Anatomy of Injustice

by Raymond Bonner

  To drive home the horror, Jones talked about the instruments that had been used to batter and kill Mrs. Edwards—exhibits that had been introduced into evidence and the jurors would be able to have with them during their deliberations. “I want you to feel it,” he said about the ashtray. “Just feel the weight of it.” Then there were the bottle tongs. “Look at them. They had blood on them, even back in there in the drawer.”

  Abruptly, Jones shifted to the night Elmore was arrested. He knew what common sense would lead some jurors to wonder.

  “Some people ask you, Why would he wait down there with her that night on the early morning hours of Wednesday the twentieth when he heard her call the police, and stay down there. You can’t answer that, because your brain doesn’t work like a person who would do this act. You might ask the question, Why would he take this back and put it in that drawer and let it be hanging out. You can’t answer that. No way you can answer it. Your brain doesn’t work like one. You can’t fathom why he did this act in the first place. It’s so repulsive to you. If you’re not the one who has the ability to kill, you can’t understand why one would kill, or why he’d do certain acts before or after doing it. You just can’t do it. It’s improper to ask you to put yourself in his place.”

  Jones addressed another question he knew a reasonable person might have: If there had been a rape or a sexual assault and there was all this blood elsewhere, why was there no blood on the bed? His answer, to the jurors, was, “She could have been swallowing the blood.”

  He was now ready to explain how those hairs had got on the bed. “Give me your attention, ladies and gentlemen. When he put his part of his body into the part of her privates, it was so repulsive to the lady that she, then, grabbed down there for the first time and came out with forty-something of his pubic hairs.” He picked up the tempo. “And it hurts him, then. He hurt her, first, but that hurts him. Then he jumped up and she tried to get up, but he caught her. He caught her in the corner and he beat her to death. For two or three reasons, because he has not only the capacity to kill but to overkill. Understand that mind? Don’t let anybody try to make you, because you can’t. You’re not a killer, you’re not a murderer. Yes. Yes.”

  The jury was hushed. Jones had only a few more things to say. He came back to the image Elmore had projected sitting there and on the stand. “Well, we all know the choirboys can do wrong, who have been models up to a point. You never know when that fuse, or where there is an explosion inside that might go off.”

  He asked the jury to convict. This was the man who had murdered Dorothy Edwards.

  He had been talking nearly two hours and now sat down.

  It was 1:30 and Burnett recessed for lunch. Before sending the jurors out, he cautioned them that even though the lawyers had finished with their witnesses and arguments, the jurors were not to begin discussing the case, not until he had instructed them on the law.

  After lunch, Judge Burnett charged the jury, following the standard instructions drafted by the state judicial authorities. He began by reminding the jurors that the defendant was presumed to be innocent and that on each count of the indictment the state had to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. “A reasonable doubt is not a whimsical doubt, nor is it a slight, fanciful, or weak doubt,” he said. “Proof beyond a reasonable doubt must be proof of such convincing character that you would be willing to rely upon it unhesitatingly in the most important of your own affairs.” He then explained each element of the charges in the indictment. “In order for the State to prove the Defendant guilty of murder, it must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the Defendant did kill a person and that the killing was done with malice aforethought, express or implied,” he said. “Malice aforethought is the deliberate and well-formed purpose to do the unlawful act. Aforethought simply means that the intention to do the unlawful act was conceived, or planned, sometime before the actual commission of the act, and the length of time is not important.”

  Lawyers for each side may ask for specific instructions, and Anderson asked for an instruction related to Gilliam’s testimony. He wanted Burnett to instruct the jury: “If the jury believes from the evidence that any person was induced to testify in this case by any promise of immunity from further punishment, or that any hope was held out, or entertained by him that he would be rewarded or in any way benefit if he implicated the defendant in the crime charged herein, the jury must take such fact into consideration in determining what weight should be given to the testimony, closely scrutinize it, and unless they can reconcile it with truth, completely reject it.” Burnett declined to do so.

  At 3:50, the jurors filed out of the courtroom, into a spacious adjacent room with a large conference table and a coffeepot. The bailiff brought them all the exhibits that had been introduced into evidence. They began to discuss the evidence. They talked about how poorly Elmore had been represented. “Why doesn’t this guy get another lawyer?” they asked one another. They discussed the evidence, the fingerprints, the hair found on the bed, the blood found on his blue jeans. One of the jurors said she thought one of the more incriminating pieces of evidence was Elmore’s bloody shirt. That was a reflection of how successful Jones had been and how ineffective Anderson and Beasley were: No witness had actually testified to seeing blood on the shirt. Jones had created the inference when he got Elmore’s girlfriend to testify that Elmore had torn his shirt off and she had thrown it away. Elmore’s lawyers never asked her if there was blood on the shirt, and never pointed out during their closing argument that there had been no testimony that there was.

  An hour into their deliberations, the foreman advised the clerk that the jury had a question. Judge Burnett went into the jury room, accompanied by Jones and Anderson, leaving Elmore in the courtroom with police guards hovering near. A question had arisen among the jurors about whether Elmore would have had time to go from Mary’s apartment over to Melrose Terrace, murder Mrs. Edwards, then return in the two-hour space of time in which he had not been seen. The jurors wanted a map of Greenwood. Because a map had not been introduced into evidence, Judge Burnett could not give them one.

  Another hour passed, and the jurors took a vote.

  At 6:20, the foreman advised the bailiff and the bailiff advised Judge Burnett that the jury had reached a verdict. The jurors filed back into the courtroom. They found Elmore guilty of murder, criminal sexual conduct, housebreaking, and burglary. He was found not guilty of armed robbery and larceny.

  “It was an open-and-shut case,” said James Walker, a thirty-four-year-old worker at Greenwood Mills. Elizabeth Hackett, one of two blacks on the jury, wanted to find him not guilty. “We felt he was innocent. We thought he was framed. But we had to go by the evidence, not by how we felt,” she said. “He didn’t have a good lawyer,” she added.

  “His lawyers didn’t give us anything that would help him,” said another juror, Susan Burnett. “There was nothing that could sway us, that could create any doubt.”

  WHEN THE SUPREME COURT reinstated the death penalty in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, it ruled that a defendant charged with a capital offense must be given a bifurcated trial. First, the jury must decide on guilt or innocence. If it finds the defendant guilty, then comes the second, or sentencing, phase. It is a trial of sorts: The prosecution puts in evidence of aggravation, to convince the jurors that the defendant is such a terrible, evil, dangerous person that he does not deserve to live. The defense offers mitigation, evidence of the defendant’s good character or childhood traumas, in effect arguing to the jury that even if he committed the crime, his life should be spared.

  By statute, Elmore was entitled to a twenty-four-hour period before the second phase could begin. Anderson and Beasley urged him to waive it, and of course he did. Judge Burnett went into the jury room and asked the jurors whether they wanted to work Sunday or take the day off and start again Monday morning. Everyone’s attitude seemed to be the same: This guy’s guilty; let’s get it over with.

  DELIBERA
TION ON DEATH

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, when many of the jurors normally would have been in church, they were back in court. They wouldn’t miss a sermon. “He could have been a preacher, the way he was going,” Elmore’s sister Elease said of Jones’s performance that day.

  Jones wanted to persuade the jurors that Elmore had not only murdered Dorothy Edwards but had tortured her as well. He called Dr. Conradi to the stand. He showed her the photos of the victim’s bloodied, battered, and bruised body, then passed them to the jurors. Doctor Conradi again described the thirty-three stab wounds on the front and the nineteen on the back. Forty-one had been administered before death, she said. Plus there had been blows to the head, neck, and legs. Mrs. Edwards had still been alive when many of those wounds were inflicted, Conradi said. In other words, she had gone through a slow, painful death.

  Slowly, painstakingly, body part by body part, injury by injury, blow by blow, Jones created images in the jurors’ minds. How about the left ear? he asked.

  “The blow to the left ear was of a severe nature and severe enough to partially tear the ear away from its attachment in the back,” Dr. Conradi replied.

  “And could you give us the degree of pain?”

  “I would say severe.”

  When Jones had finished, Anderson had no questions but rather a request of the judge. Could the court recess so that he could attend a luncheon engagement? Judge Burnett agreed to it.

  After lunch, it was time for Elmore’s lawyers to try to save his life with evidence in mitigation. Anderson put on a nominal case. He called members of Elmore’s family. They were terrified at having to be in a courtroom facing white prosecutors, a white judge, white jurors, and white cops. But they would do whatever was necessary to help their son and brother. Anderson first called Elmore’s mother. Like her son, she talked softly, and Anderson asked her to speak up. The illiterate daughter of a tenant farmer, she said Eddie was the sixth of her eleven children. (He was actually her eighth.) She said he finished the eighth grade. (He had dropped out in the fifth.) She said he had turned twenty-three years old in February. (His birthday was in January.) She said he went to church every Sunday, helped with the chores around the house, was a good boy. “I never had no trouble out of him.”

  Jones objected. “Your Honor, I don’t think she’s got the right to say anything she wants to,” he said, jumping to his feet.

  Anderson said he was trying to get Eddie’s mother to explain her son’s personality.

  “I think the jury is aware of the two types of personalities we may be dealing with,” Judge Burnett said. If the jury wasn’t, Burnett was helping them, suggesting this was a classic case of a split personality, a choirboy and a murderer, as Jones had portrayed him in his argument to the jury.

  Anderson called Elmore’s sisters. Mary Crawford, twenty-seven years old and the mother of six children, was the only one with a high school education. She testified that Eddie had been an obedient child, brought in firewood, didn’t get into fights, had gone to church. She said she was the closest in age to Eddie.

  On cross-examination, Jones didn’t spare her.

  “How old is Peggy?” he asked.

  “I don’t know right off,” Mary said.

  “Oh, now, you know just about how old.”

  “Twenty-five, or twenty-six.”

  “About twenty-five, isn’t she? Is that right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Peggy is next to him, isn’t she?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you’re on beyond Peggy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, when you said just a little while ago that you were the one closest to him in age, that’s not quite right, is it?”

  Mary said nothing.

  Anderson finished with the family members and put Elmore on the stand again. Anderson knew it was not going to be easy. He would have to draw him out. He asked simple questions, the kind Elmore could answer yes or no. You don’t remember your daddy, do you? No. You gave money to your mother, didn’t you? Yes, sir. You worked for Clarence Aiken, didn’t you? Yes, sir. You did a good job, didn’t you? Yes, sir. Worked in Roger Milliken’s home, didn’t you? Yes, sir.

  Jones was up. Objection. Anderson was asking leading questions.

  Burnett agreed. “Don’t lead your witness,” he admonished. Anderson said that he was handling Elmore just as Jones had dealt with Mrs. Moseley and Sue Moseley, which Judge Burnett had allowed. Burnett cut him off. It was not necessary to ask Elmore leading questions. “He’s an intelligent young man,” Burnett said (again assisting Jones, who was trying to convince the jury of just that).

  Burnett wanted a word with the lawyers, and the jury was sent out. Both sides were guilty of leading their witnesses, he said. His harshest rebuke was of Anderson. “Now, don’t come back after one of my rulings and go back and do the exact same thing, Mr. Anderson,” he said. Anderson countered: “I want the record to reflect that I am being prevented from eliciting some remarks that need to be heard here by virtue of a very nervous person on trial for his life. He’s scared to death to …”

  “Tone yourself down,” Burnett interrupted. Anderson was talking so loudly that Burnett feared the jury, which was in the other room, might hear. During that lunch break Anderson had requested, he had apparently consumed more alcohol than he should have.

  Anderson lowered his voice. He tried to explain to Judge Burnett that given Elmore’s personality, his quiet, reticent nature, it was hard for him to defend himself. “He’s never talked to me hardly about the case, about anything,” Anderson advised the judge.

  The jury was brought back in, and Anderson continued questioning Elmore. When he had finished, he said, “Is there anything else you want to say about this matter, about this case, about your life?”

  “Yes, sir. I’d like to say I didn’t—I didn’t kill Mrs. Edwards.”

  “All right. Answer any questions the solicitor might have.”

  Now it was Jones’s turn.

  “Put your feet on either side of that and pull it up closer to you, like that,” Jones began, gently enough, telling Edwards to get closer to the microphone. “Speak into that and speak up.” He was positioning him for the kill.

  The jury might have sympathy for a man as quiet and meek as Elmore, might even think he was simply not capable of such a grisly crime. Jones had to destroy the choirboy image. He showed Elmore the drawings of the house, which he had set on the easel in his opening argument, and asked questions. Elmore had difficulty understanding.

  “Remember that breezeway between her house and the guest room back there? You remember that, don’t you?”

  “Breezeway?”

  “You know what a breezeway is, don’t you, Mr. Elmore?”

  “No, sir, not right now.”

  The tempo accelerated—questions, charges, objections, rulings.

  JONES: You want this court to believe you were always this quiet, don’t you?

  ELMORE: Well, I, you know—you asked me something, I answered it.

  JONES: Uh-huh. Well, you want them to always believe you’re real quiet and polite, and yes, sir, no, sir, isn’t that right?

  ELMORE: No, sir.

  JONES: Well, where did you get this ashtray here?

  ELMORE: That’s—

  Anderson jumped up. Objection.

  ELMORE: —not my ashtray.

  JONES: Well, where did you—

  THE COURT: Overruled.

  JONES: —pick it up?

  ELMORE: I didn’t pick it up.

  JONES: Well, why did you hit her with it?

  ELMORE: I didn’t hit her with it.

  JONES: Why did you stick her with this knife?

  ELMORE: I didn’t stick her with no knife, sir.

  JONES: Tell us your thoughts while you were sticking her in the neck?

  ELMORE: I didn’t—

  ANDERSON: Same objection, Your Honor.

  ELMORE: —stick her in the neck.

 
ANDERSON: It’s been tried before.

  THE COURT: Overruled.

  JONES: What was your thoughts when you stuck this in there?

  ELMORE: I didn’t stick that. I ain’t never seen that before.

  JONES: Well, you hit her right on this side of the head with this, didn’t you?

  ELMORE: No, sir.

  JONES: When you were jiggling this into her body, your attitude is a little bit different than what it’s been—you’ve put up here on this stand, isn’t it?

  ANDERSON: Same—

  ELMORE: I didn’t—

  ANDERSON: —objection, Your Honor.

  JONES: —jig that in her body, sir.

  THE COURT: Overruled.

  JONES: What’s that?

  ELMORE: I did not jiggle that in her body.

  JONES: Your attitude was a lot different then, wasn’t it?

  ELMORE: I didn’t have no attitude, but I wasn’t at nobody’s house to do that to nobody’s body.

  JONES: I see. Well, if you had been there doing it, your attitude would have to have been a lot different to stick her as many times as you heard the lady say she was stuck, wouldn’t it?

  ELMORE: I don’t know.

  JONES: You couldn’t—nobody could have been doing it with the attitude you’ve been showing up here on this stand, could they have?

  ELMORE: I couldn’t answer.

  JONES: What’s that?

  ELMORE: I couldn’t answer that.

  JONES: Oh, you couldn’t?

  ELMORE: No, sir.

  JONES: I see. Uh-huh. You wiped off all your fingerprints out there, so they couldn’t find any, didn’t you?

  ELMORE: No, sir, I haven’t been in there.

  JONES: Would you tell us why you picked up her body out of that puddle of blood and put it into the bed, or into the—into the closet.