Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  The DA and police chief both paused. This seemed reasonable. They still weren’t thrilled with the software costs, but reforms sounded better in person than they’d looked on paper. They agreed to take these back to their department, where the chief, Pat Norris, pledged to begin implementing them. Norris liked this idea of finding the correct suspect, and of fewer objections in court. If that was what the commission was up to, she offered, she was interested in helping out.

  A month later Chief Norris joined the commission.

  The Winston-Salem endorsement Chris brought with her on a tour around the state—first to a meeting with two dozen police chiefs, then to another with the North Carolina Justice Academy. More departments wrote to her for training materials, so Chris forwarded every document she’d bundled together a year earlier. Then she visited the police chiefs association and the police executives association. Then the Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Commission.

  A year after that, in 2005, the commission’s reforms were finally added to North Carolina’s basic law enforcement training.

  As Chris wrangled over eyewitness-ID reform, meanwhile, the commission at large had moved on. Or tried to. From the outset, commissioners had agreed not to discuss the death penalty; consensus on that issue was clearly beyond hope, so rather than risk derailing the whole enterprise, commissioners had pledged not to touch it. Since then the issue had hung on the horizon, like storm clouds. And every so often winds blew from that direction.

  Usually this had to do with Jim Coleman. Long before Lake had invited him onto the commission, Coleman had chaired a section of the American Bar Association calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, and also served on the board of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Now he testified on the issue before the general assembly. Coleman saw his participation in the two movements as unrelated, but prosecutors in the commission didn’t. Coleman was dragging them into an argument they’d promised to avoid, DAs complained; they’d never intended to join a group opposing the death penalty, and resented any appearance that they had. Then the state senate passed Bill 972, a two-year moratorium on executions—a bill that, in its preamble, referenced the commission specifically.

  Coleman hadn’t been involved with the legislation, but it didn’t look that way. He knew DAs were threatening to leave the commission unless he abandoned his work against the death penalty, so privately he went to Beverly Lake and offered to resign. The DAs were necessary for the commission to function, he admitted to Lake. He himself wasn’t. If anyone was leaving, it should be him.

  Lake refused. Like the DAs, he personally believed in the death penalty, he told Coleman. But he’d also grown to like Coleman, despite the conflict in their politics, and felt Coleman was valuable to the commission. “Listen, I don’t think anything you’re doing is affecting what we’re doing,” Lake assured him. It was probably true that public attention had conflated the commission with the death penalty, but this wasn’t Coleman’s doing. So Lake wasn’t having anyone resign.

  Instead, Lake drafted an open letter to the two state senators who had sponsored the moratorium. “The Commission is made up of members who support capital punishment and of members who do not,” he clarified. “Their different individual viewpoints regarding capital punishment and a moratorium are irrelevant.” Bill 972 hadn’t explicitly claimed the commission’s support, he admitted, but he didn’t like that it referenced the commission at all, as this could easily be misinterpreted. “I respectfully request, to avoid any inference that the Commission endorses or takes a position on the moratorium or the bill and out of respect for the important work of the Commission, that any reference to the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission in Senate Bill 972 (H1199) be removed.”

  The amended moratorium bill didn’t fully stamp out DAs’ irritation toward Coleman, but soon something else did. In one of Coleman’s classes that semester at Duke, a student spoke up to share an experience from the previous summer, when he’d interned with Ben David, the district attorney down in Wilmington. Over the course of that internship, the student recalled, two capital cases had crossed David’s desk. The defendant in one of these cases had been black. The other had been a Lumbee American Indian, though he was so light-skinned that strangers usually assumed he was white. Ben David, in his office, had been describing to interns the political realities of being a prosecutor in the South. If he sought the death penalty against one of these men but not the other, or even in a particular order, he might be accused of racism, he predicted offhandedly. Not that he would make any decision for this reason—it was just that he was an experienced prosecutor, and he recognized the discomforts of his job.

  Coleman didn’t give the story a second thought. At the end of that week, he left for vacation with his wife. But a colleague, a Duke staffer, had been in the room. When Coleman left, that colleague filed affidavits alleging that David’s remarks proved he’d pursued the death penalty on racial grounds. She wanted a conviction and death sentence both vacated.

  When Coleman learned what his colleague had done, he felt bewildered. And livid. He’d never met Ben David—as far as he knew, neither had his colleague—but he remembered his student’s recounting of the internship, and it hadn’t been anything close to this. He e-mailed his entire class, commanding them not to say a word until he got every one of them a lawyer. Then he phoned Ben David’s office to explain who he was. “I was there,” he insisted. “It was in my class. And that’s not what happened. That’s not what the student said.” He volunteered an affidavit of his own, and to testify on David’s behalf.

  David was cleared, and Coleman’s colleague was fired—an outcome that displeased the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, who now felt Coleman had betrayed their cause, even as he sat on its board. Coleman didn’t care. He’d told the truth. “Look, there are enough racial issues that actually do affect the death penalty,” he assured Ben David. “We don’t need to make them up.”

  That Coleman, a black defense attorney, had voluntarily come to the aid of a white prosecutor, especially on an issue of race, impressed DAs in the state who heard about it. At the next commission meeting they regarded Coleman with new, grudging respect. “I see you gave one for the good guys,” one said.

  Coleman shrugged. He’s a tree-hugging, anti-death-penalty hippie, he could see them thinking. But he has his principles.

  Now that commissioners had settled eyewitness-ID rules, and reconciled—disagreeably—on the death penalty, together they turned to a different problem. Since the commission’s earliest meeting, back at Chris’s house, one obvious question had overshadowed all others, even as they’d pursued ID reform. That issue commissioners had taken to calling a front-end solution, but logically the one term raised another. What about back-end solutions? It was fine to try to prevent a wrongful conviction from happening again in the future. But what were they going to do about those that already had happened?

  That, Bob Orr had thought for months, is the elephant in the room.

  15

  We Must Use Our Judgment

  To serve a long term in prison was to stay at a permanent, insulated distance from all that had comprised the first forty-one years of his life. His friends and siblings, the fence posts and grassy acreage of Lawndale, his jobs at the textile plant and furniture shop, even his old apartment and clothes. Every one of them was gone. Week after week, his memories strained an inch further—their colors bleached a shade paler, their voices calling a decibel softer—until he had worn them nearly threadbare. In the other direction expanded one long, sluggish afternoon into another, lined as far as he could see.

  An inmate in this position controlled whatever he could. He turned the knob of his shower at precisely the same minute each morning, stored his toothbrush on precisely the same square inch of shelf in his locker. On the yard he lifted a particular weight a particular number of times. In the mess hall he ate precisely the same foods, or else deliberately did the reve
rse, never repeated a meal on consecutive days, simply to show that he could. He stuffed crumbs into his pockets and snuck them into his cell, to draw out mice, which he kept as pets. He collected books or photographs or letters or radios, and he protected his collections, sometimes ferociously. If he worked in a sewing plant he tailored his own clothes, or stitched them with his initials, out of view of the guards. Now he no longer borrowed those clothes; now those clothes belonged to him.

  Or an inmate serving a long term might disengage entirely, might flee, as far as he could, his own senses. He might regiment his day, his month, his year, his decade, so as to automate them. He might rise at a certain time, engage in certain physical actions, and rest at a certain time, as an engine idling at low speed. He ignored Christmas and Passover and his birthday and the New Year, same as the old year, all holidays that no longer existed. An inmate like this never got his hopes up and thus never felt disappointed. He took naps. If he was lucky he realized it was four in the afternoon and the morning had already passed. He’d barely noticed.

  Or an inmate might make the best of his time. He might be gregarious. He might play cards and checkers and dominoes; if he had money, he might gamble. He might run errands for guards, to curry favors, or join a gang.

  Or an inmate might pursue his education, spend his hours at the library or in classes. He might read thrillers or mysteries or literature or philosophy. He might read the Bible. If he was optimistic, or enterprising, he might read law.

  Three suffocating years Willie had spent mired in anger so liquid and churning it had nearly choked him. Now, in moments of calm, he began to recognize certain facts. Obviously it did not matter that he had committed no crime. This was irrelevant. As soon as police had arrested him, nothing he said about his own innocence counted. That was the reason they’d denied his appeals, and it meant they might not ever release him. He’d believed all this amounted to one long delay, but now he saw this might not be true. Possibly their convicting him had been no procedural error, to be corrected later, but an actual outcome. Possibly his imprisonment would be no exception to his life but its defining condition.

  The thought devastated him. And it meant he’d trusted wrongly in the Hickory police, the Newton judge, the guards he saw making their rounds. These were not people who, in the long run, got things right. These were not professionals. There was no such thing as professionals. These smartly uniformed guards, with their desks and nameplates and badges, their rifled towers, their Gray Goose buses, acted not out of power but out of fantasy. They reeked of falseness. For every rule they’d invented, he saw an inmate who flouted it; to every law in North Carolina, there had to be an exception, as he himself was. Any guard, like any judge or any lawyer in any courtroom, was worthless. What power they imagined they held amounted to nothing at all. That so-called power was uncivilized and conditional. It was puny; it was hollow; it was an illusion. He had been foolish not to realize this. It made no difference for a prison to be built of brick or concrete or razor wire because in fact it was built of smoke.

  Nothing in a world like this could be relied on; it was all only chance. He grasped now he had been wrong to think some influential person might help him. There was no such person, there was no such influence. He could trust no one and nothing but himself. Prison had stripped him to his elements. His mind alone he knew was not a fraud. He recognized the irony in this. Inmates complained they owned so little when prison only laid bare what had always been their condition: they had never owned anything more. Prison had simply released them from the delusion. A man’s true circumstances came not from his environment but from his knowledge that environment was trivial, and from the weight of his principles. To discover he owned no more than his own mind was to discover not that he lacked authority but that he commanded it. “Stop being molded by this system of things, but be transformed by making your mind over,” he read in Romans.

  When he wasn’t working he carried two Bibles, the King James Version of his childhood and the New World Translation the Jehovah’s Witnesses had given him. God, like anyone else, had a name, the Witnesses taught him, and it appeared in the original Hebrew Scriptures. But ancient Hebrew lacked vowels, so His name was spelled YHWH, and translation into Greek and then Latin had complicated the issue. Latin lacked a letter W, and its Y was closer to the J of English. In this way, YHWH had become JHVH, had become Jehovah.

  Not to everyone. There were those who had kept the Y and W of Hebrew and pronounced it “Yahweh”; there were those who avoided saying God’s name at all, and replaced YHWH entirely in their translations with a different Hebrew word, Adonai, meaning “Lord” or “My Lord,” deferring to the commandment not to take His name in vain. This allowed a reader of Scripture to avoid speaking His name aloud, out of respect.

  Witnesses believed this an important mistake. Lord was Jehovah’s title, not His given name, and censoring it had rendered Him distant and impersonal. Everywhere the Bible exhorted them toward intimacy—toward “close friendship with Jehovah,” according to the Psalms. A person rightly called his friend by his name. “This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered from generation to generation,” Jehovah had told Moses. Jehovah wanted them to use His name. This was a fact they had witnessed.

  In this way Willie read Job and marveled at what trials a man could bear. He read Jeremiah. He read Joseph, who was betrayed and sold off to Egypt. “But Jehovah was with Joseph,” Scripture promised, even in Egypt, where Joseph was betrayed once more—falsely accused of rape. Now Joseph was thrown into prison. “But Jehovah continued with Joseph and kept showing loyal love to him,” Scripture promised again. At last word of Joseph was carried to the pharaoh, who recognized his wisdom, freed him from prison, and took him as an adviser. Now Joseph’s brothers, the same men who had conspired against him, came for Joseph’s help. “I am Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt,” he reminded them. Still, he obliged. “Do not be upset and do not reproach one another because you sold me here,” he said. They had not sold him there at all; “God sent me ahead of you.”

  Like Joseph, Willie was being tested. The task was to retain his faith, whose value was more than gold—since faith, unlike gold, could withstand fire. Jehovah cared for him, he read in Scripture, would absorb his suffering if Willie in turn would stand against the devil, who “walks about like a roaring lion, seeking to devour someone.” This was what his anger felt like exactly. “Take your stand against him, firm in the faith,” he read in Peter. “After you have suffered a little while, the God of all undeserved kindness, who called you to His everlasting glory in union with Christ, will himself finish your training.” At last Willie might be freed, despite the walls of prison—despite the sham of his Newton trial and Prisoner Legal Services. “For Jehovah loves justice,” the Psalms promised. “And He will not abandon His loyal ones.”

  The smaller a camp, the more lenient its guards, generally speaking, though of course this was relative in prison. On a large camp, with hundreds or even a thousand inmates, a guard had to oversee so many things he couldn’t afford exceptions. A smaller camp was easier on him to supervise, its relationships easier to manage. Usually this relaxed him. Most of the camps out west were trouble; word was that guards in the mountains could be rednecks, and hostile. A camp that recently had been built or renovated was cleaner, which often meant it was safer. Old, decrepit buildings were depressing, and sent a message to inmates about how little they mattered. This in turn influenced their behavior. A camp with jobs, or a school, was more likely to draw a certain type of inmate, and this, too, could make things more tolerable. The same applied on a smaller scale. A cell block that housed mostly working or student inmates generally was safer than a block that didn’t. On a block like this an inmate could expect less violence, and fewer drugs, though still he knew to expect violence and drugs.

  Drugs could be smuggled inside packages, which was difficult, or body cavities, which was worse. By far it was easier for guards to bring
them in, which was what happened. Willie saw more drugs in prison than he had seen in his life—marijuana, crack, heroin, cocaine, morphine, Dilaudid, Demerol. A guard who smuggled or sold drugs earned extra income this way, and developed influence among the mobs. So did an inmate, for whom drugs also simply passed the time, same as a job with Correction Enterprises. Given the choice, an inmate who used drugs preferred a single cell, where guards couldn’t watch his every movement, but it wasn’t much harder to use them out on the yard or anyplace a guard wasn’t, or even where a guard was, so long as he and the inmate had an arrangement. Every so often inmates were drug-tested; the penalty for failure was points on the inmate’s record, or a stint in segregation, or both, depending on the mood and allegiance of the guard. A clever inmate in this position simply refused to urinate into his cup. This counted as disobedience of a direct order. Disobedience carried fewer points than a positive test. Eventually even the slowest inmates caught on to this, so the prison changed its policy. Now failure and refusal counted the same.

  A mob was a clique of inmates; a gang, more or less, though not every one was violent. This too depended on the camp, and on the guards, and on the level of custody. A mob usually aligned itself with one guard or another, whom its members could rely on for drugs or favors. A dispute between rival mobs could be dangerous, though it depended on the mob and the situation. By far violence was likeliest in maximum security, but it could happen in medium, too, on a camp that was especially hostile or where guards were especially compromised. Or if you were simply unlucky. Violence could be indiscriminate or it could be particular, could target crackers or niggers or fags. A camp like that could be a source of terror. An inmate could make a weapon out of nearly anything, and often he did. A combination lock purchased from the canteen, slung into the toe of a sock. A toilet brush with a filed wooden handle. A broken lawn-mower blade recovered from the yard, sharpened on a grinder in the woodshop, wrapped around one end with an Ace bandage.