The Boundaries of Justice

So a remorseful Kroll pleaded guilty that day -- sparing the 9-year-old from testifying -- and prosecutors dropped a charge for simple assault in her case, as well as the attempted kidnapping charges from the incident in the parking garage. Getty sentenced Kroll to spend "the balance of your natural life" in prison for the sexual assault, plus another 15 years for the kidnapping.

"We thought it was all over," says the girl's father.

In the intervening years, the case so faded from public view that most people in town scarcely remember it.

On a recent morning at Kline's Restaurant, a city institution for the older coffee-and-breakfast crowd, Brook Atkinson is explaining that the charm of Cumberland is that you know "two out of every five people walking down the street."

Stirring his coffee, furrowing his brow, he says he can't remember John Kroll. Neither can anyone else.

A few miles away, Michael Twigg, the new state's attorney, is sitting at his desk in a building just behind the courthouse. He is serving his first term as the county's elected prosecutor. He was 11 when the assault took place. He thought it was ancient history, too.

But as it happens -- this case has a million little pieces that have fallen just so -- a jurisdictional claim is the one basis for appeal that never expires.

So a year or two ago, Kroll hired local lawyer Raymond F. Weston to appeal, saying Maryland never had a right to imprison him for the sex assault. Judge Finan said there was no debate -- Kroll was right.

"An insufficient factual basis existed for the trial judge to accept the plea," Finan ruled on Feb. 8. "Territorial jurisdiction is never waiveable." He threw out the conviction and the accompanying charges.

Twigg was aghast. Kroll had already served the 15 years for kidnapping. The court had just ruled he had been held illegally in a Maryland prison for a decade. The statute on sexual assault had lapsed in other jurisdictions. John Kroll was about to walk out of prison.

Twigg immediately filed a request to try Kroll on the old charges the prosecution had agreed to drop so many years ago. He argued that Kroll had violated terms of the plea deal by seeking to overturn part of his sentence -- even if, as the court ruled, that sentence was improperly imposed.

Twigg also wrote that Kroll had craftily waited more than 20 years for several statutes of limitations to expire before appealing, to engineer his release. It's not clear that is true, but what patience it implies! What cunning, for a man to bide his time for two decades!

"All we're asking is to be back at square one," Twigg explained in his office. "Is it going to be a walk in the park to prosecute a case that's 25 years old? No, but I think we can do it."

Finan's ruling is due in coming days.

At best, from the state's point of view, there will be a new trial -- in Maryland, or, if the Pennsylvania authorities want to try to argue their way past the statute of limitations, perhaps there. The little girl, now 34 years old, will have to testify if they retry part of her case, or the woman Kroll grabbed in the parking garage may have to come forward.

Getty, the original trial judge, thinks the state is out of luck.

"I think you'd just have to let him go," he says.

So much time has passed since that awful day in 1980. So many things change, so many things don't, in a little town like Cumberland.

The railroad tracks are still there. The courthouse on the hill, too. Kids still play in the streets in quiet neighborhoods in the late afternoon. You look to the ridge where the 9-year-old's parents still live -- the child has moved away -- and you know that courts are courts and the law is the law, and it doesn't really matter, because some things are never going to be right.

A ridge or two over, there's the Big Claw, a bar where the evening's patrons knock back shots of schnapps and chase them down with a cold beer. Save for a brief story in the local paper, none of the Big Claw crowd has heard of the case. You walk back outside, letting the screen door slap closed behind you, the darkness falling, the wind whipping hard down from the mountains. There is a last ray of sun, a hard light, shining on the building just down the road, on the razor wire and ugly edges of the county jail, the Allegany County Detention Center.

John Leroy Kroll, after 25 years, is almost back home.