Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  After Wells’s visit, Chris reached out to the deputy attorney general of New Jersey, the only state in the country where eyewitness-ID reform had already been implemented, and invited her to a commission meeting, too. Then she packaged video recordings of both presentations, along with copies of New Jersey’s guidelines and computer software and a report from the Department of Justice, and forwarded the entire bundle to various associations of North Carolina sheriffs, police executives, and chiefs of police. Meanwhile, to find out how lineups were currently being handled, she distributed a survey to police officers statewide, and cajoled a third of them into responding. Every one gave lineups simultaneously. Nobody administered them double-blind. Less than half routinely warned a witness that the suspect might not appear in a particular lineup—a finding that dismayed Chris, since a rule about this already existed.

  In June the commission resolved to draft its own reforms. To encourage them along, Chris continued paying out of her pocket for private catering services, the bill from which regularly topped five hundred dollars: chipotle-rubbed flank steak with red pepper aioli; tomato, mozzarella, and avocado napoleons; mixed greens with balsamic vinaigrette. By September a well-fed commission had adopted reforms unanimously. A month later, Chris submitted them to relevant organizations statewide, including law bars for both defense and prosecution and every police figure she’d reached out to four months earlier. Accompanying the recommendations was as gentle an explanation as Chris could stomach: “Although it is believed that the risk of conviction of an innocent person in North Carolina is small, it is the obligation of the justice system to identify the cause of even one innocent conviction and correct it if possible.”

  By January, state associations of both district and police attorneys offered endorsements. Commissioners, assuming their efforts on eyewitness ID complete, began to consider which issue they would address next.

  Before they could, however, they heard from Winston-Salem.

  Back in October, when it received the commission’s recommendations, the Winston-Salem police department had appointed a four-person committee—two detectives, a sergeant, and a crime scene technician—who had read the commission’s proposal skeptically and replied with a memorandum of its own. Their concerns were many. After noticing the commission had relied heavily on the research of a Dr. Gary Wells, the department had begun with a background investigation of him, and determined that “while he is in-fact a highly regarded research scientist and educator, his own curriculum vitae makes no mention whatsoever of any form of practical work experience in law enforcement.” Wells’s research was based on controlled laboratory experiments, not actual policing, and Winston-Salem doubted that findings from either of these applied to the other. They didn’t see why this Actual Innocence Commission had fixated suddenly and arbitrarily on eyewitness identification as its “entire concern,” especially given that the commission’s proposal had offered “no supporting statistical basis about how many such wrongful convictions have occurred in North Carolina, and more specifically in the 21st Prosecutorial District, in comparison to the number of correct convictions.”

  What followed was a line-by-line rebuttal to many of the commission’s twenty-seven recommendations. Four of these the committee agreed with; another seven were already policy. Three more it already followed informally, and now agreed to codify. One it remained undecided about. Eleven others it rejected. The last it declined to comment on at all.

  This twenty-four-page reply the Winston-Salem committee then submitted to its captain, who scrawled across the front page: Concur! Excellent work done by the committee! On January 30, 2004, the department distributed its memorandum statewide, to what looked like every jurisdiction it could think of. Except the commission itself, which learned of the document only secondhand, when it blindsided them near the end of February.

  13

  In Favorable Times and Difficult Times

  As early as the Catawba County jail, where they’d sent him after his arrest, he had prayed every night for the chance to go home, for the truth to come out, for God to offer him peace of mind. When none of these happened he began to consider the possibilities. Maybe the trouble was in his prayers; maybe he was doing it wrong. Mozella had raised him Baptist, though she had rarely brought him or his siblings to church, and now he worried he had never absorbed the proper method. The act felt clumsy. He clasped his hands and knelt, but even these he wasn’t certain about; as a boy he’d seen Mozella pray simply while she walked around the house. When he’d fretted aloud that God might not hear her, as she wasn’t in the correct position, Mozella had smiled. “Think about when you sitting at the table, saying grace before you eat. Are you going to get onto your knees?” This was right, Willie realized, no one knelt at the dinner table. That was sensible before bed, since a person was about to lie down anyway, Mozella assured him. “But God gonna hear your prayers if you’re praying right.” Right depended not on posture but on frame of mind.

  So in prison he tried every way he could think of—before eating in the mess hall, while walking his loops in the yard, at the foot of his bunk before bed. His lips moved, but he had no idea what to say beyond the obvious. “Let me go home,” he tried. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Aloud he realized how selfish this sounded, but it was the truth. He really did want to go home, he really had done nothing wrong. It didn’t work; he remained in prison. At CP and again at Harnett he saw a preacher who visited weekly to lead inmates through church services; with his own prayers foundering, Willie decided to try someone else’s. There the preacher told him that to pray meant to let go, and to give to the Lord. Willie had no idea what this meant. “There isn’t any one way to pray,” the preacher promised. “You’ve just got to go to the Lord with honesty.”

  But Willie had gone to the Lord with honesty.

  “Man accomplishes nothing on his own,” the preacher told him.

  That much, at least, was right. Filing appeals by himself had proved pointless. It ought to be enough that he was innocent; he ought to be able to put that in a letter. But he’d tried, and nothing had come of it. This preacher was right—a man accomplished nothing on his own. Man had to reach out to others. So Willie had changed his prayers, had asked God not to get him out of prison but simply to lead him toward someone who could. This was how he’d landed on jailhouse lawyers inside the prison library. But courts had denied their letters, just as they had his. What he needed was help from outside the prison, but who on the outside would hear him? This was how he’d reached Phillip Griffin, at Prisoner Legal Services.

  But Griffin had dragged his feet, if he’d done anything at all, and again Willie considered the trouble might lie in his own prayers. Maybe still he was doing it wrong. A pastor on the outside had mailed a Bible to him in prison, and now Willie began to study it, to learn for himself how he might convince God to help him. He read every day, when he wasn’t walking loops or on a work assignment. One afternoon he sat on a bench in the yard, reading, when another inmate approached and nodded toward the open Bible in his lap. “You ever think about where you’ll go when you die?” the inmate asked. He was a slender man with skin as black as his pupils, a thin mustache, broad eyes, and a long, oval face. Willie didn’t recognize him, but he was smiling widely.

  “Well, from my understanding, I’m going back to the dirt,” Willie answered cautiously.

  “You don’t feel like you’re going to heaven?”

  “I don’t know much about heaven yet,” Willie admitted. He still had a lot to read. “I think it depends on what type of person you are.”

  But Willie was in prison—certainly he’d done something to be in here, the inmate pointed out. “So do you think you’re going to heaven?”

  “Well, the Bible ain’t told me,” Willie answered. And wasn’t everyone a sinner, inside prison or out? “If God don’t forgive me, I suppose I’m going to hell.”

  “Suppose I told you there is no such thing as hell.”

 
; “There’s always been heaven and hell,” Willie insisted, lifting his Bible.

  The inmate shook his head. “That’s what they’ve taught you,” he said. “You don’t know that. What you’ve learned is, be a good person, you’ll go to heaven. But also, you’ll live forever here on earth.”

  “The Bible says, once you die, you go back to where you come from,” Willie said. “That’s the dirt.”

  The inmate gestured around their prison yard. “Isn’t this dirt?”

  “I ain’t listening to this shit,” Willie told him, and rose and walked away.

  But every day for two weeks the same inmate returned to his bench, and there Willie was, squinting at pages in his Bible. Always he had more questions. One night Willie tracked him down inside his block to show him a passage he’d discovered in Psalms: “The wicked shall be turned into hell.” There, Willie said. See? He pointed toward the page. A sinner went to hell.

  And what exactly was hell? the inmate wanted to know. Did the Bible say?

  As Willie considered this, the inmate produced his own Bible and turned to Matthew. “‘For the one who has died has been acquitted from his sin,’” he read. He looked at Willie. If a man was acquitted from sin, he asked, why would God continue to punish him?

  Willie couldn’t answer.

  The inmate with the questions was named Bryan Garner, and he was a Jehovah’s Witness, he told Willie, unlike the Baptists who visited weekly. He hadn’t always been this way; twenty-five years ago, on the outside, Bryan had been a different man, one with a drug habit, until he’d gotten picked up for speeding, assault, and armed robbery. After more than a decade he’d grown frustrated he still wasn’t up for parole, so one summer morning in 1985 he’d gotten a jump on guards and fled from minimum security. For the next three years he’d lived normally on the outside—changed his name, gotten married, and first learned about Jehovah. It was this last that had proven to be a problem. If the Bible had taught him only one thing, it was to live honestly, to devote himself to the Truth. And there he was, a fugitive who rightly belonged in prison. He was a hypocrite, he realized gradually, not only in his own eyes but in Jehovah’s, which was worse. He’d had no choice but to do what he did next. In March of 1989 he’d walked into a lawyer’s office and then to the gates at Central Prison, to turn himself in for the remainder of his sentence. After processing through CP he’d been transferred to Harnett, same as Willie.

  Since then Bryan had continued studying Scripture with a Bible teacher who visited Harnett on Wednesdays. The next week, Bryan brought Willie to meet him. The pair gave Willie a copy of their Bible, the New World Translation; this was the basis of their faith, Bryan explained, the literal words of Scripture. Anything he said he encouraged Willie to trace back in the text. Constantly Bryan and his teacher were leafing through passages for the particular words and sentences that answered Willie’s questions. The teacher had volunteered to come to prison because this was a place he felt he was needed. “‘Preach the word,’” he quoted from Timothy. “‘Be at it urgently in favorable times and difficult times. Do the work of an evangelizer.’”

  Willie felt skeptical. Every religion he’d seen kept its own version of the Bible, and he knew a person could translate a text to support whatever he wanted. He kept both Bibles, the New World Translation and his own King James, to compare them. Mostly the two books aligned, he found, but the words of the New World Translation were simpler, more direct. From King James he had managed to decipher generalities, but often its language was dense and unfamiliar:

  Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.

  In the New World Translation Bryan gave him, he found the same message, put more clearly:

  Know this, my beloved brothers: Everyone must be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for man’s anger does not bring about God’s righteousness. Therefore, put away all filthiness and every trace of badness, and accept with mildness the implanting of the word that is able to save you.

  The effect was more than convenience, Willie saw. The more cryptic a language, the more one person relied on another to interpret it for him. This in turn propelled him not toward the Bible but toward his fellow men, who were unevenly faithful and unevenly qualified, whom Witnesses mistrusted. Whenever Willie arrived at a word or phrase he didn’t recognize, Bryan suggested he look for it in a dictionary, to find for himself what it meant. No preacher Willie knew had ever done that. Others had simply furnished an answer and expected him to accept it. There was no hierarchy among Witnesses, no ministers or reverends or priests; Bryan’s teacher was no nearer to God than Bryan was, and Bryan was no nearer than Willie. On the outside, Jehovah’s Witness congregations had elders, but these were only men who’d been practicing longer. It didn’t make them any holier. Nearly anyone could observe the Truth for him-or herself, directly in Scripture, and could share it with others who hadn’t. Could serve as a witness on behalf of Jehovah. Thus Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  Willie wasn’t certain. But none of his own prayers had worked. He didn’t see what he had to lose.

  In autumn, after a year and a half at Harnett, he was transferred again, to Sampson Correctional. A laundry job had opened up there on the hangarlike floor of a warehouse, nearly a third of the camp’s four hundred or so inmates hauling white socks and underwear and T-shirts from the washing machines to the dryers, or peeling brown chino pants and shirt jackets from heaping plastic bins. That was what inmates called a smaller prison—a camp, like they were on vacation.

  A week after he arrived, his sister Gladys wrote to Prisoner Legal Services, just as Willie had, preferring it over some jailhouse lawyer her brother could find in a prison library. Because the attorney she’d asked initially, down in San Antonio, had told her not to bother attending Woot’s trial, she still only barely understood what had occurred there. Would someone at PLS please look into her brother’s case? “Raised as we were by our mother, I cannot see any of her sons doing such crimes, because they were taught to respect women, and to treat women as they would want their mother and sisters to be treated,” she wrote. “It is because of our upbringing that I am becoming gravely concerned that my brother may indeed be serving [for] a crime that he did not commit. I do not know any place else to turn.”

  In response, Prisoner Legal Services forwarded Willie a generic request form for postconviction assistance. He’d already filled this out, more than a year earlier.

  Less than two weeks later the state supreme court denied Willie’s latest petition to hear his case. When he heard the news he wrote again to Phillip Griffin; after Willie’s long complaint to him and his boss, Griffin had promised answers within a week, but since then Willie hadn’t heard anything. “I would greatly appreciate if you would let me no what you have done in my case,” he pleaded. “By the way it look you have not done anything. I am looking to hear from you soon and would appreciates any answer that you could give me.”

  A week before Halloween he finally heard back. The news wasn’t good. “I appreciate your impatience,” Griffin wrote. “Unfortunately, I am unable to provide you with the answers you want.” He had read Willie’s transcript and appellate briefs “several times” through, and also examined the law concerning witness identification, hoping to find precedent for appeal. And come up empty. “Thus far, I have not been able to solve the basic problem in your case,” Griffin explained: “The jury believed the victim’s identification of you, supported by the hair found at the scene. While I personally believe that you are innocent, that does not mean that I can get you a trial.” If Willie could afford private counsel, or a private investigator, to persist where Griffin himself had failed, he recommended Willie try this. “Because I believe you are innocent, I have not yet closed your case but continue to explor
e various avenues. I will let you know when I have given up.”

  Louie Ross, from high school, learned the prison phone schedule and began sending Willie money, then waiting by the phone in his apartment, so Willie could call him collect. But insomnia and colds plagued Willie into winter. Now when he blew his nose the tissue turned bloodstained. Nurses prescribed him Tylenol, Robitussin, and Drixoral, sometimes two at a time; they screened his blood and put him through another X-ray, for pneumonia. All negative. Shortly after Thanksgiving, the head psychologist at Sampson summoned him for a meeting. “He was soft-spoken and he talked at length about his despair about being involved in a life sentence in the prison,” the psychologist observed. “He also talked a lot about his mother who had passed away.” His conclusion: “I think Willie enjoys talking. I also think that he is experiencing continued depression.”

  Upset the state supreme court continually refused to hear his case, he appealed its latest denial to the nearest district court, in Raleigh—on his own, since he no longer had any lawyer, as de Torres’s appointment had expired, he couldn’t afford another, and Prisoner Legal Services had declined to help him. Then he wrote again to de Torres, to ask for the documentation he needed for another motion. “I hope you will be able to assist me with this as I have no other way to obtain this much needed material,” he begged. By January de Torres hadn’t replied, so Willie found another jailhouse lawyer. But he still needed his own complete case file. He wrote again to de Torres, then to Griffin, back at PLS, with the same request.

  Replies from both lawyers arrived on the same day. Each had enclosed a photocopy of the brief Willie had asked for, and de Torres had added further paperwork he expected Willie might not have. “Hope this helps,” he wrote.