No Justice

by Robbie Tolan

  But there wasn’t an iota of humanity in him that I could see. And if I look at it from his perspective, why should he feel contrite? The Bellaire Police Department didn’t reprimand him or hold him accountable in the least. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t do anything wrong. So when he recounted his memory of what we said, he delivered it like a man who thought he was invincible.

  On the other hand, I had to give it to Cotton. The shooting and trial seemed to have humbled him. If it wasn’t for him fabricating details of the shooting, I might have had a bit of sympathy and compassion for him. But just like Edwards, Cotton fumbled over his words and testimony, which led Greenwood and Morris to declare him a bad witness.

  But let’s go back. Trying to understand Cotton’s mentality from the jump is what makes me mad, in that it was his brazen decisions that set off the series of dominos that left me with a hole in my chest. Because the Bellaire Police Department had put its officers on a hair trigger because of their search for auto theft suspects, Cotton had unholstered his gun when he got out of his police car because he thought we were dangerous criminals, even though Anthony and I were on the ground with our hands in plain sight.

  “I drew my weapon and ran up to officer Edwards. This is a felony arrest. It would be normal to hold suspects at gunpoint,” Cotton said on the stand. The defense then played a videotape of Cotton saying that me being on the ground was a good thing.

  “He was on the ground and everything was going to be sorted out without deadly force.”

  Then Cotton, who, if you remember, burst onto the scene without announcing himself, said that he didn’t realize that the older woman standing on the doorstep at two o’clock in the morning was my mother, even though he admitted that she identified herself as “the homeowner.”

  “She was doing a lot of talking, and not a lot of listening,” Cotton said. Again, that pissed me off—this notion that this police officer, along with Edwards, who had collectively done no listening to any of the black people at the scene, would then assume that we were supposed to listen to him. Remember, we had done nothing wrong. My cousin and I were lying on the ground, my dad was standing up against the Suburban with a gun pointed at his head, and my mom was being harassed in front of our own home and next to our own cars, and yet not one of these guys stopped and listened to us. They just assumed we were at fault based on a mistake. So color me skeptical when I heard that Cotton suddenly was concerned about my mom.

  “I was taking her to the garage for her own safety,” Cotton said. “I heard him yell. I turned and looked as he was getting up. I pushed her, took a step away from her, faced him and drew my weapon.”

  Now stop right here. What do I mean when I say Cotton fabricated details of the shooting? Well, during the pretrial investigation, he said that I had something shiny in my hand, but at the criminal trial, suddenly I was doing something else.

  “In front of this jury today, you’ve testified that Robbie Tolan was digging in his waistband, correct?” Greenwood asked.

  “That’s correct,” Cotton said.

  “Have you ever said anything different?”

  “Well,” Cotton said, hesitating, “I may have characterized it differently, like reaching into his waistband or something like that.”

  Greenwood decided to press Cotton because it was important to show the contradiction between what Cotton had said before and what he was saying during the trial.

  “Have you ever made the statement, he was digging or reaching into his pocket?”

  “No. Not that I recall.”

  “Have you ever made the statement to anyone that Robbie Tolan had something shiny in his hand when you shot him?”

  “Absolutely not. No.”

  That’s when Greenwood knew that he’d gotten Cotton because of his previous testimony.

  “That would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes it would be a lie.”

  In my eyes, it was all a lie. I didn’t reach for my waistband, I didn’t have anything shiny in my hand, and I didn’t I yell out “Fuck you, fuck you!” It was all made up, and Greenwood said that later on in the trial, he’d gotten Cotton to disavow the idea that he’d seen me either “digging” or “reaching” into my waistband. His new testimony was that my hand was at the center of my body or in the vicinity of my waist and that he wasn’t even sure that he could actually see my hand because my “clothing was probably covering it up.” Cotton also said that a tree was casting a shadow on the front porch where I was, and that he only had one option, which was to shoot first and ask questions later.

  “We’re trained that if you wait until you see the weapon before you react, you will get shot,” said Cotton. “I thought he was going to shoot me.”

  Wait, you mean to tell me that police officers can shoot you simply because they think you have a weapon? Maybe that’s why an officer killed Castile when he was pulling out a wallet instead of the firearm he warned the police officer he was carrying.

  “I couldn’t believe he was getting up. I kept thinking to myself, don’t do it, don’t do it,” Cotton said in a pretrial videotape that was played in court. “I thought he was drawing a gun.”

  And that’s basically how it broke down. I was shot because a guy came running onto the scene with a loaded gun, but didn’t make a correct assessment of the situation, and then compounded that mistake by misinterpreting what I was doing, while admittedly not seeing clearly. And for that, I’m supposed to feel sorry for him that he felt bad for me.

  Look, none of us—not the lawyers, the police, my parents, or I—disagreed that I yelled, “Get your fucking hands off my mom!” And I don’t regret protesting the mistreatment of my mother, not one bit. But I do sometimes wonder if a different exclamation by me would have resulted in a different reaction from Cotton. At the very least, should I have perhaps avoided using profanity? Still, that does not justify deadly force any more than profanity toward a policeman hints at imminent violence.

  I looked it up, and the court ruled in the 2012 case of Morris v. Noe that a suspect asking, “Why was you talking to Mama that way?” was “potentially confrontational,” but not an “overt threat.” In Bauer v. Norris (a deputy Sherriff), a court ruled that “the use of any force by officers simply because a suspect is argumentative, contentious or vituperative is not to be condoned.”

  I want to think that Cotton, if he was given truth serum, would agree with the court cases, because he did sound contrite when asked about his reaction to learning that this whole ordeal had been one big mistake.

  “Officer Edwards came over to me and told me the car was not stolen,” Cotton said, “and my heart dropped.”

  Cotton then described what happened after he’d shot me.

  “I watched him long enough to figure out that he’s not a threat anymore at this point. So at that point I moved forward. I holster my weapon and I start checking him for weapons. I’m looking for the gun. When I can’t find the gun and I search and search his pockets. I search his waistband. I searched underneath him, no weapon… he was just groaning. He was obviously in pain. I said a prayer for him because at this point when I couldn’t find the gun, I was just hoping that he was going to live.”

  Hoping that I was going to live. That’s what I was dealing with after all of the bad judgment. Hope.

  “I checked for wounds,” Cotton continued. “I found the entrance wound on his chest and I was kind of—I checked him for an exit wound and couldn’t find one and I—I was confused as to why there was only one wound because I knew I had fired more than one round and I couldn’t find any other wounds in him. And so I checked him even more extensively and still couldn’t find—I checked his legs, still couldn’t find any.”

  I asked my relatives about their reaction to listening to Cotton’s testimony, and each one of them said it made them very emotional. Again, that’s the toll that comes from being even tangentially connected to a shooting victim of the police. But there was something else I was interested
in: Did Cotton seem contrite? Did he seem like he had remorse? From the info I gathered, it seemed like he did have some remorse, but I wasn’t in the courtroom to see it myself.

  It’s hard to talk about all of this without also acknowledging that despite the effect this shooting had on me, I’m still a human being who is bound and determined to not be bitter and hateful. Jeffrey Cotton is a man. Edwards is a man. And I’m sure that they have families who love them and who they love back. I’m not trying to be heartless in how I see them, and I know that Cotton was facing a possible ninety-nine-year sentence for shooting me. I get it; it’s serious, and his life was basically on the line. But what about me and what about my life and the ramifications of their mistake that I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life? I didn’t want to see either of these men destroyed, but they had basically destroyed part of my life.

  Did I want either of them to go to jail for the rest of their lives? No. But I didn’t understand how two people entrusted with the responsibility of serving and protecting the public could make a nearly fatal mistake, with me dodging death only by the grace of God, and still keep their job. Accountability and losing their jobs were the punishments I wanted for Cotton and also Edwards, whose incompetence led to me being shot. I didn’t think that was unreasonable or revengeful. It was simply the best outcome for all of us, mainly because both Edwards and Cotton had revealed that in the heat of the tough job of police work, neither was capable of making good decisions. That in itself should be a permanent disqualifier for wearing the badge and holding life and death authority over other human beings.

  The trial lasted six days, and most of my family had used hard-earned vacation time to be in the courtroom, even when they knew I couldn’t be there. That’s what family love is all about, and I wanted to repay them by sitting right there with them during the closing arguments. So on that day, we arrived early, with even more family coming in droves to hear how Greenwood and Morris would put the cherry on top of our case.

  We took up much of the center section of the courtroom, and I sat in the front row in between my mom and Pastor Caldwell. The butterflies in my stomach danced around as though I was giving the closing arguments myself. When Greenwood and Morris entered the courtroom, each was carrying stacks of books and notes.

  “Looking forward to making this closing argument,” Greenwood told us, as he greeted the family. “Just wanted to make some final touches to my speech to the jury.”

  The prosecutors Greenwood and Morris had done everything that we’d asked of them up to that point, and my family had been happy to have them on our team. Having experienced a shooting by a person operating under the color of the government, we weren’t necessarily the most trusting of people when it came to believing that the prosecution had our best interest in mind. But our initial skepticism was tempered by our faith in God. Our faith had gotten us to the indictment and then finally to the trial. We put our faith in Him, and He gave us Greenwood and Morris. It was now in His hands.

  My relatives had glowing reviews of Greenwood’s work in the courtroom. Other than during my own testimony, I hadn’t seen him in action, so I was excited to see what he could do with his closing argument. I wasn’t disappointed. In short, Greenwood delivered a poignant and powerful closing argument that left me confident and impressed. He noted that Cotton had come up with three different versions of why he’d shot me, including saying that I’d been carrying something shiny, which he then later recanted.

  “An unarmed kid was shot by the Bellaire police, and you know what? He wasn’t doing anything illegal,” Greenwood told the jury. “It’s a tragedy of errors, not a comedy of errors, a tragedy.”

  Of course, the defense wasn’t as impressed as I was. In their closing argument, Aman and Paschal somehow decide that I wasn’t the victim in this case, but Cotton was. Yes, the person who rushed to the scene, gun drawn, and shot me in the chest was the real victim in this saga. As the defense team went through their arguments, they colored me as a delinquent menace that was just looking to get into a fight with police. The fact that I was unarmed while the two policemen had loaded guns pointed at me was just an incidental fact, apparently, to the defense. I was the dangerous one—the one on the ground with his hands up.

  Having to silently listen to the defense tell lie after lie was probably one of the hardest parts of the trial. I couldn’t say anything because the bailiff would escort me out if I did. What was worse was hearing the defense play on the ugly racial stereotypes that my racist email and letter writers sustained themselves on. I said that the guy who sent me the death threat would find his ideas in the courtroom, and there they were.

  Objectively, though, Aman’s closing arguments in contrast to Greenwood’s were dull and mediocre. I thought we were winning on all fronts, and the prosecution did too. They felt very confident in our chances for a conviction as we broke for lunch after the arguments.

  “Go get some lunch, relax in the witness room because we have no idea as to how long these deliberations will last,” Greenwood told us. “But you will be given ample notice before you have to return to court.”

  Okay, I thought, let’s head out. With my family in tow, we took a back entrance out of the courtroom and headed to the Spaghetti Factory in downtown Houston and relaxed a bit. I didn’t talk too much but allowed myself to enjoy the presence of my family. After about an hour, we headed back to the witness room, where everything seemed pretty normal. Some in my family decided to sit around and talk about various aspects of the trial, while others passed the time by playing cards. I walked around the room, looking at my family, and realized that we could have been at any other family gathering, but this was a tad bit different. I still had the weight of the verdict on my mind, and although Greenwood had warned me to not expect an immediate verdict, I couldn’t get it out of my mind that a jury was now discussing me. I sat by the window by myself and looked out over the city of Houston, as I tried to relax and clear my mind. Amid the laughter and conversation, I almost didn’t notice that the witness room phone had rung.

  The phone ringing wasn’t really a surprise, as the attendant typically answered it a bunch of times during the day. Sometimes the calls were to tell us that we could go to lunch, other times that the attorneys wanted to meet with us, so I didn’t pay attention. But then, the room got deathly quiet. My dad called for me in a soft voice.

  “Robbie, the jury has a verdict.”

  The room instantly became chaotic, as everyone fumbled to gather their things. We had about forty minutes to get to the courtroom, so technically there was no rush, but you know how an expectant father gets flustered and runs around like a chicken with his head cut off when his wife is in labor? That was the fifty or so relatives in the witness room. Plus, we all wanted to make sure that we sat together in the courtroom, so we wanted to get into the pews quickly.

  My heart was pounding as though my freedom was at stake, instead of Cotton’s. By now, the witness room wasn’t as secret as it had been at the start of the trial, and when we walked into the hallway toward the elevator, a lone reporter pretended to wander aimlessly around, waiting for me. My family formed a big circle around me to keep the reporter from me, as I really wasn’t in the mood to answer any more questions. I think he got the message, and he just let us walk to the elevator without a word. My heart pounded as the elevators slowly descended to the ground floor and the waiting courtroom.

  When we finally reached our stop, the elevator doors opened to pandemonium. Dozens of reporters bombarded the doors, and as we got off, my family did their best to circle me again. Other relatives had taken other elevators and added their bodies to the big circle as we slowly made our way through the crowd of reporters and photographers. As I looked at the chaotic scene, I could see nothing but the arms and hands of reporters and photographers trying to reach over my family to get a shot of me or maybe a statement.

  Inside the courtroom, I spotted my relatives seated in the first three rows. I sat in
the front row between my parents, pretending that I was calm and collected. I pulled out my phone and fiddled with it, but I could hear the chatter from the people around me. It was like they were betting on the outcome, with some positive and others pessimistic.

  Greenwood and Morris walked in confidently and greeted us. They noted that after the verdict was read, they would escort us across the hall to the witness room opposite the courtroom.

  “We feel really good about a conviction,” Morris said before he and Greenwood took their seats behind the prosecutor’s desk. Cotton and his lawyers took their places behind their desk, and soon after, the courtroom doors were flung open and the bailiff walked in with the jury. Two of the jury’s nine women were black, and the rest of the jury members were white men.

  “All rise,” the bailiff commanded. We all stood as the judge finally entered the courtroom. The judge sat behind her bench and began thumbing through some papers.

  “There will not be any outbursts from anyone after the verdict is read,” the judge said with a stern voice. She encouraged everyone to exercise their best poker face, but in a trial this emotional, I knew that was going to be a Herculean task for it not to be an outburst either way. It felt like my heart was racing a thousand miles a minute as the judge explained to the jury that when she asked him to, the foreman would stand up and read the verdict. It was just like you see on shows like Law & Order.

  “Has the jury come to a verdict?”

  The foreman, who seemed just as nervous as Cotton, jumped up and said, “Yes, your honor.”

  And then it happened.

  “We, the jury, find the defendant, Jeffrey Wayne Cotton, not guilty.”

  From that moment on, as the foreman’s words flowed over his lips, I did not hear another word. Not from the judge. Not from my relatives who surrounded me, shouting and crying despite the admonitions of the judge. Not from my parents who squeezed my arm. My heart had dropped, and I felt paralyzed. My eyes glazed over, and people said that I had a blank expression on my face, to the point of spacing out.