This story is published by agreement with Montana Quarterly. It may not be republished without the express permission of Montana Quarterly.  Convicted in Missoula in 2002 for a jailhouse rape he says never happened, Cody Marble waited more than 14 years to see that conviction erased and his record cleared. This story also appeared in Montana Quarterly But when he tried this year to get compensation from the state of Montana and Missoula County for the 10-plus years he wrongfully spent in prison, using a new state law designed specifically for that purpose, he watched with disgust as another jury ruled against him, leaving him with nothing.“Never have I been more disillusioned and disgusted with our justice system, or humans, than I am now, and the crookedness involved in not holding [Missoula County and the state] to their previous position,” he told me this summer, several weeks after the May 22 verdict by a district court jury in Missoula. “That they would, or are even allowed, to switch hats and argue [my] guilt again is blatant corruption.”Under the 2021 state law intended to make compensation easier for the wrongfully convicted, and ultimately cheaper for the state, Marble had to prove his innocence — even though he’d been exonerated seven years earlier.Missoula County and the state, potentially on the hook for $750,000 in compensation to Marble, vigorously fought Marble’s claim, arguing he was guilty of raping a fellow prisoner in the Missoula County Juvenile Detention Center 22 years ago and thus ineligible for payment under the new law. After an eight-day trial, the majority of a jury essentially agreed, deciding Marble hadn’t proved his innocence. The verdict came despite testimony from guards at the center who said they firmly believed the rape never happened. “I was never interviewed before Cody was arrested,” said Susan Rosten, who was working as a guard the night of the alleged crime. “Prosecutors never called me.” “Never have I been more disillusioned and disgusted with our justice system, or humans, than I am now, and the crookedness involved in not holding [Missoula County and the state] to their previous position.” Cody MarbleThe county’s position at trial also contradicted its well-publicized stance from 2016, when then-County Attorney Kirsten Pabst moved to vacate Marble’s conviction. She said then an investigation convinced her it was flawed and could no longer be supported. He was freed from prison that year and his conviction erased a year later. Yet Marble’s subsequent pursuit of compensation has made that victory seem like a cruel joke. Not only did he come away with nothing, but the law made him sign away his right to make any other attempt to gain payment from the state. In a further irony, Marble, against his better judgment, had agreed to help the Montana Innocence Project promote the law and get it passed in 2021 — only to see it amended into a form ultimately making it harder for him to get payment. The change, inserted by an amendatory veto from Gov. Greg Gianforte, required the county where the claimant was prosecuted to cover 75% of any payment, instead of entirely the state. It brought Missoula County into Marble’s case, as a much more aggressive defender. Supporters of the original law tried in 2023 to remove Missoula County (or any county) from the equation, but Gianforte vetoed that effort as well. His veto killed the bill entirely — which also allowed the law to expire June 30, 2023. Credit: Mike DennisonMarble is the only person who used the compensation law, which was promoted as a less-expensive option for the state to help the wrongfully convicted. “This [compensation] was supposed to be fast, and the state wasn’t supposed to fight with you,” Marble said earlier this year. “But they fought me tooth and nail.”Marble also said he never intended to use the law, believing its statutory compensation — $60,000 for every year wrongfully spent in prison and $25,000 for each year on parole — too low for what he went through. But he said his lawyers talked him into filing the claim, which came up empty.The state had been paying his rent for a Great Falls apartment while his claim proceeded. That benefit, however, was set to expire in mid-August.Now 40 years old, Marble remains a free man with no criminal record — but he’s bitterly disappointed with a system that wrongly imprisoned him for much of his adult working life and then thwarted attempts to compensate him. “All I did was acquire more false accusations,” he said of the May trial. “By far the most worthless, degrading, humiliating, inhumane thing I have ever been through in my life.”In the wake of the May verdict denying Marble any compensation, the Montana Innocence Project has set up a GoFundMe site to raise the amount of money Marble would have won with a positive verdict: $750,000. As of mid-October, it’s raised less than $2,000.In early 2002, at age 17, Marble found himself in the Missoula County Juvenile Detention Center, sent there after running away from a drug treatment center. His father bailed him out on March 12, 2002. A week later, Missoula County sheriff’s deputies came to his house and asked him to come outside. They immediately put him in handcuffs, took him to the jail and said he was being charged with anally raping a fellow juvenile inmate, 13-year-old Robert “Bobby” Thomas, while both were in the jail on March 10.Thomas and five other juveniles in the jail “pod” told a guard and then later a deputy on March 16 — six days after the alleged incident — that Marble raped Thomas in the pod shower, in view of the others. Marble said then, and has maintained ever since, that no rape occurred, that the others made it up to get back at him either for a perceived slight or under the misguided belief that the accusation could help them curry favor with prosecutors in their own cases. Cody Marble, left, listens to testimony at the May 2024 civil trial on his claim for compensation from the state and Missoula County. Above: Marble testifies at a legislative hearing in 2021 on the bill creating a new state system to compensate the wrongfully convicted. Credit: Mike Dennison / Courtesy of MTN NewsFive of the juveniles, including Thomas, testified against Marble at a November 2002 trial in Missoula District Court. He was convicted of rape and sentenced to 20 years in prison. His defense attorney at the time didn’t want him to testify, so he never got to tell the jury his side of the story. In late 2007, Marble’s father, Jerry Marble, called me at my Helena office for Lee newspapers. I was a Lee State Bureau reporter at the time and had not known of the case.Jerry insisted his son was innocent and that I should write about the case and Cody’s effort to overturn his conviction. After reviewing the trial transcript, interviewing Marble and examining other evidence, I felt something had gone terribly wrong, and that Marble was innocent.I wrote a lengthy story for Lee Newspapers that got minimal play. Marble’s petition to overturn his conviction failed in court. His story and quest for innocence seemed destined for obscurity. But a year later, the fledgling Montana Innocence Project got involved — and eventually got Thomas to write out a statement in 2010, taking back his testimony that he’d been raped by Marble eight years earlier. Thomas said in the statement that fellow juveniles in the Missoula detention pod told him to say Marble raped him, and he went along — although “this did not happen,” he wrote. “And now today I want to come out and let it be known,” he wrote. “I’m coming forward now because I’m in prison on a sex crime and know what it’s like. So I don’t want him to be charged with one when innocent. When I was in jail, I was the youngest and smallest and I was pressured into going along with it.”Thomas’s written statement became Exhibit A in a new Marble petition to overturn his conviction, filed in late 2010. Yet when Thomas was told by Missoula prosecutors he’d be charged with perjury if he persisted in changing his original testimony, he took back his recantation — and, at a 2012 hearing, said again, in court, that Marble had raped him. Marble’s new petition was rejected by a Missoula judge.That decision, however, was overturned by the Montana Supreme Court in 2015 and sent back to Missoula County — where Pabst, the new county attorney, re-opened the case and eventually decided Marble’s conviction was fatally flawed and should be dismissed.“That’s what prosecutors do,” she said at the April 2016 news conference announcing that Marble would be freed from prison. “We convict the guilty, we exonerate the innocent and, in some cases, reunite a man with his family, because it’s never too late to do the right thing.”Fast forward eight years, when Missoula County is responsible for 75% of Marble’s $750,000 award if he “proves” his innocence. Pabst, still the county attorney, filed a sworn statement with the court in February saying she had changed her mind and thought Marble guilty. Her stated reason: the Innocence Project in 2015 had concealed from her an internal 2010 memo in which they revealed that while Thomas initially told them he wasn’t raped, he had later backtracked, before writing the 2010 recantation statement, and said he had been raped. She said that fact “gives a much clearer picture into the mind of … Robert Thomas at the time of the recantation,” leading her to believe Thomas’s original testimony that he’d been raped by Marble.Marble told me after the trial that Pabst’s reversal was “a real killer” against his claim. Pabst didn’t respond to a request to further explain the reasoning for her reversal.In a statement after the May trial, the Montana Innocence Project said allegations that it withheld this and other information were absurd — particularly since Pabst and the county knew very well that Thomas had not only waffled on his recantation, but also taken it back, in court. Yet attacking the Innocence Project was a key part of Missoula County’s defense at the trial. Attorney Andrew Huppert called them “corrupt” and said their whole case — and Marble’s — were “built as a house of lies.”Huppert is part of the Carey Law Firm in Missoula, which the county paid $382,000 to defend against Marble’s claim — two thirds of the $560,000 it would have paid to Marble. I asked Erica Grinde, Missoula County’s Chief People and Risk Officer, why the county would spend that money to fight the claim and say Marble was guilty, instead of paying its share of the compensation to a man the county had said eight years earlier was wrongfully convicted. She said just paying or settling the claim would insinuate that personnel at the county had done something wrong — and that the county didn’t believe its personnel had done anything wrong in Marble’s case. Missoula is the only county in Montana with its own risk fund, so it would have paid the money from that fund, rather than relying on an insurer.As for Thomas, he could not be at the trial to speak for himself. In April 2014, he fatally shot himself after a lengthy standoff with police in Havre. He had absconded from parole in Cut Bank four months earlier and ran from police in Havre after being stopped for a traffic violation. Before shooting himself, he repeatedly said he didn’t want to go back to prison.Huppert and his fellow lawyers representing the county and state repeatedly invoked Thomas’s trial testimony and subsequent statements about being raped by Marble, reinforcing to the jury over and over that Marble was a rapist. They also belittled the idea that the 2002 trial testimony against Marble by other juveniles was a conspiracy to frame him.Cody Marble outside his Great Falls apartment earlier this year with his American Terrier, Athena. After his claim for wrongful-conviction compensation was rejected by a jury this May, Marble faces an uncertain future—including a decision on where he can afford to live. The state had been paying his rent while his claim was active. Credit: Mike DennisonBut at this trial, Marble did take the witness stand, defiantly proclaiming his innocence and telling the jury how he had never changed his story, never entered the shower area to rape Bobby Thomas, or done anything that the others had claimed.The jury also heard from detention center guard Tracy Addyman, who said she was the guard approached four days after Marble’s release by one of the kids, telling her Marble had raped Thomas.“I said, ‘You guys were at the table [watching] and nobody clicked on the intercom?’” she said. “They said no. I said I didn’t believe it. … ‘You just had to get up and walk and click a button,’ I said. He just kept laughing. I said this wasn’t a joke. They all thought that it was funny.”Addyman said she was duty-bound to report the accusation to the sheriff’s office, which investigated that night by interviewing the accusers. She said she was shocked that Marble was charged without any prosecutor or investigator asking anything of the guards. She quit a month later. “I felt if a group of kids could do this to a juvenile who didn’t do this, they could do it to staff. I felt it wasn’t safe to work there.”Susan Rosten, who had been on duty the night of the alleged rape, testified she saw nothing that indicated any rape had occurred. She was in the pod minutes after it was supposed to have happened.She told me earlier that guards would have noticed Marble and Thomas missing from the main pod room, and that the kids had easy access to buzzers to notify the control room, that they used constantly: “They were never afraid to ask us for a piece of paper, or anything. I don’t believe that that many young men would have allowed that to happen and not press a button.“I don’t see how it could have happened. If two of them went in the showers and were missing, people would have noticed that.”And finally, during closing arguments, Marble’s lead lawyer, Mark Kovacich of Great Falls, told jurors that no one for the county or state had answered the obvious question: Why would Marble, who knew he was getting out of the jail in two days, commit a brutal rape in full view of everyone in the pod? But, in the end, none of those arguments appeared to register with the jury, which returned a verdict against Marble in a little under six hours. Only two of the 12-person jury believed him; he needed eight to win his claim.In a conversation Marble and I had four months before the trial, Marble had a prescient moment when asked whether he thought he could win his compensation claim before the jury.“I know the truth, that I’m innocent, so I have the truth on my side,” he said. “In reality, I should win, but I’m scared of any jury after what’s happened to me already. I thought it was clear [22 years ago] that I didn’t do anything, even though my attorney didn’t do a good job. But I was wrong.”The post Cody Marble’s long fight appeared first on Montana Free Press.