for firing my gun in public (at the ground) without justification, and one more for provoking a riot that greatly damaged the town where I lived. The charges were absurd. The forensic evidence was overwhelming in my favor. No ricocheted bullets were found, and the supposed entry holes were dubious at best. The prosecution’s theory violated basic physics by 750 percent, posited an impossible ricochet trajectory angle, could not account for missing exit wounds, and relied on ammunition traces that did not match my firearm. None of this mattered.

The Chilean prosecutor, Paola Rojas Caro, was loud-mouthed, arrogant, insolent, mendacious, and cruel. She was a leftist pursuing a political case against a well-known rightist and libertarian commentator. The judiciary was arbitrary and biased. The truth—documented, measurable, verifiable truth—was subordinate to political convenience. I was convicted, and my life was left in shambles.

This chapter is for every man who knows he is innocent and yet sits behind bars. It is for his family, who know it too. And it is for the church, which must understand that wrongful conviction is not a rare anomaly but a routine feature of criminal justice systems around the world.

The Dehumanization of the Legal Process

Before I describe the psychological torment of wrongful conviction, let me describe the physical experience of being processed through the legal machinery—because the dehumanization begins long before the verdict.

Every trip to the courthouse was an exercise in institutional degradation. Strip-searched: remove your clothing, lift your testicles, turn around. Ankle- and wrist-chained, stuffed into a yellow “imputado” (accused) vest too small for my frame. I rode alone in a grimy paddy wagon with no seatbelt, thrown around tight curves on coastal mountain roads. I waited in a holding cell measuring three and a half meters by one and eight-tenths, with carved-up plaster walls, singing hymns to pass the time. For Covid-19 protocols, I was made to wear garbage-bag-thin plastic coverings over my clothes—blue and white—making me look like a lame hospital clown. “This is just another glimpse of hell,” I noted in my journal. The chain with cuffs was sent down one pant leg. I was told to face the wall and lift one foot at a time to be ankle-cuffed and locked. This was the routine for every hearing, every appearance, every step in a legal process that dragged on for years. And I was not a violent offender. I was a college professor with five degrees, accused of crimes that the forensic evidence disproved.

The procedure was designed not to ensure justice but to remind the accused that he was nothing—a number, a case file, a body to be processed, chained, transported, and returned to its cell. The system that claims to seek the truth treats the accused as guilty from the moment of first contact, and every physical indignity reinforces that presumption.

The Experience of Being Convicted of Something You Did Not Do

There is a particular cruelty in wrongful conviction that exceeds even the cruelty of imprisonment itself. The man who is guilty and convicted can, at least, acknowledge the justice of his punishment. He may rage against the sentence, but he cannot rage against the verdict. The wrongfully convicted man faces a different torment: the world has declared him guilty of something he did not do, and no amount of protest, evidence, or logic can undo that declaration if the prevailing socio-political will is against him.

In the weeks following my conviction on October 16, 2020, the people of the Chilean Right went through periods of depression. My sentencing evidenced the tremendous injustice promulgated by the Left and especially the communists. Chilean, Canadian, American, British, and New Zealand rightists or libertarians, along with Baptists, Presbyterians, and old-line Catholics, backed me in my effort to expand my legal team for the upcoming Supreme Court appeal.

But inside the prison, the conviction settled on me like a death sentence. Not because I feared the years ahead—though I did—but because the system had looked at the evidence, heard the arguments, and decided that truth did not matter. The judges were not interested in physics, in forensics, in the logical impossibility of the prosecution’s narrative. The pretrial judge denied me the right to have a ballistics expert on my defense team for some incomprehensible technicality. They were interested in disposing of a case, in satisfying political pressure, in maintaining the fiction that the Chilean judiciary functions as a neutral arbiter of fact.

The psychological impact of wrongful conviction is unlike any other form of suffering I have experienced. It is a combination of outrage, helplessness, betrayal, and existential disorientation. Your entire understanding of how the world works—that evidence matters, that truth prevails, that the legal system, however imperfect, at least aspires to justice—is shattered. You discover that you have been operating under a delusion, and the discovery is shattering. In terms of criminal justice, libertarian anarchists are right: justice, even if imperfect, is better without the state.

The Appeals Process

If conviction is the wound, the appeals process is the salt ground into it. My appeals journey was a marathon of hope, delay, disappointment, and partial vindication that stretched across years. We skipped the Valparaíso Appeals Court due to local bias and went straight to the Supreme Court. My lawyers—public defenders Guillermo Améstica, Claudio Fierro, and Sebastián Undurraga del Río, who I had hoped would be supplemented by private counsel but were not—presented the evidence that should have acquitted me from the beginning. At each stage, the system responded with its own timetable, priorities, and institutional inertia.

The District Attorney postponed my trial for over two more months due to spurious Covid-19 concerns—extending my pretrial detention to nearly eleven months. That decision meant more time suffering unjustly, more time separated from my family, more months of my life consumed by a system that could not be bothered to move with urgency.

Lawyer Gonzalo Morales, my post-conviction public defender, delivered bad news with clinical precision: the unlikelihood of being pardoned, the requirement of three bimonthly “very good” conduct scores in six months just to qualify for Sunday home visits, and the possibility of being imprisoned for many more months even in the best-case scenario. If the cell phone were found and my score dropped, parole would be postponed an additional year. The calculations were exhausting. Each variable—conduct scores, judicial calendars, institutional transfers, legal filings—introduced another opportunity for the system to extend my suffering.

There is a theological dimension to the appeals process that many Christians overlook. When the evidence proves your innocence but the system does not care, you are confronted with the question that lies at the heart of all unjust suffering: “Is God just when human justice is not?”

The answer is yes—absolutely, unequivocally, yes. But the answer does not feel like yes at three in the morning when your latest appeal has been denied, and your lawyer is telling you to prepare for another year behind bars. The gap between theological knowledge and experiential reality is the gap in which most wrongfully convicted Christians live, and bridging it requires a faith that is supernatural in its origin and tenacious in its character.

Working with Lawyers from Prison

Allow me to offer practical counsel to anyone navigating the legal system from behind bars.