Chasing Gideon

by Chasing Gideon- The Elusive Quest for Poor People's Justice (retail) (epub)

  love

  Rodney R. Young

  The prosecutor removes this letter from the overhead projector and puts down another one. And another one. And another one. Alternately threatening and cajoling, the letters paint a picture of a severely dysfunctional relationship, one that bears many of the telltale signs of a classic case of domestic violence. (Indeed, later in the trial it would come out that Rodney had twice punched Doris.) On the heels of this is a display of raw sexual or emotional need. “Please come back, I’m sorry,” he writes in another undated letter. “I just want you to show me love Doris meaning give me Sex and I will try to cover everything until you get back on your feet.” The correspondence, seen together, is full of the wild mood swings in their troubled and confusing relationship. Throughout the reading of the letters, Rodney stares down at the floral carpet, absorbed in the endlessly repeating pattern of beige and green petals, flowers unfolding in orderly, predictable rows.

  Moving forward in time, the prosecutors direct Doris’s attention to the week before the murder. In what has to be the most curious aspect of this murder, she tells the jury that she discovered signs of breaking and entering through the laundry room window several days before Gary was killed. Prosecutors return to this somewhat bizarre fact several times over the course of the trial, first while questioning Doris. Gary was killed on a Sunday, after returning from church, but Doris says that a strange thing happened on the Friday night before when she got home from work. “I washed some clothes and went to bed,” she says.

  “And you woke up on Saturday?” Bell asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Anything unusual?”

  “My laundry was all folded up and set on the couch in the living room.”

  Someone switched the loads, waited for the dryer to finish, folded the garments. Gary had spent the night at his girlfriend’s, so it couldn’t have been him. Doris was puzzled the next morning. She went into the laundry room. That’s when she discovered the window had been tampered with and alerted Gary that it looked like there had been a break-in. Someone had broken into the house, she believed, but they had merely switched the loads and folded the batch in the dryer.

  “Did you see Gary that day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any more conversation regarding the broken window?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “The screen was out to the woods,” Doris says, explaining that it looked like it had been thrown there near the edge of their property. “Around the window it looked like someone chopped away at the wood and the hole was a big one.” She told Gary, “Let’s get that fixed and fix the alarm.” They had a security system in the house, but it wasn’t activated at the time.

  Two days later, someone broke in and murdered Gary.

  “At the time period when Gary was killed, would you say the defendant was angry with you?” Bell asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you think of that at the time?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was in New Jersey and I was in Georgia.”

  The prosecutor returns to questions about the night of the murder. “Did you notice anything of yours missing?”

  “My social security card.”

  “Anything of Gary’s missing?”

  “Gary’s cell phone.”

  When it was time for the defense to cross-examine her, Romond stood up, buttoning his beige suit jacket as he walked around the defense table to stand closer to the wood-paneled witness box. “Miss Jones,” he said. “We are very, very sorry for your loss.”

  He had no further comment.

  Over the next few hours and days, the prosecution continues to build its case against Rodney Young. A handwriting specialist testifies that the letter writer who penned the love notes to Doris—“I got my hope up high being with you so let that happen lets me, you and Aaliyah be the family were proposed to be”—is the same (semiliterate) person who scrawled threats in marker on the walls of Gary Jones’s house the night of the murder—“Wes know what you look like.”

  Another witness, like a character straight out of the old TV hit Heat of the Night, happened to be passing the time on the tailgate of his truck in the Covington town square at 7 P.M. a few nights before the murder. A guy fitting Rodney Young’s description pulled up next to him in a car with Jersey plates and asked for directions to Salem Road, the turn-off before Gary and Doris Jones’s street.

  A local gang investigator from the Newton County sheriff’s office, James Fountain, offers his expert testimony regarding the writing on the wall at Gary Jones’s home the night of the murder. “Do you know anything about ‘ATL mob’?” Zon asks him, referring to the graffiti scrawls that were scribbled around the various rooms.

  “No,” he says.

  “And did you reach out to other experts to see if they had heard of this gang, ATL mob?”

  “No intel anywhere that I could find of a gang going by the moniker of ATL mob.”

  Then, AT&T mobility engineer David Walker takes the stand and produces Rodney Young’s phone records. The itemized list reveals which cell towers his calls were bouncing off on the days before, during, and after the murder. Walker charts a damning path from Rodney’s home in New Jersey on March 25, 2008, all the way south down Interstate 95 and on into Atlanta, Georgia. He talks the jury through records showing that Rodney Young made a few phone calls that bounced off the cell tower less than a mile from the Joneses’ house on Friday, March 28, on Saturday, March 29, on Sunday, March 30—the night of the murder.

  A co-worker of Rodney’s from the canning factory in New Jersey testifies that he loaned Rodney his TomTom (GPS) the week before the murder. The TomTom is in evidence and one of the recent trips is to Salem Road, the road that leads to Gary Jones’s subdivision.

  A detective tells the jury how he found duct tape (like that used to bind Gary Jones), magic markers (like the kind used to graffiti the walls in Gary Jones’s home), and a cell phone (registered to Gary Jones) in Rodney Young’s basement bedroom in New Jersey a few weeks after the murder.

  Things look very, very bad for Rodney Young. It seems clear that he did, in fact, brutally murder Gary Jones. And, on the morning of February 16, the prosecutors begin the day by playing a tape of an interview cops conducted with Rodney Young several weeks after the murder. There is no lawyer present to advise Rodney as they push him to confess. Rodney admits he went to Georgia to visit his sister in Atlanta.

  “I got these phone records that indicate you were down there,” a cop says.

  “I hadn’t done anything,” Rodney says.

  “I understand you maybe didn’t do anything, but were you down there that weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the truth the first time?”

  “Because I was scared. I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t have nothing against him.”

  “Yes, everybody loved Gary. . . . You need to understand where this evidence is going. We have you picked out of a photo lineup, asking directions to that road on that day. . . . At the time that Gary was killed, your cell phone was pinging to a tower a mile from that house. You were at that house when he was killed. . . . Rodney, you’re down there and go inside that house—”

  Rodney tries to interrupt to say something.

  “Listen to me. Listen to me, Rodney. Give me a chance to talk, then . . . you go in the house to scare her and want her to come back. You don’t expect him to come home till 4:00 or 4:30, and you’re writing on the house and Gary comes in. . . . Or the only alternative I see is you went down there and murdered him. You waited for him to come home and murdered him in his church clothes. Either you didn’t plan this and it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, or you thought about it.”

  “I never kill him.”

  “You were there.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “You were there,” he insists. He asks a few more questions, then returns to the crime sc
ene. “It often happens that victims bring things on themselves by their lifestyle and the decisions they make. Gary wasn’t one of them. He was coming home from church. He was in his church clothes. A good-looking guy trying to do the right thing and murdered right in his house.” He mentions the writing on the wall. “‘Get out of town. Get out of the state.’ No gang-banger writes that on the wall. I cringed when I read that on the wall. It was almost painful to look at how someone was trying to make it look like something it was not. Just tell us what happened.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “You lied about being there. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I didn’t have no beef with him. . . .”

  “Why didn’t you tell us you were down there?

  “Because I was scared.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I gave you a swab and everything,” Rodney says, referring to the DNA swab he’d agreed to. (No DNA evidence ultimately connected him to the crime.)

  The two detectives questioning him circle around with their questions for several minutes, growing increasingly volatile, raising their voices, and then calming down to try and coax him into a confession. “You are responsible for a death. I’m not characterizing it as a murder. I don’t know when he came in and what kind of misunderstandings might have taken place. . . . You, based upon everything we know, you are not going anywhere except to Georgia. Do you understand that?” he says. The specter of the death penalty—illegal in New Jersey, handed down with frequency in Georgia—hangs heavy in the room. “At this point, I want to know the truth. . . . You need to have your side of the story out because this is your opportunity. . . . You’re a man, a big man. . . . I’ll tell you what a jury’s going to think. . . . A jury is going to say you were waiting for a moment to strike, and then you struck. It is you. The only thing left is for you to say to me, man, I didn’t mean to do it.”

  “I ain’t kill nobody. I ain’t kill nobody.”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody.”

  The detective, yelling now, interrupts him. “You killed him and you know you did. . . . You know he was a good person. You regret this ever happened, but you need to say it.”

  “I didn’t. . . .”

  “You did it, and I just want to know why.”

  “I didn’t. Why you say I did it?”

  “You!” Bang on the table. “Were!” Bang. “There!” Bang. Silence. “I feel sorry for you.”

  “Why you feel sorry?”

  “You are no less of a person or no less valuable in the eyes of God. I’m not a perfect person. I made a lot of mistakes. And honestly, this is bigger than you and I. You know there is a God and I know there is a God. And he is looking down on us right now.” He says he knows Rodney, after doing this, can’t live with himself, can’t sleep at night.

  “I ain’t kill nobody. Why wouldn’t I go to sleep? I sleep every day. . . . I didn’t kill nobody.”

  “Your life will never be the same. . . . It gets down to you. It gets down to Rodney. It’s about why something like this happened. At the end of the day, Rodney, when we go back to Georgia, you have to answer for it. . . . You and I, you and I are going back to Georgia. You understand that?”

  There is a moment during the two-hour taped recording, as investigators cajoled, harangued, coaxed, and urged Rodney Young to confess—and he denied committing the murder, repeatedly—where doubt enters the mind of listeners.

  What if he really was innocent?

  It is obviously illogical. Overwhelming evidence indicated he committed the murder. Yet, he does not admit it. What is the psychology behind this? listeners speculate. Is it because this is an act so profoundly abhorrent that he cannot admit it to himself? Or what if he really cannot understand that he committed the crime? In arguing for clear procedures to determine mental retardation, the authors of a 2005 Constitution Project report called Mandatory Justice: The Death Penalty Revisited argue that the reason mentally retarded people are not “morally culpable” is in part because they simply do not understand the consequences of their actions: “Persons with mental retardation suffer from substantial disabilities affecting moral reasoning, cognitive functioning, control of impulsivity, and understanding of the basic relationship between cause and effect.”2 Probably this is what is going on. But what if he was telling the truth? Is there any chance at all that he did not commit the crime?

  Listening to the recording, jurors were no doubt waiting for the admission of guilt to come, the aha moment that comes at the end of every Law and Order episode to clarify motive and method. We have come to expect such things, steeped as we are in tight episodic narratives of crime and punishment. One assumes the reason the prosecutors are playing the audio is so that jurors will hear the suspect break down and spill all. All this questioning by detectives, the voices spilling out into the dead silence of a courtroom four years later, presumably, was leading up to Rodney’s spectacular confession.

  But as the tape winds down, the conversation repeats. “Ain’t nothing happen,” Rodney insists. “I said, ‘Ain’t nothing happen.’” The recording hangs on a question about Rodney’s cell phone. “Then why on Sunday, during the homicide, was your phone in Covington the better part of six or seven hours?” the detective asks. “Did you get a flat tire? What made you stay there?” Moments later, the tape dribbles off into a heavy silence. The cursor on the blue screen above the jury’s head just comes to the end of its trajectory and stops. And jurors blink out of their reverie, suddenly alert, shifting in their chairs, stretching, glancing at the clock. Is it lunchtime yet?

  And the thought—what if he is innocent?—nudges, insistent and awful in the stale air of this Covington, Georgia, courthouse. Or, more likely, what if, given his extremely limited mental abilities, he cannot even acknowledge—let alone comprehend—the nature of what he has done? Under those circumstances, what is the function and role of our justice system? And does a defendant like Rodney actually need extra help from the government, via an adequately funded public defender, to protect his rights?

  These thoughts gather steam in the afternoon when a parade of teachers, coaches, and social workers from Rodney’s Bridgeton, New Jersey, high school are put on the stand to testify about his mental acuity. The defense addresses a skeptical jury, and will have a tough time painting a portrait of Rodney as mentally retarded in the eyes of the law. After all, jurors knew that he held a job, lived more or less on his own, moved through the world like the rest of us. But the teachers tell a different story.

  The defense team brings down twelve teachers and others to talk about Rodney Young as a student so that the jury can see him in an expanded way. The big question hanging in the balance is whether or not Rodney is mentally retarded and thus ineligible for the death penalty. Secondarily, the tactic is a way of pleading for mercy in sentencing—a way of setting up phase two of the trial (in case Rodney is found guilty and not mentally retarded). Revealing who he is as a person with very low functioning mental abilities and a troubled childhood becomes a way of asking the jury to recognize his humanity and spare his life.

  To prove that he is mentally retarded, his attorneys must rely loosely on the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which defines someone who is mentally retarded as having an IQ below 70, being diagnosed with the condition before age eighteen, and having deficits in adaptive functioning (daily living skills). Before the trial began, an independent psychologist evaluated Rodney, without his attorney present. However, the psychologist was given leeway by the court to question Rodney about the crime itself. Without knowing what he said, the defense attorneys worried to the judge in advance that admitting this expert’s testimony, wherein Rodney was asked details about the crime, was a violation of Rodney’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The day that jury selection began, the judge agreed to seal the psychologist’s evaluation, which was not released to either side. I
n order to keep it sealed, however, defense lawyers had to agree not to call any expert witness to try and establish Rodney’s retardation. They could present evidence of retardation through “lay witnesses” but not via experts. Reluctantly, Rodney’s attorneys were forced to agree.

  From the very beginning, this proves challenging, for all sorts of reasons. The defense calls twelve of Rodney’s New Jersey teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches, who attest to the fact that he was in special education classes throughout his entire student life in the Bridgeton schools, and that to be in special education classes, students underwent an assessment, including an IQ test; all students in special ed had IQs under 70. However, in those precomputer days, the school district threw out records after seven years. Nothing on paper from his school career proves definitively that his IQ was below 70. (In fact, the defense team had hired someone to do a current, adult IQ test on Rodney and he scored 77, classified by the Wechsler Intelligence Scale as “borderline mental retardation.” They chose not to introduce that evidence.) But at the time, IQ tests put him below 70, according to twelve defense witnesses.

  Wayne Hendricks, a small, precisely dressed African American man in his sixties, is the first to take the witness stand for the defense. He has been a teacher for thirty-eight years, teaching special education at Rodney’s Bridgeton High School. He testifies that Rodney was classified as “educable mentally retarded” based on the standard IQ test, which means he fell between a range of 60 and 69.