Between eleven o’clock and one the loudspeakers blared again for lunch, in the same rotating order as for breakfast. Once his block was called, an inmate had fifteen minutes to report to the mess hall and pass through a food line, then another fifteen to eat. After thirty minutes, he had to be outside again. When every block was through, the mess hall closed for cleaning, then reopened at four thirty for dinner, before another return to the yard. Throughout all this were periodic counts. These, too, were announced by loudspeaker. Count time, count time! All inmates report to your assigned dorm! Get on your assigned bunk! Remain on your assigned bunk until the count is clear! A count occupied thirty or forty minutes, and was called five or six times a day. Then speakers would blast Count clear! and Willie would return to the yard to resume his loops.
At sunset the yard closed and inmates returned inside to another count, then to church for a service, or to the dayroom to watch television, or to their bunks. As daylight contracted toward the end of the year, so did an inmate’s time on the yard. For this reason an inmate who preferred to spend his time outdoors, as Willie did, preferred warmer months, despite the southern humidity, for their longer days. In December the yard closed as early as five.
Most nights he was in bed by nine thirty, more than an hour before lights dimmed. He hoped desperately to spend as much of his day as he could in solitude, in an empty room or walking a barren sweep of grass, because it was where he felt least afraid. On a lucky night he was asleep by the time other inmates retired, and didn’t hear the noise they made entering. Inevitably he awoke again by midnight or one and lay there, his pulse ricocheting through his skull, staring at the mattress above him, or, if he had been assigned an upper bunk that week, at the ceiling. At night he wasn’t supposed to leave his dorm—couldn’t, in fact, because its doors had been locked. Even to use the bathroom he needed permission from a guard. Some guards didn’t enforce this rule, but others were hardheads. If a hardhead found him out of bed he risked being charged with an infraction.
For the few hours he slept, he dreamed he was being chased by inmates in brown uniforms, their eyes widened crazily, mouths foaming like dogs’; or by guards, their batons dangling heavily from their belts, slapping their thighs as they sprinted toward him, pistols drawn. “I’m innocent!” he always screamed, and the men would smile. They never listened. Or he was pacing down a corridor, relieved at the quiet, the other inmates from his dorm off in the dayroom. Then all forty of them emerged from around the corner, carrying pistols and clubs they had robbed from the guards. They hadn’t been in the dayroom after all. They had been waiting for him. Or he was back at trial, the judge was shaking his head sternly as jurors stared at Willie in horror. Then Steve Hunt showed up. When jurors saw him they all collapsed into laughter.
When he awoke his head was askew and his pillow was stuffed into a corner, his thin sheet wrapped around his leg like a telephone cord. He had sweat through his shirt and his heart was racing. His arms throbbed from clenching his fists. Often he was rigid with terror, or his knuckles were bruised from where he’d flailed against the wall. After weeks like this he came down with an illness that lasted into November. His throat burned and his appetite was gone. What little he did eat, he vomited. He put in a request for sick call, where nurses suggested a liquid diet until he could keep down solid food. They gave him cold tablets and Tylenol.
Until Steve Hunt had knocked on Brenda’s door a year earlier, nothing about Willie’s life had augured prison. He was the eighth of nine children; his mother, Mozella, had married four times, fully half of which ended in tragedy. At fifteen she married a man named Samuel Vinson, had her first child, and then four more. But Samuel Vinson left her, so Mozella remarried—to Cliff Grimes, with whom she bore another pair of children. One afternoon Cliff climbed atop their roof to clean it, slipped, and fell to his death. Again Mozella remarried, this time to Edgar Brooks, with whom she became pregnant with her eighth: a boy, due at the close of that summer, 1946. In July, eight months into her pregnancy, another car swerved into Edgar Brooks’s, and killed him instantly. A month later Willie was born.
Most of Willie’s half siblings were fully grown by then, off living with wives or husbands of their own. Only one remained from Mozella’s first marriage, Robert Lee, and two from her second, Gladys and Cliff Jr. The three of them plus Willie and Mozella shared a tiny three-room, tin-roofed cottage off Route 1 in Lawndale, owned by a white family whose land Mozella sharecropped. Then Mozella remarried a final time and gave Willie a younger brother, Bobby Lewis. One of the older half siblings pinned the younger ones with nicknames whenever he visited, and each time he arrived he found Willie playing in the clay outside their cottage, rolling and digging with his bare hands. Always rooting around, his brother said, laughing at him. Always rootin’. Root. Woot.
Lawndale then was a hilly swatch of farmland midway between Asheville and Charlotte, smaller than a square mile, pocked with disrepaired barns and grass the color of copper and highways indistinguishable from back roads. Or, rather, properly this was Lawndale, though certain folks considered it nothing more than a nameless outskirt of Shelby, a town of fifteen thousand, twenty minutes south—assuming you owned a car, which many in Lawndale didn’t. Others regarded both towns as the Piedmont, meaning the larger area roughly between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Catawba River. The entire county was 460-odd square miles named for a colonel who’d helped to halt the British advance into North Carolina, and since those days it had stayed agricultural: corn, wheat, oats, and sweet potatoes, but mainly cotton. Eventually, in the 1950s, there were also dairy farms and a small handful of textile and manufacturing plants, but even then Mozella and her children knew only sharecropping, like most poor families in Lawndale. (Or Shelby, or the Piedmont.)
As early as the 1940s and ’50s, blacks and whites were relatively integrated on that stretch of farmland, at least in geographical terms, since a sharecropping family occupied a fringe of the same property as the family it worked for. Besides schools, what really segregated a community like this was not race but money. A landowning family could earn income simply by sitting still. A sharecropping family, white or black, could labor from sunrise to sunset without earning a cent. (Though it was also true that most landowning families were white, and most sharecroppers black.) During cotton season, which might last three months every autumn, Willie and others like him were excused from school annually to help their parents on the farm. Even outside that season, a sharecropping child often split his day between farm and schoolhouse. A child of landowners thought only of the latter, and he kept there year-round.
Few jobs other than farming existed in Lawndale, since only a single textile mill had come to stay: Cleveland Mills, where linemen threaded yarn, dyed it, packed it into cardboard boxes, stacked those boxes onto trucks, and sent them off to warehouses. Trucks rumbled down Route 1 nearly every day, filled with yarn. If a person’s future didn’t include the mill or the fields, he generally headed south to Shelby, or else thirty miles north, to Hickory, where industry had taken better hold. If he had any money he could try farther still: DC, Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York.
At Vans Grove Elementary and then Douglas High, both all-black, Willie earned steady Bs. He was talented at math, and in other classes got by. He was a shy boy, and quiet; he liked school, but it was hard for him to introduce himself to strangers, and harder since he attended only two-thirds of the year, due to the sharecropping. It was obvious what a benefit education could be. A handful escaped Lawndale each year, to high schools up north or even to college. Willie tried to apply himself. He graduated from Douglas in 1964, a year before county schools integrated—though Douglas itself never would, and instead was shuttered.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, after four months of waiting in O dorm, de Torres wrote to share that he’d filed Willie’s appeal. Only now, through a fog of incomprehension, did Willie begin to absorb what had happened: unless an appeal succeeded, the prison would keep him, th
ough he had committed no crime. All through his nine months in county jail and the four days of trial, literally until the moment of the jury verdict, he’d assumed the truth would come out. Of course it would. He had waited so long to go home. In all that time he hadn’t seen a single piece of real evidence against him. The fingerprints hadn’t matched, the hair had been uncertain, and Carrie Elliott—couldn’t anyone see that she hadn’t truly recognized him? Now he saw the facts had never mattered. That was the explanation. Everyone at his trial must have known he was innocent. There had been a decision to convict him anyway. Had Miss Elliott really even been raped? Possibly she and Linda McDowell had invented this fiction, as they had the others.
Regardless, de Torres should still have gotten him off—he seemed like a good man, de Torres did, but where had he been during the long wait for trial? Willie didn’t know how many hours de Torres had invested in his case, but it hadn’t felt like enough. Then Steve Hunt, and the Catawba County prosecutors, had denied him any chance by refusing to turn over evidence. He hadn’t done a single thing wrong, and these people had thrown him in prison anyway. Why had they told those lies? Linda must have grown jealous. That was what all this was about. He’d never been as close with Linda as he had with her sisters; as far as he could remember, they’d never had problems, but that must have been it. What about the others—the Hickory police, and the district attorneys? He wondered this constantly.
When he shuddered awake at two in the morning he was aglow, he was seething. His every filament vibrated hideously. Against the walls of his lungs roiled gales of pressure, as though his entire chest had been cauterized. He sensed he might be corroding internally, like a battery. He felt equally likely to explode, like gunpowder, or cave in, like sand. He was livid. He was incandescent. The blood in his veins was spoiling. For entire days his own limbs felt prosthetic.
He held no hope for de Torres’s appeal, because he knew direct appeals were ruled on locally, meaning the people who considered them were the same goddamn people who had sent him here. It didn’t surprise him when de Torres’s appeal was denied. Legally the next step was the court of appeals, but Willie didn’t want to waste his time. He wrote directly to the state supreme court. This was denied, too.
8
Newman, Coleman, and Weitzel
Around the same time that Rich Rosen asked his law students for help reading letters from inmates, a separate group of students, at Duke University, just ten miles southwest of where Rosen worked at Chapel Hill, were volunteering to read letters of their own. None of the Duke students knew Rosen personally, but they’d heard of Ronald Cotton, the man he’d freed, and resolved to do something to help. Because they weren’t yet licensed to practice law, they couldn’t formally accept clients, but they could respond to inmates who wrote them for help, and mail police or prosecutorial files, which inmates usually couldn’t access on their own. Students hadn’t been at this for long before they heard from two professors up in New York, at the Cardozo School of Law, who’d founded a nonprofit called the Innocence Project, aimed at solving the same problem. Appeals for help had overwhelmed them, too, so they were putting out word to a handful of top law schools across the country, hoping to plant seeds for a national network of satellite programs. The Duke students agreed to convert their volunteer group to an innocence project. For that, however, they needed faculty advisers.
They chose Theresa Newman and Jim Coleman, two well-liked, left-leaning professors they guessed would be receptive to the idea. Polite and self-effacing, Newman looked precisely the scholar she was, with short, no-fuss hair and the demeanor of someone who spent considerable time in libraries. Her colleague Jim Coleman, one of the few influential lawyers in North Carolina who also happened to be black, wore horn-rim glasses and a trim gray beard, his hair as short as moss. The effect was of a kind, oval face, ringed by gray fuzz.
“Seventy to seventy-five percent of people in prison today went to trial with a court-appointed attorney,” Coleman once bemoaned to Duke Magazine. Pay for such work was low, which meant that many court-appointed attorneys in North Carolina were not in fact professional public defenders. “Instead they are attorneys who take the cases because they are just starting in practice, and need the work. Or they don’t have other work, because they are not very good at what they do… Judges are satisfied to appoint a lawyer who is breathing.”
Newman and Coleman both agreed to serve as faculty advisers for the new Duke Innocence Project. This required they attend a training session up in New York. There they met Rich Rosen, who had come to explore the same possibility for Chapel Hill. All three lawyers had never been in the same place before, and now they got to talking. Their two campuses were only twenty minutes apart, they realized. It made sense to work together.
Not everyone agreed their work was worth doing. To many of Rosen’s and Newman’s and Coleman’s colleagues, in North Carolina and across the country, the letters they were reading were no more than acts of desperation; there was zero chance these inmates were innocent, only that they had nothing to lose by filing paperwork. The American criminal justice system had always trivialized the chances of wrongful conviction, feeling certain—as Chris Mumma no longer could—that protections at trial made that outcome impossible. A series of reforms in the 1950s and ’60s had bolstered this attitude still further. In Mapp v. Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court clamped down on unlawful searches and seizures, and in Gideon v. Wainwright it extended the right to an attorney to those defendants unable to pay for one. After Miranda v. Arizona, anyone who was arrested had to be informed of his rights; after United States v. Wade, he was entitled to his lawyer during most lineups.
Quickly these reforms proved controversial, publicly as well as on the court itself, since, by design, in addition to protecting defendants, they provided new hurdles for conviction. One justice, dissenting from Miranda, warned that “the rule announced today will measurably weaken the ability of the criminal law to perform [its] tasks”:
I have no desire whatsoever to share the responsibility for any such impact on the present criminal process. In some unknown number of cases, the Court’s rule will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets and to the environment which produced him, to repeat his crime whenever it pleases him. As a consequence, there will be not a gain, but a loss, in human dignity.
Over the next two decades the court reeled back several of these reforms, narrowing what precisely it had promised and in which circumstances those promises applied. First it ruled that poor defendants, though entitled to a lawyer, were not entitled to choose which particular lawyer they liked. Then it defined counsel only modestly, as “reasonably effective assistance given the totality of the circumstances.” Other reforms required legislative follow-up that had never come to pass. The courts already were getting it right—why reshape them? “Our society has a high degree of confidence in its trials,” wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1993, “because the Constitution offers unparalleled protections against convicting the innocent.” That sentiment had prevailed for seventy years. “Under our criminal procedure, the accused has every advantage,” a court of appeals judge, Learned Hand, had remarked in 1923. “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.”
At last that ghost would appear, however—on October 26, 1987, one day before Willie Grimes’s arrest in North Carolina, in an article in Newsweek magazine. Over in Britain, Newsweek relayed, a geneticist had discovered a technique for comparing human DNA. Already the technique had been used “to resolve a handful of paternity and immigration cases,” as well as, “more dramatically, to link a twenty-seven-year-old man… to the rape-murders of two teenage girls near the English village of Enderby.”
One reader of that issue of Newsweek happened to be an American lawyer whose client had been incarcerated for a decade, for a rape outside Chicago. From Newsweek the lawyer und
erstood that DNA might implicate a person, but now he wondered if it had ever been used for the reverse: not to implicate someone, but to exculpate him. It hadn’t. In January 1988, he filed a motion to try.
The result made his client, Gary Dotson, the first person in United States history to be exonerated by DNA testing.
It didn’t stop, though, at Dotson. Over the next half decade came nearly thirty more DNA exonerations, so many that in 1996 the National Institute of Justice chose the subject for its annual report. Of twenty-eight convictions the report examined, every one had relied on eyewitness testimony at trial. Seven had relied on hair analysis. Four had relied on “expert scientific testimony” by a man who’d worked as a forensic serologist, and then a medical examiner, in two different states before being charged with fraud. On average, the exonerated men had spent seven years in prison, though eight had served a decade or more. One had served nine and a half years for the rape of a woman on whom sperm had been found—despite the fact that he’d previously undergone a vasectomy, so couldn’t have produced sperm if he’d wanted to.
In response to that NIJ report, the U.S. attorney general, Janet Reno, formed the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, which in turn produced a document called Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement. “Recent cases in which DNA evidence has been used to exonerate individuals have shown us that eyewitness evidence is not infallible,” the guide warned. “Even the most honest and objective people can make mistakes in recalling and interpreting a witnessed event; it is the nature of human memory. This issue has been at the heart of a growing body of research.” Nonetheless, the guide offered no enforceable rules, only a “consensus of recommended practices.”
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 8
