Ivery Dorsey stepped out of Pam Lychner State Jail in Humble, Texas, on Wednesday, Feb. 5, as a free man. He was wrongfully convicted of murder and incarcerated in Houston for 18 years and two months, and was finally released on parole. Dorsey is the third person to be released with the help of Princeton students in less than two years.
“I was just thinking, ‘Man, it’s been 18 years, you finally get a chance to get out of here,’” Dorsey told The Daily Princetonian. “That hit me hard when I walked out. I was like, ‘Damn, I’m free.’”
“And then I see my team right there.”
His team — Ben Bograd ’23, Kennedy Mattes ’23, and Kerrie Liang ’25, along with Georgetown Law student Kayla Ahmed — met Dorsey in February 2023 while participating in Making an Exoneree, a semester-long class that tasks undergraduates with reinvestigating cases of people who have been wrongfully incarcerated. Liang is a former head Archives editor for the ‘Prince.’
While Dorsey is now on parole, he and his team will continue to work toward his full exoneration.
While enrolled in Making an Exoneree throughout the spring of 2023, Bograd, Liang, and Mattes spoke to him on the phone twice a day. They reviewed hundreds of pages of police reports and trial transcripts, and they tracked down witnesses and friends of Dorsey related to the case.
They also traveled to Texas for four days to work on his case and film a short documentary explaining his story: He was wrongfully convicted of murder in 2007 because of one eyewitness misidentification given 12 years after the original crime. After Ivery’s conviction, another man came forward and confessed, describing the specific details of the crime scene.
But the students didn’t just work with Dorsey on his case. They also got to know him personally and consider him “family,” Bograd said.
“So many days of talking and emailing each other in the penitentiary, them checking on me, making sure I got books to read, just loving on me — I’m grateful to have them in my life,” Dorsey said.
“You get to know someone over the phone, and instantly you can tell how genuine and kind and how much integrity Ivery has,” Mattes said in an interview with the ‘Prince.’ She recalled the first time they visited Dorsey in a Houston prison. The prison had only set out one chair for Bograd, Liang, and Mattes. “Despite having a chair, [Dorsey] stood with us the whole time, for hours.”
“Each of the people that we’ve helped has, in turn, helped our students,” Professor James Vreeland, who taught Making an Exoneree in Spring 2023, told the ‘Prince.’ ”They become mentors for the students, and they have so much to give and so much to share.”
After finishing the Spring 2023 semester, the team continued to work on securing Dorsey’s release.
“If you really want to try to get somebody out on parole or get somebody exonerated, it doesn’t happen within a time period that’s convenient for you,” Mattes said. “You have to keep pushing.”
The students vigilantly monitored updates to Dorsey’s case on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice website, and on Jan. 27, 2024, they saw that Dorsey had been approved for parole. But upon being approved for parole, he had to complete two six-month long reentry programs.
“Even with the starting of those programs, there was so much backlog that they couldn't even start the programs immediately,” Liang told the ‘Prince.’ “We had to write letters asking if they could expedite it. Things just happened so slowly.”
The team also composed a 107-page parole packet detailing Dorsey’s plans upon release. The packet, approved by the parole board, included plans for him to live in his native Harris County, Texas. Later, however, the team found out that Dorsey was barred from living in Harris County during his parole and had to find other living arrangements.
The team flew to Houston, Texas, on Feb. 4, the night before Dorsey’s release. They were there waiting in the jail parking lot at 7:30 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 5. They could not leave their vehicle to stretch, and they watched anxiously as people filtered in and out of the jail for nearly four hours.
“Things have always kind of gone against Ivery,” Bograd told the ‘Prince.’ “We knew he was coming out [of the jail], but there was this shred of doubt [that] something could still go wrong.”
Finally, at 11 a.m., Dorsey stepped out of the jail. They immediately embraced in a group hug. The team had only ever spoken to Dorsey on the phone, or through a glass wall at a prison facility in Huntsville, Texas.
“Everybody thought they were going to [hug] one at a time,” Dorsey said. “I was like, ‘No, bring it in, bring it in.’”
Following Dorsey’s release, the team stayed in Texas through the weekend to spend time with Dorsey and help him with the re-entry process. “They’re still working their butts off,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey is only allowed to be outside of his residence for eight hours a week, but he is still expected to find employment, pay fines, and attend parole appointments.
“On a more fun note, he’s having to get caught up on how much society has changed,” Mattes said.
Dorsey is learning how to use an iPhone, so they’ve taken selfies, and shown him how to avoid spam calls. They’ve played Connect Four, eaten meals together, and shown him how to give song requests to Alexa.
“We watched an episode of ‘Is It Cake?’ last night, which he found to be the funniest thing, because he’s an artist himself,” Mattes said.
When asked what the best part of his week has been, Dorsey responded, “Just being together.”
“These kinds of really human relationships, these bonds, are really what drives the course,” Vreeland said.
This semester, the University is once again offering Making an Exoneree, along with “The Criminal Legal System: Advocacy and Freedom,” both of which pair teams to students to advocate for a person who is incarcerated.
Dorsey is the third person to be released in partnership with the Princeton program, following Anthony Mills in October 2024 and Muti Ajamu-Osagboro in June 2023.
“We just cannot thank the University enough for offering this class, and really our plea to the school is to keep the class going,” Mattes said. “Because there have been three prison releases so far, and I'm sure there’ll be many more to come.”
Elisabeth Stewart is a senior News writer and assistant News editor emeritus for the ‘Prince.’ She typically covers religious life, student identity and campus life, and eating clubs and co-ops.
Please direct any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com
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