She has given the WNBA and its fans eight seasons of unparalleled performances, resulting in endless accolades and multiple memories etched in league history. We all knew Moore has done some remarkable work away from the court, especially over the last few years.
In the last week or so, we got an even deeper look into that work. The all-time great wants to continue to focus on work off the court.
We should respect that. Key additions the Minnesota Lynx made over the offseason did not deliver on their title aspirations. Because her year off the court has been incredible.
In she announced she would take a sabbatical from her WNBA career — and the grind of the basketball circuit — to fight the case of Jonathan Irons, a man who argued that he had been falsely convicted of burglary and assault charges. Those charges ended with Irons being given a year prison sentence for a crime he had allegedly committed when he was And while Moore earned decent money — particularly during her spells in Europe and China — she did not have the financial security Jordan enjoyed when he temporarily left the Chicago Bulls.
He was handed a blue folder stuffed with documents. He paged through them and discovered something that caught his eye. Irons' team then calls Irons' original defense attorney, Christine Sullivan. The report, Irons' lawyers argue, raises questions about the conduct of the prosecution in Irons' original trial.
The document is not the same report that was given to Irons' defense attorney in At the time of Irons' trial, the fingerprint report indicated that the two fingerprints found on the storm door leading out of Stotler's home belonged to Stotler. But this report, which Williams found two years into his investigation, indicates that only one of those prints was Stotler's. The other, this report reveals, doesn't belong to Irons. A choked sob comes from the corner of the room.
Tears stream down Irons' cheeks as he gasps for air. This is the argument upon which Irons' appeal hinges. Moore presses her lips together and grips the railing in front of her. Her knuckles tighten and the tension ripples up her forearm. Green calls for a recess. The room empties. Moore stands in the hallway surrounded by her family. Irons is off to the side, flanked by corrections officers. They aren't allowed to speak to each other. Twenty-one years after his conviction, Irons has finally received another day in court, but he will have to wait weeks, maybe months, to find out if Green believes him.
The Lynx were and preparing to face the Connecticut Sun for the first time that season. The night before, on July 6, Philando Castile, a cafeteria supervisor at J.
Hill Montessori School, was shot and killed by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a suburb just east of Minneapolis. His death came just one day after year-old Alton Sterling was killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the same neighborhood where Augustus grew up.
Since the death of Michael Brown, an year-old black man, on Aug. But the deaths of Sterling and Castile struck a specific chord for the Lynx, both because they came so close together and because they occurred in familiar and cherished places.
In a moment that echoes now, almost four years later, Reeve looked to her captains. After the game, on the bus to the airport, the answer began to take shape. Moore and Brunson led the conversation in the following days, Moore guiding her teammates through the process of choosing the words they wanted to use.
She proposed where to put them on the T-shirts they eventually debuted on July 9, -- three days after Castile's death -- during warm-ups for a home game against the Dallas Wings. In bold white letters, "Black Lives Matter" stood out on the back, underneath the names and shield. The Lynx's public display sparked demonstrations across the league. Later that summer, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to kneel during the national anthem.
After the Lynx's demonstration, the league had sent out a memo reminding teams of the uniform policy. The Lynx never wore the shirts again.
The WNBA's most dominant team had walked out on a limb, but not far enough to snap the branch. But for Moore, something was giving way.
Her relationship with Irons and her belief in his innocence had long been a personal conviction and a private cause, she told ESPN's Dan Le Batard in April, but the events of showed her that she could have an impact on issues of criminal justice publicly. For six long years, Maya Moore had been consumed by chasing basketball success without respite. Without time to be with her family.
Without time to get Jonathan Irons out of prison. Moore had played in the Rio Olympics three months earlier, in July, winning her second gold medal. When considering the motivations for why she stepped away from the game a year ago, it is worth acknowledging: Maya Moore was exhausted.
After consecutive days of two-a-days in Fort Lauderdale in the spring of , Whalen and Moore took a night off. They'd booked a suite at the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort and decided to have dinner at Ilios, the hotel's restaurant.
It was during a conversation there that Moore first told Whalen about Irons -- and her family's advocacy on his behalf. She told Whalen about the case. About her godparents. About what she saw as the injustice facing a man she considered family. About how other than training, this was what she'd been focused on all offseason. About how personal this fight was to her. Can this one superprospect revive the greatest dynasty in sports? During the October evidentiary hearing -- when the fingerprint evidence was presented and the case reexamined -- excitement and relief had filled the room.
Today, a rainy Monday in central Missouri, the hearing takes all of five minutes. Green orders the fingerprints, the ones discovered by Reggie Williams in , to be run through a process called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a central database used by law enforcement to identify people whose prints had previously been entered into the system -- but those results won't be ready for weeks.
The fingerprints are crucial to Irons' case for several reasons. They could belong to someone else in the system, casting further doubt on whether Irons committed the crime. But in the state of Missouri, a person's innocence is, in some ways, irrelevant.
Legal precedent in the state holds that unless a prisoner is on death row, proven innocence is not reason enough to be set free. Petitioners must prove that they have been denied a constitutionally adequate trial. To that end, the existence of the report as new evidence could also be enough to prove that Irons had his rights constitutionally violated -- and therefore his conviction could be void.
That's because the suppression or altering of the fingerprint document could constitute a violation of the Brady rule, which mandates that the prosecution turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defense pretrial. Failure to do so is a violation of a defendant's due process. But even a ruling in Irons' favor does not guarantee his release.
The state could appeal, or he could be retried. And so this is how it goes. Process begets more process. Hearings beget more hearings. Motions result in countermotions.
Decisions are appealed, and that process can feel interminable -- and is one that even in the event of confirmed innocence does not guarantee freedom. Reeve walked past the towering glass behind the bar to a private room in the back, where she was joined by Lynx forward Rebekkah Brunson, who sat across the room. The two dozen attendees had gathered at the behest of Moore, who had begun to speak more publicly about her commitment to criminal justice reform. She just quietly sat back and did the work.
Moore wanted to introduce her social action campaign, Win With Justice, as well as highlight the work happening across the country to reform the criminal justice system.
Reeve, who had coached Moore for all eight of her WNBA seasons, took her seat at dinner to support her star player. This was the same player whose wingspan had been plastered on a downtown billboard in a rendering of Jordan's iconic pose. The same player who, nine months earlier, had delivered Reeve her fourth championship in seven years.
Her sons step out of an adjacent car, both wearing suits. As the rain pours down, they scramble to take photos with one another. Cheri leaves them outside. In the time since the hearings began, over a year ago, she and her husband, Reggie, have moved to Atlanta. They join Maya and Kathryn at church in Atlanta most weeks. They've all made the trip back to Missouri for this. The hallway outside the courtroom is loud, family and friends and onlookers chattering before the day's proceedings.
They hug, shake hands and smile. Moore stands silently in the center of it all, as tension pulls at her body. She shushes her jubilant loved ones before they enter the room. Irons' case is scheduled for a counsel status hearing -- where the lawyers give an update on the case and schedule a date for the next hearing. The clock ticks past a. Green enters the courtroom 10 minutes late. Many cases are scheduled to be heard in this time slot, but Green starts with Irons'.
He reads the decision from the bench, in a manner so blunt and perfunctory that it's almost absurd to think that two sentences could undo two decades of a life. As he speaks, Moore swallows and tightens her lips. The sentences are a jumble of legalese -- habeas relief, conditional writ, Brady claim -- but six words stand out. A sigh ripples through the courtroom, followed by a round of applause. Moore puts her head in her hands and cries. Kathryn envelops Maya in her arms, cradling her daughter, wiping tears from the corner of her own eyes.
In his judgment, Green found that there was, in fact, a Brady violation.
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