Sullinger, however, portrayed Caliph Washington as a trained killer, willing and able to take someone’s life with no remorse. “I suppose they teach them that in the service,” he continued, “but to teach a character like that, tricks like that and then put him back here with civilian life, is about the biggest mistake that the armed forces have made.”
When Sullinger finished, Judge Goodwyn gave the routine oral instructions before retiring the jury to consider a verdict. He praised the twelve men’s dedication, patience, and citizenship; he explained the four degrees of homicide, types of punishment, reasonable doubt, self-defense, and verdict forms. He reminded them that Caliph Washington entered the trial with a presumption of innocence. “It is a fact which is to be considered as evidence,” he continued, “and should not be disregarded.” When his honor finished at 5:45 p.m., the twelve men moved to the jury room with copies of the original indictment and the verdict forms.
Nearly three hours later, at 8:35 p.m., the jury announced they had reached a verdict. Caliph stood expressionless as the jury foreman, William F. Kelly, read, “We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment and we fix his punishment at death.”
Bailiff Vines handed Judge Goodwyn the verdict, and he examined the slip of paper. His honor looked up, focused on Caliph Washington, restated the verdict and punishment, and asked, “Do you have anything to say as to why the judgment of the court in the sentence of the law should not now be pronounced upon you?”
Caliph answered yes, and Judge Goodwyn told him to speak.
“I just say I am innocent,” Caliph responded. “It is self-defense. I’d like to have an appeal.”
Goodwyn listened intently. When Washington stopped speaking, the judge coldly told the defendant he was guilty as charged and that his punishment was fixed at death by electrocution at Kilby Prison in Montgomery on February 18, 1960.
The appeal process would begin anew.
10
“YOU BELONG TO THE STATE OF ALABAMA”
Alabama’s Kilby Prison in Montgomery, where Caliph Washington waited on death row.
A FEW DAYS FOLLOWING Caliph Washington’s second conviction, a state prison transfer truck arrived at the county jail in Bessemer. Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed Washington and led him from his cell into the slow-moving elevator for the ride to the basement of the courthouse. In the narrow alley behind the building awaited state prison guards. The guards pushed Washington into the back of a converted truck, a vehicle inmates and officials alike referred to as the “long chain” because of the method used to secure the convicts. The prisoners sat on long benches facing each other—knees and shoulders nearly touching—bound together by the long chain and a single destination: the big house in Montgomery.
The engine roared as the bus traveled the narrow road east from Bessemer until they reached U.S. 31, the key artery to the state capital in this pre-freeway era. Along this lost highway, they passed through sleepy villages like Saginaw, Varnons, Minooka, Verbena, and Pine Level. Within two hours, the truck arrived at the classification and receiving center at Kilby Prison, some four miles northeast of the capital. The prisoners were “tense and scared,” one observer noted, although they would never admit the fear to anyone but themselves. For all male prisoners entering Alabama’s penal system, this was the first stop.
The center, just outside the gleaming white walls of Kilby Prison, was a two-story E-shaped building made of red brick. Guards pulled Washington from the “long chain” and escorted him into the building. They removed his handcuffs and then his clothes. Guard Joseph E. Bonnett noted on Caliph Washington’s classification card that the prisoner had no money, billfold, social security card, keys, pen, identification papers, jewelry, or pictures. Bonnett then took the naked prisoner and placed him in a tiny stall, where he sprayed him with the insecticide DDT to kill any potential parasites. Caliph was hosed off and given a “septic bath” so that the filth and grime from the county jail were not transferred to the state prison. Cleansing process complete, Bonnett carefully fingerprinted the naked Washington: right thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, little finger; then up the left hand from thumb to pinky; and finally both full hands. According to classification records, Caliph Washington stood sixty-seven inches tall and weighed 175 pounds.
As Caliph wiped the black ink from his fingers and hands, Bonnett handed the young man a large white coverall and a pair of white canvas slippers. “Less than 10 minutes of prison life,” a reporter once observed, taught any prisoner arriving at the classification and receiving center “that he would be told what to do and when to do it.” Washington didn’t have to wait long for the next order. Once attired, the guard yelled, “Over here,” and opened a heavy iron door that led to a dark, narrow staircase. Caliph walked up the stairs, where a door swung open and another guard escorted him into a quarantine dormitory cell.
For the next few days, he waited. He could receive no visitors or mail, nor could he write a letter to his parents. Aslee and Doug Washington, however, did receive a letter from the classification center informing them that their son had been received.
Prisoners entering the quarantine dormitory completed a battery of tests, including a complete physical and dental examination, as well as extensive psychiatric and general intelligence tests. Prisoners also went through a series of interviews to determine personal, or “social,” history, including family life, previous employment, sexual orientation, and drug use. All test results, interview transcripts, FBI arrest records, and findings from the presentence investigations were placed in the prisoner’s file and presented to the classification board. The final step of the classification process was the prisoner’s interview with the classification board. Interviews lasted five to fifteen minutes, and at the end, the board assigned a status to the prisoner—minimum, medium, or maximum security—and a prison.
A death row inmate, Washington was automatically classified as a maximum-security prisoner. Following his physical examination, he was photographed: one shot staring into the camera, the other a profile view. He received standard-issue prison clothes—again all white—with his number etched on the inside. Caliph’s prison number was Z276: all death row inmates received a Z designation, the last letter of the alphabet and symbolic of the prisoner’s final stop. “You belong to the State of Alabama now,” one prison official liked to tell a newly classified inmate. “You’re nothing but a number.”
The classification board assigned Washington to the special detention unit at Atmore Prison, some hundred miles south of Montgomery, near the Florida border. At times, blacks lived on death row at Kilby, but at other times state officials kept the unit strictly segregated. While whites remained on Kilby’s death row, black men were routinely transported back and forth on the “long chain” from Kilby to Atmore and back again for clemency hearings, appeals, and executions.
Quietly situated sixty miles northeast of Mobile, Atmore Prison encompassed 8,360 acres of fertile Alabama soil. At this overgrown road camp, most of Atmore’s residents worked twelve-hour days of hard labor in the scorching Alabama sun—digging ditches, building railroads, picking cotton, clearing roads, and raising sugarcane, cabbage, cotton, collards, corn, and kudzu (which was shipped around the state for erosion control). When Caliph Washington arrived at this “hell-hole of hell-holes,” as one inmate described it, he undoubtedly saw the careworn prisoners working the fields under the watchful eyes of guards on horseback with loaded shotguns lying across their legs. The warden believed that spending all their time working made prisoners too tired to cause any trouble.
As the prison transfer truck pulled to a stop near the octagon-shaped guard tower, guards unloaded Caliph and the other prisoners and led them through the double set of iron doors. Once prison officials examined his papers, guards took him down a long, dark hallway to one of sixteen cells in the segregation unit, a special facility built to separate the hardest criminals—the “incorri
gibles and the agitators”—from the rest of the prison population. The eight-by-ten cell was nothing more than a damp, airless hole with few furnishings: a double bunk bed, a washbasin, and an opening in the floor for a toilet. At the end of the hallway was the shower unit. Federal regulations mandated a shower no less than twice a week, but the guards rarely complied. Death row inmates were allowed to exercise weekly, but separately from the general prison population.
When Caliph Washington arrived at Atmore, the prison was relatively new, having been constructed in 1955 at the cost of $850,000. Six years before, at the old prison facility at the site, a fire began in the loft of one of Atmore’s long wooden cellblocks, a matchstick-framed structure over twenty years old. At the time, Atmore housed 870 convicts, over six hundred of whom were black. No one was injured in the blaze, and local fire officials concluded that “defective wiring” probably started it. Prison officials, however, later admitted that inmates caused the fire.
Soon afterward, convict laborers began rebuilding the facility. During construction, the hardest criminals were sent off to Kilby, while the remaining souls lived in makeshift tents at the construction site. The project moved at a slow pace, taking over six years to complete, due to poor state funding, inadequate building materials, and low worker morale. A heavily reinforced concrete structure took the place of the flimsy wooden construction of the old facility. Inmates and prison reformers hoped that the fire cleansed the prison of its iniquities, but no amount of reinforced concrete could keep graft, corruption, and negligence from the dark hallways of Atmore.
FOR OVER FIFTY years, starting in 1875, Alabama had no large prison facilities to shelter a criminal population. Instead, released from any obligation of taking care of inmates, budget-strapped state and county governments leased convicts as a significant source of revenue. Businesses housed and fed the prisoners, 90 to 95 percent of whom were black, in return for a captive workforce that could be exploited in lumberyards and mines and on farms and railroads. Most male convicts worked in horrific conditions in coalmines near Birmingham, where contractors whipped them for disobedience, attempted escape, and to enforce company rules. Many critics, as historian Mary Ellen Curtin wrote, called convict lease a “new form of slavery.”
In 1911, a massive explosion at Banner Mine in northwestern Jefferson County killed 125 convicts and resulted in a public outcry over the use of prisoners in such an unjust and unsafe manner. The following year, executives at TCI decided that their workforce would be made up of only free men and no prisoners, but other companies continued the practice. The abolition of convict lease was long talked about in the Alabama legislature, but many politicians only saw the economic benefit of the system, which generated over $3 million in income for the state in 1919. So prisoners continued to work in the mines and the calls for abolition continued. “The evil and the danger” of convict lease, Governor Thomas Kilby wrote in 1923, “lies in subjecting the convict to the greed, cupidity and brutality of the man who works him and over works him for profit.” That same year the new Kilby Prison opened, and the state began purchasing additional property for correctional facilities in preparation for the death of convict lease. That came in 1928, when the Alabama legislature made it illegal for “any person to lease or let for hire any state convict to any person, firm, or corporation.” Alabama was the last state in the nation to abolish the practice.
Most former convict lease prisoners found their new home on a state-purchased 3,600-acre farm in Escambia County near Atmore. Dubbed the Moffett State Farm in 1928, the facility received the “final movement of convicts from the mines” on June 30 of that year. The state later purchased four thousand additional acres and added additional cell houses, a cold storage plant, a canning plant, and a forty-two-mile railroad. The facility consisted of a series of wood-frame barracks with concrete foundations, each containing showers and toilet facilities.
Just as under the convict-lease system, Alabama officials had little interest in the inmates’ well-being after they arrived at Atmore or other state prisons. As author James Goodman wrote, life at Atmore during the 1930s and 1940s was brutal. Prisoners lived in constant fear that every other inmate was a menace. At any time during the day or night, whether at dinner, work, or sleep, a convict faced the threat of a bare-fisted or knife-wielding ambush from another prisoner. Guards ignored most of the violence while participating in their own form of sadistic concentration-camp savagery by ordering prisoners to come closer for a chat, then shooting them for attempted assault or telling them to walk away, then sending a barrage of bullets into their back for attempted escape.
The prison seemed just as inhospitable in the late 1950s. At times, those working in the fields would dig up the remains of long-forgotten prisoners from decades before, when guards would beat a prisoner to death and force other convicts to bury the corpse in the fields where they worked. Escapes were rarely successful. The prison farm at Atmore was so large and so isolated that a prisoner who got beyond the fence could run all day and still not leave state lands. “They (prisoners) just wouldn’t run,” one warden recalled, “because you could see them too far.” The thirty-five man-hunting dogs in the prison kennel also deterred potential escapees.
Guards paid close attention to the prisoners. Heads were counted at the beginning and end of each day. “We’d call them out and line them up,” one guard said, “and we had a platform that was at the foot of the bed for them to sit on . . . and they’d be sitting on that platform and they’d be so tired that they’d lay back on the floor. We could count them by laying there.” At other times, work crews met in a designated corner of the wire-enclosed prison yard. Prisoners were beaten or put in solitary confinement if they were late for these open-air head counts. After checking each inmate, the guards escorted them out of the yard, marching them in two single-file lines—“just like in the movies.”
Until the 1950s, if a prisoner caused trouble or defied authority, guards and wardens used an eighteen-inch-long tapered razor strap to whip him with as many as twenty-one lashes on the buttocks. The restrictions rarely stopped guards from using the strap whenever it pleased them. On February 1, 1951, Alabama governor Gordon Persons put an end to the practice and to what he saw as the “last relic of brute force and barbarism” in the Alabama prison system. In a vivid public display, he burned thirty straps outside the capital building. “There’ll be no more whipping of prisoners in Alabama,” he announced. “Whipping is a sign of weakness on the part of those in authority. It is inhuman and will not be tolerated.”
Regardless of this reform, the prison culture that Caliph Washington entered just a few years later remained a violent, inhumane place. Atmore had a reputation as not only the “murderers’ home,” the residence of the state’s most incorrigible prisoners, but also as the home of Alabama’s most aggressive homosexual prisoners (or “tush hogs” in inmate lingo). Much of the prison violence among inmates was over sex. When a new inmate arrived at the prison, the “wolves,” the hardened longtime prisoners, intimidated the young convicts as part of a courtship ritual. Some “gal-boys” remained attached to one inmate, but others acted like prostitutes, selling themselves to the highest bidder. Most of the wolves did not tolerate other inmates coveting their human slaves and often murdered anyone who tried to steal away their prize gal. Guards often ignored the sexual subculture at Atmore, believing that a prisoner with a “wife,” “gal boy,” or “tush hog” worked harder and fought less.
Entrance salaries for guards at Atmore during the late 1950s were approximately $258 a month, “substantially below acceptable standards.” The bad pay and violent work made hiring and keeping guards difficult. One year, the turnover rate was over 70 percent; most years it averaged 40. Those hired for work at Atmore were poor and at times just as hungry and tormented as the prisoners and only one rung up the socioeconomic hierarchy. As an inmate concluded, the only two questions asked of potential guards during the interview process were “Do you hate niggers?”
and “Can you shoot a gun?” Low pay and poor working conditions drove many guards to graft and corruption.
In a lengthy letter to the Alabama governor, one desperate Atmore resident complained about the widespread negligence, misconduct, corruption, and graft at the facility. “The whole prison is a Big Joke on society,” he wrote. The anonymous prisoner (“For my own safety I must remain unknown”) described the lucrative black market in operation at Atmore, where inmates with enough scratch could purchase additional clothes, soap, food, and medical care. The right amount of money could buy a prisoner out of solitary confinement or off a harsh work detail. In addition, the inmate believed much of the prison’s farm produce and livestock were being sold under the table. “There is a lot of pigs being transported away from here at night on private trucks . . . over to Mississippi to a private plantation.” Many prisoners considered the entire system corrupt, and complained that they were cogs in the biggest “racket” in the state. One inmate said:
We convicts slaved year round on seven or eight thousand acres of soil. . . Did we wear clothes from the cotton we grew? We were half naked most of the time. Did we eat from the square miles of Irish potatoes we grew? We ate what they called seconds, rotten potatoes or poor potatoes. Who got the quality potatoes? Who got paid? . . . Somebody got a make on all that stuff we raised. How much of the money taken in went to run our prison? How much went into the pockets of the prison heads?
Caliph Washington had little time to witness the alleged corruption at Atmore. Within weeks of his arrival, and for reasons only known to prison officials, the state transferred him back to the city of steel and stone: Kilby Prison.
He Calls Me by Lightning Page 17
