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Aggravated: The True Story of How a Series of Lies Sent an Innocent Man to Prison

Michael Sirois

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In 2006, Steve Sirois was sentenced to serve 35 years in a Texas prison for a crime he didn't commit. He and his older brother, Michael, weren't especially close growing up -- fourteen years and four other siblings crowded the space between them -- but their relationship changed when Steve was accused of a horrendous crime, aggravated sexual assault of a child. After the conviction, Michael started helping Steve write his appeals, but what he saw in the trial transcripts didn't make sense. How could a jury have convicted his brother based on that testimony? In her affidavit, Steve's accuser gave vague dates for the crime, but soon abandoned those for different dates, and even replaced the details of her claims with new ones. Despite her accusations, Steve was adamant, swearing, "I didn't do it. It never happened." There was no forensic evidence, no semen stains or pubic hairs to provide DNA, no weapons, no sex tape. Nothing but his accuser's words. Michael wondered if he could prove that her accusations were false. But how? Using affidavits, court transcripts, and interviews; along with additional evidence from public information requests and other factual data, the book lays out a devastating portrait of an untruthful accuser, an overzealous prosecutor, a jury that made a deal to swap votes in order to gain a conviction, and the series of lies that led to that outcome.

389 pages, Paperback

Published December 11, 2020

About the author

Michael Sirois

8 books43 followers

Michael Sirois was reading by the age of four, and writing stories by the third grade. In high school he fell in love with acting, and added that to his repertoire. After college, armed with English and Drama degrees, he taught writing, drama, and technology in the middle school trenches for two decades, but continued to act and write. One of his stories, Loonie Louie, placed in the top hundred of the 1989 Writer's Digest Short Story contest. The 1990's saw his one-act play, Baum in Limbo, produced in Houston. His screenplay, An Ordinary Day, survived the first round of cuts in the 2005 season of Project Greenlight, beating out over 5,000 other scripts. An excerpt from his first novel, If a Butterfly, was featured in Rice University's 2006 Writer's Gallery. If a Butterfly is slated to be published in mid-2021 in two parts. After running educational outreach programs at Rice University for an additional seven years, Michael retired, and lives with his wife, Minay, in a suburb of Houston, where he is hard at work on a fourth novel, The Hawthorn's Sting (another thriller), and a mystery/thriller, Murder Between Friends, hoping to have a first draft of one of them by late-2021. Ideas for a few more are also floating around in that scary place called his brain. Stay tuned.

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