Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Benjamin Rachlin
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Author photograph by Juliette Kenny
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“21,730 Days” portrait by Christer Berg.
ISBN 978-0-316-31148-9
E3-20170719-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue: 1987
1. Firm and Unequivocal
2. Chris
3. Only a Few Additional Weeks
4. Lake
5. K and O
6. Rosen
7. Some Ideas of Persecution
8. Newman, Coleman, and Weitzel
9. The Benefit of Every Reasonable Inference
10. A Problem for Everyone
11. One of Those Cases
12. Nobody Could Be Against This
13. In Favorable Times and Difficult Times
14. Their Different Individual Viewpoints
15. We Must Use Our Judgment
16. The Elephant in the Room
17. Does Not Admit to Crime
18. An Extraordinary Procedure
19. A Situation Not of His Making
20. We Recommend the Closing of This File
21. Some Concerns About His Medical Condition
22. Any Cases Where Evidence Had Gone Missing
23. In Three Dimensions
24. I Can Tell That This Lady Have Went Over My Case
25. Everybody Knows He Didn’t Do It
26. The First Real Test
27. They Will Try to Get Me to Sign Papers
28. The Last Avenue I Can Think Of to Pursue
29. He Spoke About Going Through Changes
30. Send Him a Questionnaire
31. If They Had Anything, It Can’t Match Nothing from Me
32. What She Said Happened, Happened
33. A Lawyer I’ve Never Met
34. A Type of Panel I’ve Never Seen
35. A Long Time Coming
36. Cases of Innocence Still Open
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Sources
Newsletters
For my parents, Allan and Vicki
and for Jaclyn
Under our criminal procedure the accused has every advantage.… He cannot be convicted when there is the least fair doubt in the minds of any one of the twelve.… Our dangers do not lie in too little tenderness to the accused. Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.
—Judge Learned Hand (1923)
Author’s Note
This is a work of nonfiction. I have changed no names or dates. Dialogue in quotation marks is drawn from trial or interview transcripts; police, hospital, or prison records; personal or legal correspondence; prepared remarks or meeting minutes; or the recollections of those present. Where a person recalled the gist of a discussion but not its particular words, I have rendered dialogue without quotation marks. Where a person’s thoughts or feelings are described, these were recalled afterward in writing, testimony, or interviews. Though of course I have interpreted events, I have done so as faithfully as possible.
More detailed information appears in the Sources.
Prologue
1987
There was a knocking at her door. The sound was unmistakable on an evening so quiet, silent but for insects—a mild night for October in North Carolina, nearly sixty degrees. Must be her neighbor, Carrie thought. No one else would visit her apartment so late, a few minutes after nine o’clock. She knew the time exactly, having just taken her blood pressure pills, as every night, right at nine.
She liked Linda, her neighbor. Before Carrie’s husband died, last Thanksgiving, Linda and Mason—that was Linda’s boyfriend—had stopped by often to check up on him, or to bring ice cream, or to ask if Carrie needed groceries. They were so well mannered it nearly didn’t matter they were black. Only Linda ever visited now, or Carrie’s family, who would have called first. Otherwise Carrie never let anyone in, or even lingered outside. She was too old for public housing, sixty-nine, and ninety pounds, five feet tall if she stood up straight or wore stockings. One of the only white people around. She lived in a neighborhood they called Little Berlin, a cluster of squat, half-brick duplexes near the intersection of I-40 and US-70, an hour west of Charlotte, barely a mile from the Hickory town line. Out front lay concrete tablets for porches, nothing on them but collapsed wooden benches or classroom chairs taken from who knew where. She had disliked the place as soon as they’d moved in, two years earlier, though it was worse now that her husband was gone. On nights like these she would stay inside and cut coupons. She had a booklet of them she had collected from the supermarket that afternoon. Then to bed early. She wore a nightgown and her glasses, had already washed her hair. On her bedspread were clothes she had laid out for church the next morning.
In the porch light it was a moment before her eyes adjusted. Then she saw a man there, so near he startled her. He was a foot taller than she was, his skin as dark as the view beyond her porch. By instinct she fumbled for the handle of the storm door, but too soon it was open, its chain snapped, the hinges buckled all the way to the wall.
“I want you,” the man said, licking his lips.
“You get out,” Carrie gasped. She pulled for the handle of the interior door, but already his hand was inside, and the man yanked it wide.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he told her. Then he was over the threshold. “I want you,” he said again. He pushed Carrie across the living room, past her television set, past a potted snake plant, and onto her couch. The coupons she’d been clipping fluttered to the floor. Before she had fully registered his being inside her apartment he was lifting his shirt over his head, groping at her nightgown. She could see he was much younger than she was, and unshaven. He smelled of alcohol. “I like older women,” he said. “They don’t mess around.”
Had Linda and Mason gone out? Linda would not be able to help—she was too small, too weak, like Carrie. But Mason. She would allow Mason inside, this one time, to help her. She thought briefly of her husband, but he was gone now, she knew. Wasn’t anyone else outside? Her underwear was off. He was forcing himself into her. Her heartbeat rattled beneath his weight. She nearly screamed but chose not to.
He might hurt her even more. She knew he had a knife—a switchblade, several inches long, halfway unfolded. Or he didn’t. Later this would be a source of contention: whether she had actually seen the knife or if the man had simply threatened her and she had imagined one, as real as his stubbled face, as the alcohol on his breath.
He finished. Stepped back from the couch and stood there, shirtless. She hoped he might leave now, on his own, that it might be over. Her body throbbed as though from a distance.
He told her they were going to the bedroom. “Let’s go,” he demanded. But he didn’t know the apartment. He asked her where the bedroom was.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Carrie told him.
This made him angry. He ordered her to the bedroom with his knife—was there a knife? Again she refused. He clutched her arm above the elbow and dragged her from the couch. Her bedroom was fifteen feet across the pockmarked linoleum floor. He found it easily. Hauled her onto the bedspread, atop the clothes she had laid out for church. Climbed over her. Forced himself again. The bedroom so narrow there was no space to run, even if she could get free, which she knew she couldn’t. This man on top of her, the blood gone from her arms. The pale blue walls of the room. A box in the corner, with spare sheets. A white mug on the nightstand.
He finished again. She knew she needed to escape but lacked the strength. Her limbs pulsed when he released them. “I n-need to use the bathroom,” she stammered.
He leaned away. Stumbled off the bed. “I’m hungry,” he announced, then disappeared into the living room.
On the bathroom tile she knelt and prayed. The man heard this and shouted at her from the kitchen to quiet down. “I can’t stand that,” he told her. She could hear him opening cupboards. “What you got in your refrigerator?”
She walked to the door of the kitchen and thought of something. “My neighbors will be over soon,” she told him. “They’re coming over. You should leave. You won’t want to be here.”
The man’s face was hidden inside the empty refrigerator. He was still shirtless. “Mason?” he asked, his voice muffled. Then he straightened. “I saw Mason leave,” he told her. “Their apartment’s empty. Nobody’s here to help you.” He smiled. Looked back into the refrigerator. “What have you got to eat?”
She was stunned to hear Mason’s name. Were Mason and this man friends? Had this been planned? “I didn’t make supper,” she managed. “There isn’t any other food here.” She looked at the kitchen table. A box of Cheez-Its, a package of hamburger buns, a plastic bowl full of fruit. Wicker place mats.
The man tugged his shirt over his shoulders. “I never heard such screaming,” he told her, nodding toward the bathroom, where she had knelt praying. Then he shook his head, as though she disappointed him. He pushed aside the hamburger buns and reached for the bowl of fruit. Took an apple, several bananas. Then he turned and the door clapped shut. He was gone.
1
Firm and Unequivocal
Just after nine thirty on Wednesday morning, July 6, 1988, as 90 percent humidity clamped down outside, Judge Kenneth Griffin settled onto his bench in the Catawba County Justice Center and brought court to session. Seen from the road, the justice center was a concrete slab of a building with asymmetrical columns, a modest parking lot, and tall, slender windows, enjambed beside a sheriff’s office and detention facility. The entire complex sat shouting distance from a gas station, two fast-food restaurants, and a Speed Lube Express. All the rest was rolling farmland.
“Good morning,” Judge Griffin said. Almost nine months earlier, up in Hickory, a town of fewer than thirty thousand residents, in the western third of the state, an elderly woman had been assaulted in her home. “The State of North Carolina has accused Mr. Willie James Grimes…” He paused and looked toward the defense table. “Hold up your hand, Mr. Grimes.” As the man raised his arm, Griffin read the charges: two counts of first-degree rape, one count each of first-degree burglary and kidnapping. “To each of these charges, Mr. Grimes, through his attorney, Mr. de Torres, has entered pleas of not guilty,” Judge Griffin told the jury. He turned the proceedings over to Bill Johnson, an assistant district attorney, who called Carrie Elliott to the stand.
What followed was unsettling testimony. Already petite, Carrie seemed even smaller on the witness stand, where she occupied barely a third of the wooden box. Beside Judge Griffin’s elevated bench, she seemed a tiny fraction of his height. As apparent was her age; she was older than the judge, who himself was over sixty. It was easy to imagine her overwhelmed by an assailant. Johnson led her to recount the facts of that night in October: where Carrie lived, that she hadn’t expected any visitors, her assailant’s demand for something to eat. “How was the intruder dressed?”
“He had on a green shirt,” Carrie remembered. “And jeans, or blue pants.”
Next Johnson established the reason for having brought two separate counts of rape: the couch and the bed were distinct episodes, and he wanted Carrie to lead the jury through each of them. “Approximately how long did this intercourse on the couch last?” he asked. “Do you recall?”
Carrie didn’t. “It seemed like forever to me,” she said. “It was a horrible nightmare.”
“And how far away was his face from yours?”
“Right up over me.”
“Were you able to get a good look at this individual?”
“Yes, sir,” Carrie affirmed, nodding. Had she noticed anything unusual about the man’s appearance, or any identifying marks? She nodded again. She had seen a mole on his face, and that he’d needed a shave. The mole was on the right side, which Carrie recalled because she had broken a fingernail trying to scratch at it. “I fought with him the whole way,” she said.
Since that night in October, Carrie added, she had seen the man again at his probable-cause hearing, and had recognized him there, too. She had also seen him in a photograph police had shown her. Johnson wanted to know more about that photograph—how had it been displayed, and how easily had she recognized Grimes in it? But Grimes’s lawyer objected, and Judge Griffin sustained. Uncertain how much follow-up the judge would permit him, Johnson asked that the jury be dismissed briefly so this could be worked out in private. Once the jurors filed out, Johnson resumed his questions, knowing to proceed carefully. If the judge ruled his questions fair, Johnson would be allowed to ask them again with the jury present. Otherwise what followed would remain inadmissible.
“Mrs. Elliott, you say that you were shown photographs,” he began. “And out of the photographs, picked out one of the attacker.”
“Yes, sir,” Carrie confirmed.
“Who showed you that photograph?”
That was Sergeant Bryant, Carrie told him, of the Hickory Police Department. Bryant had traveled to Claremont, where Carrie was staying with her sister-in-law, to show her the lineup. There Carrie had recognized Grimes’s photo. “And he said, ‘Are you sure?’” Carrie remembered. “And I said, ‘I am positive.’”
“I’m going to show you what I am marking as State Exhibit One,” Johnson advised, which was a series of photographs he expected would look familiar. Offering the lineup to her, he said, “And I ask if you recognize that.”
CARRIE: No, sir.
JOHNSON: You don’t recognize that?
CARRIE: No, sir.
JOHNSON: You say you made an identification of this person.
CARRIE: Yes, sir.
JOHNSON: Of the person who attacked you.
CARRIE: Yes.
JOHNSON: Do you recognize any of these pictures on State Exhibit One as the picture that you identified?
CARRIE: I saw one that looked like it.
JOHNSON: For the record—this State Exhibit One has six windows on it, with six photographs, and beneath each window is a number. Is that correct?
CARRIE: Yes, sir.
JOHNSON: Would you tell us the number of the photograph you say looks like your attacker?
CARRIE: That looks like him, over there.
JOHNSON: Do you see any of these photographs—are you able to tell from these photographs the person that attacked you?
CARRIE: They don’t look like any of them now.
JOHNSON: Do any of these photographs look like the one from which you made an identification?
CARRIE: They were in little blocks like that.
JOHNSON: Are you able to tell us whether any of these is the one that you identified?
CARRIE: Hard to see any difference.
Answers like these wouldn’t help before a jury. Johnson chose an easier question. “At the time of your identification,” he tried, “how certain were you of this individual that you identified?”
“I knew him,” Carrie answered, nodding resolutely. “I am certain that he was the one.”
This was better. “Here in the courtroom,” Johnson asked, “do you see the person that attacked you that night?”
“Yes, sir,” Carrie said.
“Where is that person?”
“Right down there,” Carrie replied, gesturing toward the defense table. “Beside the guy with the red shirt on.”
Only two people sat at the defense table. Grimes, the defendant, had been allowed to change out of his prison jumpsuit for trial and now wore a red button-down shirt. Next to him sat de Torres, his lawyer. Carrie was pointing at de Torres. “I remember him,” Carrie continued, not realizing her error. “I will never forget that picture of him over me. I will never be able to erase that.”
Johnson was stunned. Of course Carrie meant Grimes, he knew. She had gotten confused. De Torres, who was staring in disbelief, was a white man, and he and Grimes didn’t look anything alike.
To minimize her mistake, Johnson rushed for a follow-up. “When you say ‘picture,’ you are talking about a mental picture,” he mumbled. “Not a photograph?”
“Yes,” Carrie told him. “What I saw with my own eyes.”
“How positive are you of your identification of him?” Johnson asked.
“I am positive.”
“That is all for now,” Johnson said, and sat down.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 1
