Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  With this new plan in mind he met again with the prison psychologist, for a checkup. “Willie seemed to be in good spirit,” the psychologist observed. “He talked about focusing his attention on getting a re-trial and his desire to keep his mind off of the fact that he has such a long sentence.” The psychologist himself was skeptical further appeals would lead anywhere, but still privately believed they were valuable, “as a means of diverting [Willie’s] attention.” He also noticed Willie was “investing himself a good deal into religious activities and he finds that helpful. He can see that the medication is helping with the depression. He seems to enjoy our conversation and appreciates the contact.”

  His depression aside, something about Willie struck the psychologist as unlike other inmates he had seen. He couldn’t quite articulate what it was. “In general Mr. Grimes appears to be a man who has less of the overall characterological elements to his personality of many other inmates,” he noted. Why this was, he wasn’t certain.

  District court in Raleigh denied his appeal, on the ground that it lacked jurisdiction over state supreme court decisions. Phillip Griffin visited him in prison, which turned out not to matter, since Griffin could do no more in person than he had in his letters. He still believed Willie’s transcripts suggested his innocence, but this alone still wasn’t enough for an appeal. With some luck, another attorney, or a hired detective, might turn up something more—Griffin himself worked for the state, however, and PLS didn’t conduct those sorts of investigations. They received letters from as many as twelve thousand inmates a year. There was nothing more he could offer.

  Willie couldn’t afford another attorney, or a detective. He realized he needed someone who could take his case on for free, someone with influence. He wrote to Oprah Winfrey to explain who he was and what had happened to him. He wrote to Montel Williams. He wrote to the Legal Defense Fund at the NAACP. He wrote to the clerk’s office back at Catawba County, to ask after his evidence. He didn’t know that Ed de Torres had tried this already; a couple of months earlier, in January, around the same time Willie had mailed his latest appeal to Raleigh, de Torres had phoned the clerk to ask for the same thing. The rape kit that doctors had conducted on Carrie Elliott, the hair that police had recovered from her robe and bedspread, the fingerprints they’d lifted from the banana in her kitchen—the DNA tests he’d asked for at sentencing had never been conducted on any of these, de Torres knew, and they remained Willie’s best—only—chance for appeal.

  When the clerk’s office phoned him back at ten thirty the following morning, however, de Torres was out of the office, and his secretary had taken a message: “Evidence has been destroyed.”

  The town of Hickory, though only thirty miles north of Lawndale, was another country. After his car was stolen, unable to make it back up to Towana in DC, he decided to try there because, unlike Lawndale, over the past several decades Hickory had industrialized, so that, also unlike Lawndale, it was hiring—at its furniture plants, its textile and hosiery mills, even its fiber optics and telecommunications companies.

  But the end of farming in Hickory, though it had brought jobs, had also ended the only incentive for black and white families to occupy the same land, and the town had had a difficult time integrating its schools, which was another way of saying it had done its very best not to. After the decision of Brown v. Board in 1954, wherein the U.S. Supreme Court, partly at the urging of Beverly Lake’s father, had ordered that southern schools integrate not at once but rather with “all deliberate speed”—a phrase North Carolina interpreted to mean its different towns could proceed however they liked—the Hickory school board had formed a committee to study how Brown applied within its jurisdiction and concluded more or less that it didn’t.

  In a radio address at the start of that academic year, the governor urged black families statewide to “take pride in your own race by attending your own schools.” If his state could no longer segregate by law, he figured, then its students and parents must assume that responsibility themselves. Just in case, he helped enact the Pupil Assignment Act of 1955, and a year later the Pearsall Plan, each intended to delay integration. Both the state’s senators, and eight of its twelve representatives, signed the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, also called the Southern Manifesto, denouncing Brown as “a clear abuse of judicial power… with no legal basis,” whose consequences they predicted to be “explosive and dangerous.” Integration was “certain to destroy the system of public education in some of the states,” the manifesto argued, or at least cause “hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.” And anyway, it was “contrary to the Constitution,” whose principle of segregation was “founded on elemental humanity and common sense,” and North Carolina didn’t intend to fool with.

  For the next nine years Hickory proceeded as though Brown had never happened. Then came the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning the use of federal funds for any discriminatory purpose. The following year, the Department of Education withheld ninety thousand dollars from Hickory public schools for noncompliance, and soon the Pupil Assignment Act and the Pearsall Plan were both underneath too many lawsuits and desegregation orders for North Carolina to sustain them. Finally, in 1966, the Hickory board developed a plan “intended to prevent or eliminate any and all possible discrimination.” Among its provisions was the closure of two all-black schools—soon it would close four more—as well as townwide redistricting and the end of “race, color, or national origin” as considerations “in the hiring or assignment… of teachers and other professional staff.”

  It was an imperfect solution. In fact, several of those all-black schools had been symbols of pride and identity for their communities, especially one, Ridgeview High, which held only two hundred and fifty students but nonetheless had reason to boast: in the thirty-five years Ridgeview had fielded a football team, it had lost eleven games—total. Local families had tagged the team the Untouchables. A surprising number of its alumni had gone on to play sports professionally, for the Buffalo Bills and Washington Redskins and for several teams in the NBA.

  All this vanished when Ridgeview was shuttered. “When the school [moved] across the tracks, people who didn’t have transportation couldn’t see a game,” Sam Davis, coach of the Ridgeview Panthers for their final fourteen years, recalled a decade later. “And in the winter, it would be too cold to walk. When you move a school like that, some people lost interest.” Administrators at the newly integrated Hickory High, uneasy at the prospect of a black man coaching its varsity team, named Davis an assistant to the ninth-grader team at a nearby middle school. His own assistant, who had coached for more than three decades, was asked to take the eighth grade.

  White Hickory families, meanwhile, displeased at black children attending classes alongside their own, began to transfer out of Hickory High and into North State Academy, an all-white private school that had opened, conspicuously, only one year after the Civil Rights Act. By the end of 1976, so many had transferred that Hickory High lost state allocation for three full teacher salaries. Within another decade, public-school enrollment had dropped by nearly three hundred.

  Black families were leaving Hickory, too. Those students who at Ridgeview had been star athletes or cheerleaders or members of student government now found themselves outsiders at Hickory High—stark alienation for a community whose pillars had long been its schools and churches. Like white families, able black families got out entirely, a pattern that mirrored what was unfolding miles south in Lawndale—for different reasons, since in Hickory the flight was from discord and in Lawndale it was from joblessness.

  The escape of wealthier citizens meant decay to their former neighborhoods. VIOLENT CRIMES INCREASE 67% IN COUNTY, read a July 1978 headline in the Observer-News-Enterprise, out of Newton, just twelve miles southeast, where a decade later Willie would be tried. From February 1981: “Report shows crime rate soaring in Newton… Crime in Newton increased by a staggering 22.7 percent
during 1980. Aggravated assaults alone increased by 80 percent. The amount of burglaries, and breaking and enterings are up 52 percent.” To improve its most blighted neighborhoods, the town of Hickory installed several low-income housing complexes, including one near where Ridgeview High had once stood, a sorely needed project that also had the effect of wiping out any sense of community that had persisted there. The complex was named Hillside Gardens, though people also called it Little Berlin, and it was where Carrie Elliott lived.

  When Willie arrived in Hickory, in 1978, he met a friend named Rachel Wilson. Rachel had siblings—Betty, Carolyn, and Allen Shuford, plus Linda McDowell—and most of them had children of their own, but because the Shufords were poorer even than Willie, their entire family occupied the same two-bedroom house. This meant eight to ten bodies, depending on how many were home at once. So when he and Betty began dating, and Betty asked if she and her two young children, a boy and a girl, could come stay with him in his apartment on Third Avenue, Willie agreed.

  By 1986 the romance between him and Betty had cooled, though the pair stayed friendly, and there was no reason for either to leave the apartment. Then Betty met another man she was serious about. Willie noticed the new boyfriend had no place of his own; if Willie stayed in the apartment, he saw, he might be in the way. He wanted his friend Betty with a place for herself, and for her children. He volunteered to move out. Then he met and began dating a woman named Brenda Smith. Brenda and Betty got along just fine, since Betty too was now dating someone else, so Brenda didn’t mind him keeping Betty as a friend, or looking after her kids, or, once or twice, if he couldn’t find a ride, passing the night at Betty’s apartment, so long as he passed it on the couch. It had once been his couch, after all. After four months on his own in a temporary apartment, he was invited by Brenda to move in with her.

  They’d been dating for a year or so when Steve Hunt of the Hickory Police Department knocked on her door.

  14

  Their Different Individual Viewpoints

  When she learned of the memorandum from the Winston-Salem police, Chris was furious. At the computer keyboard in her home office, she punched out a withering seven-page, single-spaced response, divided into ten sections and nine subsections, replete with italics and bold print, each forwarding a counterargument. While the memorandum had not been addressed to the commission, she felt “compelled to respond,” she began irately. “I hope this response will be circulated to as many agencies as have received copies of the committee’s memorandum.”

  She resented the implication that she or the commission had relied on only one source for their research into eyewitness ID. In fact they’d consulted with five nationally recognized experts and had reviewed publications or materials from the National Institute of Justice and police jurisdictions in both Illinois and New Jersey. They’d further solicited input from nearly every major law enforcement agency and association in North Carolina. These Chris listed in an enormous paragraph. “I’m sure the committee did not mean to suggest that there is an acceptable percentage of wrongful convictions,” she added, in reply to the complaint that the commission had offered no statistics. Another complaint she considered “dramatic.” A third she dismissed as “humorous.” “If Winston-Salem can not understand how to interpret and apply this recommendation, it is not surprising that the committee has adopted an overall ‘it can’t be done’ approach.”

  Even as she banged at her keyboard, though, Chris knew she could never send the letter. It would only alienate police, whose support she needed for the reform she was after. So she kept her seven-page screed private. In its place, she drafted a simple three-page summary of Winston-Salem’s complaints, brought this to the commission for discussion, and scheduled a meeting with the Winston-Salem police for the final week of May.

  Then she recruited allies on the commission. She began with Mike Gauldin, the detective from the Ronald Cotton case. Gauldin was a matter-of-fact man with the build and mountainous jaw of a wrestling coach; Ronald Cotton had changed his life entirely. “I never imagined that I would be involved in a case like that,” he’d once told the Raleigh News and Observer. “It’s caused me a lot of soul searching.” Gauldin had realized immediately that he could never restore the decade Cotton had wrongly spent in prison, so had done the next best thing, which was to place himself and his department, up in Burlington, at the forefront of every possible reform. At times this put him at odds with fellow police, but Gauldin didn’t care. Fellow police hadn’t lived through Cotton.

  Next Chris enlisted Tom Ross. Today Ross directed the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the largest nonprofit in the state, but before that he’d been a superior court judge and had led the Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, the body that recommended sentencing guidelines to the North Carolina General Assembly. Because he had served under chief justices from both parties, his reputation was nearly apolitical. Tall and watchful-eyed, Ross had businesslike reserve—like Beverly Lake, he’d once been an Eagle Scout, though the two men’s relationship had sometimes been strained. Ross had long been close friends with Henry Frye, the first black chief justice in North Carolina history; when Ross was appointed to the bench, it was Frye he’d chosen to administer the oath for his swearing-in. And it was Frye whom Beverly Lake had campaigned against for chief justice. Ross didn’t have anything against Lake personally, but he hadn’t liked Lake’s decision to run.

  But Ross had come independently to the same concerns as Lake about the credibility of the courts. As a postconviction judge, Ross had been the one to rescind the conviction of Charles Munsey, the inmate whose confession at Central Prison turned out to have been fabricated—the first death sentence in state history overturned on grounds that the convict was innocent, as far as Ross knew. (Across the country, there had been forty or so others.) Munsey had been so polarizing that Ross had decided to write that opinion himself, rather than delegate it to his clerks, and then, even rarer, to read it aloud in open court. He felt determined to get this one right. Years later he still remembered walking down the long hallway from his chambers to the courtroom, past guards and officers who knew the case he was about to rule on. “You got to keep him in jail, Judge,” they whispered as he passed. “If he didn’t kill that woman, I’ll bet he killed somebody else.” At the end of the hallway Ross swept into his courtroom, settled on his bench, and ordered a retrial.

  Since then Ross had won the William H. Rehnquist Award, a national honor bestowed each year at the U.S. Supreme Court, in Washington, DC. There he decided his speech would concern public trust in the courts. Almost two years later, Ross had received a letter from Beverly Lake, expressing identical concerns. He’d arrived to that first meeting skeptical it would lead anywhere; as far as Ross knew, Lake had never been a reformist. And he’d never heard of this Chris Mumma woman. Politically, Ross knew that reform was risky territory. A person couldn’t whisper the word reform in North Carolina, in connection with criminal justice, without everyone assuming he meant the death penalty. The baggage of that could define a person politically, and Ross wasn’t sure what Lake was up to. But it impressed him that Chris had only been a clerk when Lake met her, since he knew this meant Lake could have easily patted her on the head and ignored her. Aw, Chris, I know you believe in that, but you’re barely out of law school, you really aren’t sophisticated enough to know. Instead, Lake had seen precisely what Ross had, planning that speech two years earlier. The concern Chris raised was valid. Someone credible needed to address it, even at risk to his own reputation. This was what Lake was trying to do, Ross realized. He pledged to help however he could.

  Coincidentally, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the nonprofit Ross now led, was based in Winston-Salem. Chris decided his office would make a good location for a meeting.

  In May, Winston-Salem’s district attorney and police chief arrived to Ross’s office with the same concerns their colleagues had laid out months earlier. Reforms would make it harder to catch criminals, and
harder to put them in prison. They doubted the commission knew about either of these things.

  “Look,” Chris argued, once pleasantries were through, “we’ve got five representatives from law enforcement on the commission, including Chief Gauldin here. We’ve also got nine prosecutors. We are not lacking input from those with practical work experience.”

  Nor was the commission focused solely on eyewitness ID, Gauldin added. They’d simply chosen to address this first, because research proved it was the single largest factor in wrongful convictions. The commission wasn’t fixated on ID, as Winston-Salem had charged. They’d only prioritized it.

  Ross allowed that the department’s memorandum had raised a few valid concerns. One had to do with staffing: it was true that double-blind lineups generally required more officers, and in smaller jurisdictions, he knew, these could be hard to come by. But police in New Jersey, where all lineups were administered this way, had faced the same challenges, and had found ways around them, partly by using particular software and partly by sharing resources among adjacent counties. If those weren’t enough, the commission understood, Ross offered. Maybe, in a few exceptional cases, lineups couldn’t be double-blind, because the necessary staffing wasn’t available. Ross could live with that, as long as the other reforms were implemented—if suspect photographs were still shown one at a time, for example, rather than all at once. These weren’t laws the commission had proposed, only best practices. The idea was to follow them as closely as a department was able.

  The idea was also to improve their chances of getting the bad guy, Chris added. Not to make it harder. This was the whole point. Studies proved that ID reform would help Winston-Salem catch the criminal, rather than some guy who looked like the criminal. A lineup run this way also held up better in court, and provoked fewer legal challenges. This was important, because the issue was coming, whether Winston-Salem liked it or not. As long as the department insisted on keeping its outdated procedures, any smart defense attorney would pounce on them at trial. Didn’t police want to stay ahead?