Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  Now, though. Guilty. He wasn’t sure he understood what this meant. Somewhere nearby a voice was murmuring; de Torres had leaned in and was saying something. “Don’t worry about this,” he heard. “We can beat this. They’ll dismiss it in appeals court.” Then a bailiff was leading him to his cell in an adjoining building. He passed the weekend in confusion. On Monday they hauled him to his sentencing hearing. There was de Torres again, assuring him a conviction meant only a few additional weeks, there was no way an appellate court would uphold any of this. The judge would rule lightly, there was so little evidence, de Torres kept saying, until the judge announced his life sentence. Still, it didn’t matter, de Torres insisted. They would appeal. Until then, prison wouldn’t be so bad, Willie had been there already, he could last a little longer. They had color television, remember.

  For three more days he sat in his cell, trying to interpret what had happened. He knew he wouldn’t be staying. From repeat offenders in Catawba County jail he’d learned all felons were processed through Central Prison, over in Raleigh, as it was centrally located and maximum security. There was no predicting how long he would be kept there before shipping someplace else, just as there was no telling where he’d eventually be shipped. If he got shipped at all. Some felons stayed at CP long term. Willie wanted to avoid this if he could, the county inmates had told him. What he wanted was a smaller prison, since those were typically quieter and more accommodating. CP held close to a thousand. And because of processing, that number included every capital criminal in the state, plus the ones on death row—the worst sorts, murderers and rapists, actual rapists, unlike him. It scared him to imagine what things might be like there. Would his cell be large enough to walk around in? Would he be allowed outdoors at all? He’d heard an inmate at CP got only a single phone call a year, and it could be more than this long until the prison decided what to do with him, even if de Torres was right and he could count on an appeal. How long would an appeal take? It had taken nine months to get his trial.

  But now that he’d been convicted, they acted swiftly. Friday, four days after his sentencing, Willie was on a bus for Raleigh. By then his conviction had been entered into the statewide Department of Correction database, where, because of a software flaw, computers couldn’t handle the numerics of a life term. Instead, the system listed his three convictions—two for rape, another for kidnapping—beside his “Term Imposed,” as best the software could register it: “999 YRS. 99 MOS. 98 DAYS.”

  No way.

  4

  Lake

  At Northern Telecom, Chris was promoted quickly. Soon she managed contracts. Then audits. Then budgets. Then she was finance director. But there were frustrations; one year she would overhaul the budget, then the corporation would reorganize, so she would overhaul the budget again. Then the corporation would reorganize. Her boss told her another promotion would mean her serving a rotation in Montreal, where the company was headquartered. She didn’t want to move to Canada. Around the same time, she gave birth again—she took two months off to recover, longer than before, and realized she didn’t look forward to returning.

  She realized, too, there was other work she could imagine doing. She’d always been interested in law; at Northern Telecom what she liked most were contracts, which was basically legal work, she figured. And she’d never gotten James McDowell out of her head. Had he been executed by now? Would a better attorney have made a difference for him? How had his trial worked from the inside? Mostly, though, she knew that, if she stayed at Northern Telecom, she might wake up one morning, a frustrating career behind her, and regret not having tried something different. She had no idea how she and her husband would afford law school; she earned more than Mitch did, who’d left his job as a CPA for a career in something called venture capital, a field Chris had never previously heard of. Even Mitch wasn’t sure there was a future in it. If she left Northern Telecom, it would be the second time the couple had forgone a reliable salary. Still, Chris had put herself through college, and she thought she could get herself through law school. And she’d let him pursue his interests, Mitch reminded her. She ought to do the same for herself.

  The first thing she did when she arrived at law school in Chapel Hill was look up James McDowell, who turned out never to have been executed. He was still in prison. New lawyers had raised twenty-seven issues on appeal, one of which was that his shooting had never been part of a robbery. This time it had stuck. McDowell was still a murderer, but no longer was he a thief. “As this is the basis for the only aggravating circumstance,” she read in the court’s ruling, “we must also vacate the sentence of death and impose a life sentence.”

  She felt strangely relieved he’d never been executed. Even a criminal like McDowell deserved a better attorney than he’d had, and to fixate on the robbery as a reason for a death sentence still baffled her.

  Because Mitch traveled so often for work, Chris frequently towed her three children along with her to classes. One professor saw them so many times, he inserted their names into a criminal-law exam. She drove an eight-year-old Honda whose backseat was strewn with Cheerios. Then, in her second year, a discovery: there was a future in venture capital, after all. Money ceased to be a concern. She and Mitch bought a four-million-dollar estate, flanking the sixth hole of a country club. They bought a vacation home along the shore of Lake Gaston. Chris traded her Honda for a silver Audi convertible; three different times she drove it to her own court appearances, to argue speeding tickets. She donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the law school, for a scholarship for single parents.

  When she graduated, her experience at Northern Telecom attracted offers from corporate firms, but the money meant she was free to continue following her interests. She turned the corporations down to clerk in the state court of appeals. After six months, one judge recommended her to another, and she ended up with I. Beverly Lake at the state supreme court.

  Lake was a square-jawed, green-eyed man in his late sixties, with a tall forehead, drooping eyelids, and wisps of hair he combed neatly horizontal. He liked to quip that his first initial stood for Integrity, or Intelligence—in fact it stood for Isaac, a biblical name. He’d sat on the bench for more than ten years, including four on the state’s highest court, where his father, too, had once been chief justice. Though often he signed his name Jr., after his father, actually he was Beverly the third: Lake’s great-grandfather had once been colonel of a Confederate brigade from Kentucky, and had marched home from that war with its flag tucked inside his coat pocket, where it would remain with his family for the next century and a half: through his son, Beverly I, a physics professor at Wake Forest College, then through his son, Beverly II, a law professor and assistant attorney general of North Carolina in the difficult year of 1954, during Brown v. Board. That year, Beverly II had traveled north to Washington to warn that forced integration, without a period of gradual transition, might so destabilize public schools in his state as to collapse them entirely. Twice denied the job of governor, Beverly II returned instead to private practice, then was appointed to the state supreme court, and elected chief justice—like his son after him, I. Beverly Lake III, who hung on the wall of his chambers that same Confederate battle flag his great-grandfather had once marched home from a war that had already ended.

  Lake himself had entered North Carolina politics as a Democrat, despite his centrist views and the fact that he got along well with Republicans. Finally he decided that Democrats as a whole had veered too far left. He registered as a Republican, thus alienating many of his closest friends, some of whom never forgave him. Elsewhere it gained him a reputation as a man who followed his principles. By the end of the decade, he was appointed a judge, then to the state supreme court. In 2000, after hiring Chris Mumma as a clerk, he was elected chief justice. He was the first Republican to hold the post in more than a decade.

  Lake and Chris got along grandly—he the product of Southern gentility, she a spunky, no-nonsense thirty-something with
a smile that felt like a reward, a woman who spoke “pretty normally, for a Yankee,” he joked to his friends. As chief justice, Lake oversaw budgets for the state’s courts, and here was a clerk with experience in finance who could help him. Before, Lake had assigned cases and then didn’t see them again until the clerks had finished drafts of opinions. Now, Chris asked if, rather than everyone working in isolation, they could meet every so often for discussion of the cases. Lake agreed. Soon he found he enjoyed the camaraderie.

  Still, there were frustrations. A case Chris saw on Lake’s desk struck her as mishandled, like McDowell’s had been. Then she saw another where her doubts were more serious. Then another. She wasn’t certain these men had committed their crimes at all. It had never occurred to her that a person might wrongly be found guilty—in law school she’d learned every safeguard against this—but here they were, their files fanned out before her like a school project. She’d never been good at keeping a thought like this to herself. She wouldn’t stand for it, she told Lake. She didn’t think he ought to, either.

  But she knew better, Lake told her. Guilt wasn’t a question his court considered. That had been addressed already, at trial. Lake wasn’t about to relitigate a case, and neither were his colleagues—for good reason, since none of them had been present for trial. A judge didn’t overrule jurors based on his own subjective opinion. The U.S. Supreme Court had said so itself. In Barefoot v. Estelle it had ruled that higher courts “are not forums in which to re-litigate state trials.” Lake showed this ruling to Chris, as well as Herrera v. Collins, where one justice had remarked that his inquiry “does not focus on whether the trier of fact made the correct guilt or innocence determination, but rather whether it made a rational decision to convict or acquit.” Those italics were the court’s, Lake pointed out. He could sympathize with Chris’s unease, and theoretically, just as an exercise, her instincts might even be sound that a particular claimant was innocent, though it was unlikely. Either way, that was for trial courts to resolve. An appeal was only procedural. By the time a defendant reached Lake’s chambers, his guilt was no longer the question.

  Chris balked. Already she’d left one bureaucracy frustrated by its mismanagement. She didn’t intend to join another. She felt emboldened by Lake’s admission she might be onto something—it didn’t matter those hadn’t been his words exactly. He was wrong about this, she decided. Not about the law, but the moral logic that underpinned it. You might be right, but we can’t do anything about it. That was what they’d told her about the camels in Libya. Well, it wasn’t good enough. She wasn’t soft; if the men in these cases were guilty, she was glad they’d been convicted. She just wasn’t certain they were guilty. She argued with Lake as much as she dared, and, when that went nowhere, she stalked around nearby chambers until even the other justices bristled. For one defendant she quietly filed a clemency petition with the governor. Finally, unsure what else to do, she phoned a former law professor named Rich Rosen.

  5

  K and O

  Central Prison was a behemoth of concrete and brick and looped razor wire, all rectangles and sheer vertical faces, so cramped and monolithic that it looked from the outside like it had been modeled from toy blocks, then galvanized and blown a thousand times out of proportion. Through the iron grille shielding his bus window, Willie could make out wire fencing tipped with barbed chutes, and even taller guard towers, giant lampposts bracketing the entire campus. The prison entrance was so wide and well marked it looked like the on-ramp to a highway. After the turn, however, its pavement continued for only a stubbed hundred yards or so before the first security gate.

  A new inmate began his time in K dorm, one of two floors in CP’s processing wing. The other was O dorm, upstairs. Guards put him in a room the size of an elongated trailer, double bunks separated by a narrow aisle. If he rolled to one side of his mattress, not much more than a pallet, he bumped into the wall, and if he extended his arm in the other direction, across the aisle, he could touch the neighboring cot. A pair of these rooms made up K dorm, plus what looked like former social quarters. The prison had set bunks in there, too. This way it could warehouse something like eighty men, all of them dressed in identical white T-shirts and brown chino pants over white boxers and socks. Guards gave him two sets as soon as he arrived.

  Prison was loud. From the moment they rose, inmates hollered across rooms, kicked and rattled their cell bars or metal bed frames, slapped playing cards or dominoes bricks or their open palms onto the floor and tables. They drummed with their knuckles or fingers; they “spit their lyric.” Prison was bedlam. In the open cell he couldn’t find anywhere that wasn’t raucous. Somehow the place was both cavernous and claustrophobic. At every moment, strangers were beside or behind him; he felt exposed even under the sheets of his bed. If he lay facing the wall, he could feel attention on his back, could hear men snore along his row. He couldn’t sleep this way, and, when he could, it was no more than an hour or two before he startled awake. Even then, in the artificial dusk, he could see the outlines of strangers, and couldn’t trick himself into privacy.

  In daylight he kept to himself, and kept quiet. This was not as easy as it sounded. A fresh inmate was an opportunity, meaning he might have funds. To find out, veteran inmates had plans. They drew pictures or their own greeting cards; did he want to buy one? They offered to wash his laundry for a dollar or two a week. Maybe he would simply loan them a little something, on faith? Another game was to offer a newcomer a cigarette, then demand it back once he’d smoked it. Not a replacement—the exact same cigarette. If he refused, he owed a favor. He had taken something without returning it, this meant he was in debt, unless he wanted trouble. Again and again Willie shook his head.

  Each day that first week, a batch of inmates was transferred upstairs, to O dorm, and new felons arrived to fill the bunks they’d vacated. Willie shuffled between evaluations. First a medical screening, where staff recorded his height, weight, and blood pressure, and tested him for tuberculosis. Was he presently being treated for any health problems? He wasn’t. Was he taking any medications? He wasn’t. Was he thinking of harming himself? He wasn’t. They wanted to know his work history, his family history, his education. How far had he gone in school? Twelfth grade. Was he married? Yes, but only technically. Had he ever held a job? Before he’d been arrested, he’d held two. They assigned him a case manager who would determine his custody level. This followed a point system. Even within any of its three levels of security—minimum, medium, and maximum, though maximum sometimes was called close custody, and minimum sometimes was called honor grade—there were steps and grades and degrees, from lockdown all the way to parole, each corresponding to various privileges. An inmate’s crime equaled a predetermined number of points, as did his criminal history. It also mattered whether authorities sensed he had taken responsibility for his actions, or felt remorse. It counted in Willie’s favor that he had never been arrested before, besides the drunk-driving charge. But it counted against him that he insisted he was innocent. This meant he hadn’t taken responsibility, and a certain number of points. Too many points. He would remain in maximum security. In another six months, he would be eligible for reevaluation.

  Until then medical staff saw no reason for mental-health intervention. “During interviewing he was polite and cooperative,” a psychologist observed in his file. “Willie gave no indications to being a potential behavioral or management problem.” In fact what he felt was numbness, and disorientation. Nine months earlier he had been living with Brenda, working at the textile plant and furniture shop. He couldn’t believe how fast things had changed.

  His family couldn’t believe it, either. Back in October, when he’d been arrested, his sister Gladys, who worked as a military nurse at Brooke Army Medical Center, in San Antonio, had received a phone call from her niece, telling her Willie was in trouble. Gladys had asked what kind. “They say Woot raped a white woman in Hickory,” her niece had told her.

  “Th
at isn’t true.”

  “That’s what they said,” her niece insisted. So Gladys called a cousin, who confirmed what the niece had told her. At once Gladys booked a flight to Charlotte, then drove to Newton, where Willie was being held before trial. The five-hour flight was more than enough time to consider the possibilities, but when she landed she wasn’t any less bewildered. Woot would know better than to mess with a white woman. And an older white woman? That didn’t fit, either. If their mother had been firm about one rule when Gladys and Willie were kids, it was respect for their elders. One day their mother herself would grow old, she had warned them, and, because of the age gaps between her children, Gladys’s and Woot’s siblings would grow old not soon after, so she never wanted to hear about them causing trouble for elderly people. “I don’t care how hungry you are,” she had threatened. “You ever mess with an older person, you’re in trouble with me.” Possibly if Woot had been desperate, he might have tried to rob someone? But even this was hard to imagine, as he had always been so gentle. Now they were saying he had raped a white lady. Her cousin had told her the woman was sixty-nine years old. This couldn’t be right. Their own mother had been sixty-eight when she died.

  In the Newton jail Willie explained what had happened. Gladys didn’t like that he had given himself to the police. “Why didn’t you come here with a lawyer?” she demanded.