David Hood was also thankful that Washington was no longer living under the shadow the death penalty—even if this verdict were reversed and he was tried again, a jury was prohibited from sentencing him for anything more than second-degree murder. A confident Orzell Billingsley said, “There’s no doubt we’ll get it reversed. There were too many errors made by the court. It’s just a matter of appealing.”
Judge Ball, however, disagreed. “I took extreme caution to give the defendant as fair and impartial trial as is possible,” he said. “I don’t want it to be reversed and come back on me. I tried to keep it clean of any errors. This in my judgment was done.” The judge, however, seemed saddened that none of Caliph Washington’s previous time served, almost thirteen years, would count against the forty-year sentence. He told a newspaper reporter after the trial that perhaps the Alabama Pardon and Parole Board would look at the case and consider giving him parole. “I think he could probably apply for parole about eight years from now,” Ball said.
A more immediate concern for Judge Ball, however, was the issue of bail for Washington. The judge told a journalist that he believed that forty years was too lengthy a sentence to grant a person bail. Nonetheless, he pledged to set a bond amount, which, given the sentence, would be a large sum of money, but first he would need to consult the other district judges. “I’ve been very liberal with this fellow [Washington],” he said, “but after conviction, it’s a different matter.”
That Friday evening following the verdict, tensions continued to run high. Several of the black jurors reported receiving death threats. Dora Beverly Mauldin, a maid from Bessemer and the only black female on the jury, reported that a woman called and said, “We are going to get you,” and threatened to beat her for issuing that verdict. Mauldin, who endured having her Bessemer home bombed in 1957, remained unflappable. Alfonso Gaston of Fairfield also received a call from a woman who asked if he was a member of the jury that convicted Caliph Washington. When he said, yes, the caller promised to make him pay for what he had done.
On Saturday, the day after the verdict, Judge Ball announced that state law prohibited him from setting bail for Caliph Washington. “I spent the morning today and checked the state statutes,” he said, and discovered that in Alabama, anybody sentenced to more than twenty years cannot be allowed bail. Washington’s ten days of freedom seemed only to make going back to prison that much more difficult.
But Washington would not return to the Jefferson County Jail to await an appeal of the verdict. Immediately following the trial, Judge Ball signed an order transferring him to a state facility. “The court being further informed that the said defendant,” read the order, “has created a security problem . . . and it would be to the best interest of all concerned if said defendant were transferred to the Medical and Diagnostic Center, Mt. Meigs, Alabama, for safe keeping . . . [and] where he shall be confined for the duration of his sentence.”
The Mt. Meigs Medical and Diagnostic Center in Montgomery had just opened in January 1970 as part of the state’s efforts to replace the old Kilby Prison. At Mt. Meigs’s receiving center, Washington was fingerprinted, photographed, and assigned a new number, S-513. His information card listed his height as five feet eight inches and his weight as 250 pounds—seventy-five pounds more than he weighed when he went through the classification center at Kilby at age seventeen. On April 10, 1970, prison officials described the now-thirty-year-old man as having a dark complexion, black hair, brown eyes, and a “very stocky” build.
Perhaps since he was deemed a “security problem,” Mt. Meigs officials placed Caliph in a quarantine cell. On Monday, April 13, 1970, he expressed his feelings of frustration and isolation in a prayer that he wrote out in the form of a letter:
Dear Jesus, I write this letter to you, because, I am away from my beloved back home, and “oh God!” how I’ll like to be back in their presence. I miss the cheer of your spirit which worketh within each of them. Jesus, send me home with them again to stay, and to carry thou word to all that you wish for me to. I do remember the dream dear Jesus, where you showed me about this very thing, and I did not tell anyone until it happened. But I should had, because, it make people think you are not just, when you are the only true God to us all. I know Lord that you has saved me out of all of my trouble. I only fear you dear Jesus. My many praise are to you for the being so wonderful to me. I have enjoyed the short stay you given me for I know in due time it shall be long. Bless all that trust in you and are praying for your children. Help us Jesus in all we do. Set me free dear Jesus, for you said that anything I shall ask in your name you would do it. So this is my plea, and stand by me. Your beloved son and servant, Rev. Caliph Washington.
Three days later, on April 16, Washington wrote to Ralph Galt and complained about the isolation. He could not understand why they sent him to Mt. Meigs right after the trial, so far away from his family and friends. “They told me it was for safekeeping,” he wrote. “I don’t like it here at all, because, I can’t write like I want to or nothing.” He hoped that his attorneys could get him out on bond or moved back to the jail or anywhere but where he was. “But the attorneys has [sic] worked so slow on this case,” he wrote. “I only hope they shall put some speed on now.” Even so, Caliph said he had his trust in God and he had faith that “all things will work out well soon.”
On April 20, prison officials removed Washington from his quarantine and placed him in cell A-23 in the A Cellblock. The prison floor commander told the guards to not let the “subject . . . out of his cell for any reason” and to carry all meals to him in A-23. Caliph could never leave the cell unless a request was approved by warden Glen Thompson, Captain W. L. Trawick, or associate warden Joseph E. Bonnett. Ironically, in 1957, Bonnett was the guard at Kilby who processed Washington when he first came to the prison.
Even outside solitary, Caliph was unhappy with the conditions of the new facility—cold food, dirty clothing and linens, no exercise, and poor medical treatment. Mt. Meigs was a new prison, but many of the guards remained surly and cruel. He and his fellow inmates wrote a letter to state officials requesting that the board make significant changes in the procedures. “It is very difficult to eat cold grits,” they wrote, “and no one enjoys a cold meal and later a hot drink.” Associate warden Bonnett wrote that Caliph and the other inmates in this cellblock enjoyed “stirring things up” and that the prison had more than its fair share of the state’s most incorrigible prisoners. “I believe,” he added, “that there exists a ‘hard core’ of agitators” in this area. Despite these observations, Bonnett improved the living conditions in the cellblock and ensured that prisoners had hot food, clean clothes, towels, and sheets, outdoor exercise, and frequent medical visits. For Caliph it was a small civil rights victory behind the walls of an Alabama prison.
Nonetheless, while he adjusted to these new surroundings at Mt. Meigs, his lawyers filed notice of appeal with the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals—the same court that denied his habeas corpus writ in 1969.
20
“SET ME FREE DEAR JESUS”
Caliph Washington and Christine Luna in 1972.
THE JUDGES OF the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, Anna Lola Price, Aubrey Cates, and Reneau P. Almon, announced their decision in Caliph Washington v. Alabama on January 12, 1971. One of the state’s most learned and scholarly judges, Cates wrote the decision of the court. Born in 1909, Aubrey Marion Cates, Jr., was the son of an attorney who maintained a thriving practice in Louisville, Kentucky. The younger Cates earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Louisville in 1929 and subsequently studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned his law degree in 1932 from the Honour School of Jurisprudence. Cates’s legal career was remarkable, enhanced by the fact he truly enjoyed the law because it required thinking and offered good opportunities for public service and private profit. Following a brief stint as a law clerk in Louisville, Cates went to work in 1933 as a staff attorney for the Public Works Admini
stration, a New Deal program designed to provide building jobs for the nation’s unemployed. For the next seven years, he worked in the PWA offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Louisville, and Montgomery and, during the early 1940s, he served as one of the attorneys for the Office of Price Administration, where he worked alongside another young attorney, Richard M. Nixon. Following active duty in the U.S. Navy, he returned to Montgomery and remained in private practice until elected to the court of appeals in 1956 (later the court of criminal appeals), where he gained a reputation, as one attorney said, as perhaps the state’s “most splendidly educated jurist whoever sat on an Alabama court.”
Cates’s opinions reflected a distinguished background, and were direct and learned, yet they contained, as another lawyer recalled, an “intensely human” element. “He was always alert,” a colleague once wrote, “as an appellate judge in criminal proceedings, to the constitutional rights of all citizens, even those charged with crime.” His opinions were thoroughly researched, at times abundantly filled with classical references, and often exhibited his near “encyclopedic knowledge of constitutional precedents.”
In writing the Caliph Washington decision, Judge Aubrey Cates referenced many of the recent court decisions related to race-based jury exclusion and recent efforts by Bessemer officials to include blacks on Washington’s petit jury in 1970. According to Cates, however, the issue was not the jury inclusion of 1970 but the jury of exclusion of 1957. When the Alabama Supreme Court overturned Washington’s first conviction back in 1957, the judges made no ruling on the issue of jury exclusion and simply noted that the defense failed to show discrimination in the filling of the jury box in August 1957. Judge Thomas Lawson emphasized that the burden was on Caliph Washington to prove discrimination and that he “must be given an opportunity to produce relevant, legal evidence, if he can, which tends to prove racial discrimination.”
In the circuit court trial in 1970, the defense again raised the issue of exclusion in the form of a motion to quash the indictment and refill the jury box. When Judge Ball denied that motion, Cates wrote, the court disallowed Washington the opportunity to “prove allegations of systematic exclusion as to [the] grand jury which had handed down indictment.” In Cates’s direct language, Judge Ball was in error. “Accordingly,” Aubrey Cates continued, “the judgment . . . is reversed and the cause is remanded to the court below.” For the third time, a higher court overturned Caliph Washington’s murder conviction.
When Caliph received word of the court overturning his third conviction the next day, he pulled out the eight-month-old prayer he wrote to Jesus (“Set me free dear Jesus”) and scrawled on the back, “Answered on January 13, 1971.” Once again he hoped for a quick release, but it did not come. Orzell Billingsley and David Hood prepared a petition for a writ of habeas corpus with over thirteen years of well-worn arguments about rights denied and justice delayed. Caliph Washington was no criminal, they added, but a good man from a “reputable family” who was now a “Minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” They asked Judge Ball to grant the writ and order the warden of Mt. Meigs to bring the petitioner to Ball’s courtroom together with the reasons for his imprisonment. The court should then order him released from confinement and declare his imprisonment unconstitutional and void. Hood filed the writ with Judge Ball on January 19.
The response was predictable and contained no surprises, as district attorney Harry Pickens objected to the “place, time, and method” of the writ but gave no opinion as to its merits. He filed a “plea in abatement” and argued that because Washington was being held at Mt. Meigs in Montgomery County and not in Bessemer, the petition should be heard by a judge there and not in Jefferson County. “The petition shows on its face,” he wrote, “that the court does not have jurisdiction of the body of the petitioner.” On January 28, Judge Ball agreed and transferred the petition to Montgomery County.
In the state capital on February 2, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals denied the state’s request for a rehearing. Next, assistant attorney general David Clark asked the Alabama Supreme Court to review the case (writ of certiorari), but Justice Thomas “Buster” Lawson, who was soon to retire after thirty years on the state’s high court, denied the writ on February 25. Yet Caliph Washington still waited at Mt. Meigs for the circuit court in Montgomery to act on the petition for the writ of habeas.
The petition ended up in the courtroom of Judge Richard Perrino Emmet. The boy-faced thirty-nine-year-old Dick Emmet was one of Montgomery’s most popular political figures. “He knows the citizens of Montgomery County,” a journalist wrote in 1967, “from the janitor to the bank president, who their relatives are, where they went to school, and what they’re doing, and he greets them warmly when they come to his court.” Following graduation from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1956, Emmet maintained a private practice in Montgomery until 1960, when he was elected to a newly created family court judgeship. There Emmet developed a keen interest in helping youthful offenders, juvenile delinquents, and abandoned children—a passion he maintained after being elected to the circuit court a few years later.
When Emmet received the petition for habeas from Orzell Billingsley and David Hood, he suddenly became acquainted with the painful and frustrating legal journey of a seventeen-year-old youth accused of murder in 1957. The legal merit of the petition impressed the judge, and he ordered James Hagen, the warden at Mt. Meigs, to bring Caliph Washington to his courtroom in the Montgomery County Courthouse. The date was March 16, 1971, the time 2:30 p.m.
History does not record what happened at the hearing, but the next day, March 17, Judge Emmet granted the relief that Caliph Washington “prayed for in his petition” before the court and long prayed for on his knees before his God. In a dramatic if not stunning decision, the judge ordered Washington released on a $5,000 bond. Later that day, D. A. Brooks, the shift commander at Mt. Meigs, released him to Orzell Billingsley and made note that the attorney had in his possession a signed bond by the proper authorities. Just after noon, Washington and Billingsley walked out of the doors of the prison system’s receiving station and drove back to Bessemer. Caliph Washington carried his possessions in a brown paper sack. For the first time, he would ride home from Montgomery a free man.
TIRED AND WEARY, he arrived at his parent’s home and was greeted by hugs and kisses from his mother and sisters. “I could have cried all over the world when I knew that my son was free,” Aslee Washington said. The characteristically modest man told a newspaper reporter that he was not bitter about the time he served. “Sure I missed the things I would have had and been able to do if I’d been free,” he said, “but I found out that I wanted to help other people as well as myself and I became a minister.” Those years confined in prison and at times so close to death gave him a strong faith in God, and he reported that he was going to make up for lost time by “preaching the gospel” to those folks who would listen. Caliph Washington was free, but as he told the journalist on that day in March 1971, he did not know for how long.
Even with this lingering threat, Washington enjoyed his freedom. “It seems like I’m breathing fresh air for the first time in fourteen years,” he said. Members of the defense committee gave him money to start a new life, provided him with a job at a local vending company, paid his legal bills, and continued to hold fundraisers. Washington began preaching in small churches in the Bessemer area, sharing God’s plan of salvation and his own story of personal redemption.
But while he believed God had washed his sins away and given him a new start on life, Bessemer officials thought otherwise. District attorney Harry Pickens made new plans to “most definitely” put Washington on trial for a fourth time. “Time really hasn’t changed what happened in 1957,” Pickens told a reporter in March 1971.
For months to come, Pickens and other Bessemer officials held the threat of the fourth trial over the freed man’s head. They warned him not to leave the area. To keep him close by, county officials den
ied his request for a driver’s license. He relied on friends, family, and neighborhood teenagers to take him where he needed to go, just as long as they drove slowly, no doubt recalling the 1957 incident that resulted in his arrest. “You could always tell when Caliph was coming down the road because there was a whole line of cars behind him,” one friend later recalled.
One of Washington’s frequent destinations was the nearby campus of Miles College in Fairfield, where he took courses through ECHO (Educational and Cultural Help Organization). While there, he struck up a friendship with one of the teaching assistants, Christine Luna, a twenty-four-year-old worker with the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program, part of Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It was apparent from the beginning of their relationship that Luna and Washington could not have been more different. She was a small, pale Italian-American with long, straight dark hair, and was a devout Roman Catholic from Long Island, New York, who had received a solid education and worked as a registered occupational therapist. He was a hefty, dark African-American with a budding afro, and was a devout Baptist from Bessemer, Alabama, who had a limited formal education that he received through correspondence courses while behind bars.
Yet the minister and the therapist found common bonds through their strong Christian faith, their compassion for the downtrodden, and their individual efforts to overcome adversity and suffering. Luna struggled, to a small extent, with cerebral palsy, which affected her gait and balance. Washington suffered through thirteen years of imprisonment and gained his freedom but was living under the threat of a new trial and more prison time. Before they met, Luna read a small article about Washington’s release, and she did not imagine him being such a large, powerful man. She was surprised at the way he introduced himself. “He asked for my phone number first,” she later said, “before he even asked me my name.”
He Calls Me by Lightning Page 36
