Chasing Gideon
Page 22
Technically, as the district attorney plays Doris Jones’s recorded 911 call for the jury, she is trying to persuade the jury that Rodney is guilty of murder in this first phase of the trial. In reality, his public defender, Joseph Romond, acknowledges in opening arguments that Rodney likely committed the murder. However, Romond insists his client is mentally retarded and thus ineligible for the death penalty; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 2002 decision, Atkins v. Virginia, that people with mental retardation were not morally culpable for their actions and thus could not be executed. Unfortunately, the Court didn’t define mental retardation. Nor did it spell out what kind of proof was required—beyond a reasonable doubt? a preponderance of the evidence?—to make the determination of mental retardation. As a result, Georgia is the only state in the nation that requires evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a defendant is mentally retarded.
If the jury finds that Rodney is guilty but mentally retarded, then he’ll be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. If the jury decides he is guilty but not mentally retarded, the trial goes into a second phase. At this point, the jury gets a second chance to decide on the appropriate sentence for him: should he be put to death or should he be sent to prison for life, without the possibility of parole?
The jury deciding Rodney Young’s fate in this February 2012 capital case joins thousands of other juries in the United States over the last fifteen years in determining whether a person convicted of murder should himself be killed—943 of these juries returned a death sentence.1 In Georgia, this particular capital trial is business as usual—just one of the 94 death penalty cases sitting on the desks of the public defenders at the Georgia Capital Defenders office that same week in February 2012. But in Georgia such “business as usual” is deeply tangled in the politics of race, power, and money. Being poor, black, and accused of a crime in this country always increases a person’s chances of conviction. But here in Georgia—at the far end of the punishment spectrum where the stakes are highest—the right to counsel, and the funding so crucial to mounting a defense equal to that of the well-funded, well-resourced district attorney’s office, is in daily jeopardy. Indeed, justice is not necessarily the principal business of business-as-usual in the Georgia courts; justice is too expensive.
I arrive in the Covington, Georgia, courthouse on Tuesday, February 14, 2012—Valentine’s Day. It is the first full day of Rodney Young’s murder trial, and there is a lot of red. Bloody weapons. Bloody clothing. Bloody flesh displayed in oversize slides. As the jury returns from lunch at 2 P.M., the state calls Dr. Jonathan Eisenstat, a Georgia medical examiner, to talk them through the autopsy he performed on Gary Jones’s body, and to share the pictures documenting the event. It is a gruesome scene.
“Can you tell us what is depicted here?” asks Layla Zon, the trim thirty-something district attorney, as she strides across the courtroom to dim the lights and direct the jury’s attention to photos projected from an overhead projector. She sets a photo down on the machine, adjusts the focus, and turns her attention back to the medical examiner.
“It’s a photo of the body,” Dr. Eisenstat says, “just as it comes out of the bag.”
“I’d like to enter into evidence state’s exhibit number 301,” Zon says as she puts down another photo. Then another. Then another. On the huge screen, in slow succession, thirty-two images of a mangled man lying face up on an exam table flash by. The series of photos changes perspectives and moves closer and closer, from a bird’s-eye view of the man’s chest and head to a close-up of a bruise, a laceration, a rope burn. Jurors see that the corpse, in repose, has one eye closed and one eye open, staring straight ahead in startled surprise that death caught him—and possibly at the form and person it arrived in. The button-down oxford that clothes the corpse is so drenched in deep red blood that it is impossible to detect what color it might have once been.
“Now we see the body before it has been cleaned,” says Eisenstat. “The right side of the face and upper chest.” He points out a rip and explains that the “defects” in the shirt are “consistent with traumatic injury.” He borrows a pointer from the judge and steps out of the witness box to help the jury focus on the details. The camera had zoomed in so that every pore in the dead man’s skin was visible as an unseen lab technician used tweezers to fold his ear into a gruesome carbuncle, squeezing and pulling it forward to show a mark behind the ear. The technician pinches again with the tweezers to pull the eyelid back, to point out the lacerated flesh beneath. The medical examiner had cut into the body and peeled back the flesh, and he narrates his process as dully as someone sharing vacation photos of the Jersey shore. The photos flicker by, on and on.
A blond woman in the front of the jury box puts her hand over her mouth and folds her head down to stare at her lap. The woman next to her looks away, away from her neighbor, away from the photos, away from the defendant, Rodney Young, who prosecutors say committed this murder. She digs into her purse for a pink tissue and blows her nose.
The district attorney plows ahead. “Can you give me an opinion as to whether Gary Jones was alive when those ligature marks were made?” she asks.
“We have a bruise in the line of a ligature which indicates he had blood pressure and therefore was alive when the marks were made,” he answers, explaining that the victim had been tied to a chair in his home and likely beaten to death with a hammer.
Zon abruptly turns on the lights. “Overall, did you make a determination as to cause of death for Gary Jones?”
“Blunt force injuries of the head and neck,” Eisenstat says.
Zon sits down next to her co-counsel, Melanie Bell, crosses her legs, and gives a satisfied nod to those at the defense table.
None of the three attorneys there moves.
For his part, the defendant Rodney Young had declined to look at the photographs that appeared on the screen almost directly above him. He sits, a hulking man in a beautifully pressed yellow shirt and creased trousers, hunched over. He keeps his head down in his hand—unwilling or unable to look. It is a posture he will maintain for much of the trial.
Next to him, the three public defenders from the Georgia Capital Defenders office take a moment to collect their thoughts, shuffling through papers to prepare their cross-examination. Thea Delage, on a yearlong fellowship at the Capital Defenders, is a slight, young white woman in a gray suit who sits next to Rodney throughout the trial, occasionally leaning over to whisper an explanation or answer a question. Teri Thompson, a bone-thin, stylishly dressed black woman, sits next to Delage. As the attorney with the most experience, she is senior counsel. However, having just completed another murder trial two weeks earlier, she has not had adequate time to prepare for this case, so instead, Joseph Romond takes the lead on this one. A young, white man who joined the Capital Defenders office in 2008, Romond is trying his first death penalty case. He wants very much to win. He barely stands a chance.
Like many public defenders—and certainly like most who work on capital cases—Romond is deeply passionate about his work. He is both typical, in his way of obsessively working excruciatingly long hours, and atypical, in that he came to this work in an unusual way. Romond grew up in Morristown, New Jersey, and moved with his parents to Chicago when he was sixteen. He spent the last two years of high school at a Christian evangelical boarding school and, being “not very academically inclined,” decided against college in favor of vocational school. He learned to be a mechanic. After working at the local Goodyear for a mediocre year and a half, he realized he probably did not want to do this for the rest of his life. He decided it was his “calling” to go into the ministry and so he enrolled at Messiah College, a Christian evangelical college outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he majored in religion. Somewhere during his first semester’s Bible class he had an epiphany. “I realized how big a farce this was,” he says, vaguely referring to a loss of faith, or at least disenchantment with organized religion. He decided he did not want to be
a minister after all.
Romond spent a semester abroad, arriving in Cairo, Egypt, at the end of August 2001. He had been there two weeks when the September 11 attacks occurred. When folks in the United States worried about his safety and urged him to come home, he was blasé. “Hey, nobody is flying planes into buildings over here,” he said. Pro-Palestinian, he spent a month in the West Bank and discovered his position was fairly unusual among evangelical Christians. When he returned to Messiah College, an indignant critic of the widespread brutality and injustice he’d witnessed in the Middle East, one of his professors scoffed, “You’re so outraged about the Palestinians, but take a look in your own backyard.”
In fact, Romond had been active in his “own backyard” as well. He had marched against the death penalty at various protests, but felt “pretty impotent” when it came to impacting death penalty policy. Toward the end of his senior year, a friend suggested applying his resistance to the death penalty in a more practical way by becoming a lawyer. Romond went online to find out how to register for the LSATs on what happened to be the final, late-filing day for taking the upcoming test. He signed up, took the test two weeks later, applied to one law school—Howard University in D.C.—and got in.
Howard, a historically black college, was an unusual choice for a white kid from the Midwest. “I wanted to learn the perspective of the law from those most mistreated by it,” he says. “I never thought about being a lawyer one day in my life until then. I showed up for my first day of law school with a pen and some paper in my hand.” All around him were students who had been groomed for this their whole lives, armed with laptops and law books. He felt similarly outmatched when he applied to intern at the public defender’s office in D.C., almost universally touted as the best one in the country (thanks to the proper funding it gets from the federal government). “I showed up and here were all these kids from Harvard and Yale and Princeton,” he recalls.
But he persisted, successfully finishing his internship there and then scoring another coveted internship at Georgia’s Southern Center for Human Rights. It’s easy to see how Romond, with a round, guileless face, scruff of beard, and cropped dark hair, who is quick to laugh, with others and at himself, managed to navigate the terrain between privileged law students and underprivileged clients. His decision to become a lawyer may have been fairly random, but he is clearly suited to the work and passionate about his clients. “When I started in the Capital Defenders office in ’08, I was reluctant,” he says, “because I was so young and inexperienced. But there is so much need. It’s just so wrong, what goes on, on so many levels. I understand what many of my clients have done. I don’t deny that some have done awful, horrific things. But I have yet to have a case where there is not a compelling, sad, abusive, or turbulent growing up,” he said.
As he sits talking to me one day in February, sipping mimosas in a dark bar and brooding about his profession, he runs a finger around the collar of the brown fisherman’s sweater he wears as if it itches or irritates him and admits he always “gets a lot of shit” about being a public defender. “That’s true of every public defender,” he says. “Someone will say, ‘How do you defend those people? I don’t know how you can do that.’” Romond has a couple of different responses, depending on his mood or patience. “Sometimes I say, ‘How could I not defend these people?’ I love what I do and I’m passionate about it and I want them to understand why, but somehow my engagement or passion doesn’t really change minds.” When he’s feeling flip, he’ll respond to someone’s moral outrage—“How could you defend someone who is guilty of something so heinous?”—by reminding them, “I don’t represent people who are guilty; everyone in this country is innocent until proven guilty.” In his more Socratic moments, he has some success by asking people to consider the alternative, no lawyer to defend “those” people. “Imagine some poor, uneducated guy or someone mentally retarded who is standing there in a courtroom facing all the power of the government alone. It’s Orwellian, horrific.”
“I’ve become somewhat of a libertarian,” he jokes. “I enjoy getting up each day, knowing that I’m working to keep the power of the government in check. I don’t vote libertarian, but I feel libertarian.”
Romond is fervent about his defense work, but he has a casual, light touch. During the Rodney Young trial, he moves fluidly between types of people, chatting as easily with co-counsel about voir dire as he does with sheriff’s bailiffs (whom he’s troubled to know by name) about his cell phone accidentally going off in the middle of the trial, and as he does with his client, Rodney, who was more preoccupied with the color of the pressed shirt Romond would bring him to wear in court each day or the gummy worms he begged everyone for than legal strategy.
When it is his turn to question the medical examiner at the trial, Romond buttons his jacket and rises. The pictures the jury has seen are horrific, and he is stuck doing damage control. “I believe what you said was, either of the injuries to the neck would have been fatal in themselves?”
“Yes,” Eisenstat agrees.
“There’s no way to really tell the order of the injuries, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes you can tell, but not in this specific case?”
“Correct.”
“You mention the person was still alive because he had blood pressure?”
“Correct.”
“That doesn’t mean the person is conscious though, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Is it reasonable to say that a person could be unconscious from injuries to the head [like this]?”
“From the totality of head injuries, yes.”
Romond sits down, reduced to mitigating the cruelty by suggesting that the victim might at least have lost consciousness.
And things are about to get worse for the defense. When the medical examiner leaves the stand, the state calls the victim’s grandmother, sixty-four-year-old Annie Sampson. She is dressed in a prim navy-blue dress, her gray hair cinched in a tight bun atop her head. She clutches a cardigan tight around her, toddles a bit on her heels, and looks like she just stepped out of church. When she speaks, her voice unwavering but soft, she explains that Doris Jones is her daughter and that she has raised Doris’s four boys for her, including Gary, since they were babies. “He called me mommy,” she says.
Zon takes her back to the day of the murder.
“Gary called me as he was leaving out the church,” Sampson says.
“Any idea where he was?”
Sampson says he was calling her on his cell from his car as he drove home from church. “He was talking about the service the whole ride home. And he asked me, did I go to church? I said, yes, with Aunt.”
“What time was this conversation?”
“A little after 1. He was on Salem Road and getting close to home. But he had gotten a call from [his girlfriend] and said, ‘Hold on.’ Then he got back on the line and said he was going to go to dinner with [his girlfriend]. He was going to go home, take a shower, pull his suit off and then go with them. He was on the outside of the house, fumbling with his key, getting ready to walk in. He hung up.” He called right back, she says, because he forgot to talk to his niece. He asked to talk to her and wished her a happy birthday.
“Did he mention anything about a screen?” Zon asks.
“Yes, he said the screen was away from the window, [thrown] back in the woods. I said, ‘be careful.’ He said he would. He said he would call back in fifteen minutes.” She pauses. “And he didn’t.”
“Did you ever talk to him again?”
“No.”
Rodney Young worked in a factory in Bridgeton, New Jersey, putting labels on cans, before he was extradited to Georgia for his trial. Neither he nor his family had the money to pay for a private attorney, so he was assigned a public defender to represent him. But the history of indigent defense in the state of Georgia is a long and troubled one. As in so many states, funding problems have hobbled Georgia publi
c defenders. As the local district attorney offices collected money from the federal government, the state, and the county, public defenders limped along begging for handouts.
Ironically, in the late ’70s, Georgia had tried to position itself in the lead on the provision of counsel for the poor. In 1979, Georgia passed the Indigent Defense Act, a series of sweeping reforms that, on the surface, looked promising. Prior to that, Georgia left indigent defense up to its many counties. This was a complicated, hodgepodge system in which county governments cobbled together representation based on what they decided they could afford. The quality of representation was vastly uneven across the state. Georgia has 159 counties—second only to Texas with 254—and no single agency coordinated indigent defense for the state. Attorneys who practiced in small towns at the time recall judges simply going through a list of local lawyers to appoint attorneys randomly. (This would be the Atticus Finch model, familiar from To Kill a Mockingbird; lucky is the defendant who gets an Atticus type, pity the defendant who gets the tax attorney down the street.) This meant a real estate practitioner could be required to take a felony case, an attorney with no criminal experience might be dealt a murder case. Worse, it was not uncommon for the accused to sit in jail for months waiting for an attorney to be assigned, oftentimes languishing in pretrial confinement longer than a maximum sentence for his or her crime would have merited. Many lost their jobs, their homes, custody of their kids.
The 1979 Georgia Indigent Defense Act attempted to address these disparities in quality of representation, grouping the counties into forty-eight judicial circuits, establishing a statewide Indigent Defense Council, and creating a three-part system where county commissioners, the local bar association, and the judges of superior court all had a voice in determining what kind of provisions would be made for the defense of poor people in each jurisdiction.