Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  “If you’re one of us, we’ve got ways of showing it,” the mobs had promised Willie as soon as he’d arrived in prison. “We’ll get you on your feet.” Instead he avoided them. He was shy, and he sensed their danger. Joining a mob meant declaring allegiance, which he didn’t have; accepting favors meant becoming indebted, which he didn’t want.

  To pass the time he began making small loans. Jobs in the kitchen and laundry had provided him income, which he felt indifferent toward; he didn’t use drugs and rarely bought anything from the canteen, so couldn’t see what he would spend it on. If he made two and a half dollars in a week he loaned it to another inmate for the price of fifty cents in interest. The resulting three dollars he loaned to someone else for a full dollar in interest. Every so often an inmate didn’t repay him, which didn’t matter. He wasn’t pursuing a business model. He was only occupying his afternoons. He learned to be careful of the mobs, which loaned money themselves and didn’t like him encroaching, especially if his interest rate was lower. But the mobs figured out he worked alone, not for any rival, so they tolerated him. The risk was in crossing their path accidentally. He tried not to loan to anyone who already owed someone else. If he noticed a dispute between rival mobs, for a while he stopped loaning altogether.

  Other times he stopped loaning because he felt too ill to keep it up. His colds worsened into the flu, and he asked to see a doctor. But nurses misunderstood and sent him to the dentist, where recently he’d had a tooth filled. A day later they realized their error. A day after that he was prescribed more Robitussin and Drixoral, and something called Theo-Dur, for bronchitis, which no one was sure he had. In case this was wrong they also prescribed him an antibiotic.

  The following week he was up for custody review, an evaluation by prison administrators. “His work performance has been rated as excellent by his work supervisors,” his case manager wrote. “Willie has gotten along well with other inmates and the staff as well. He has not been a management problem here at Sampson.” To be promoted to minimum custody, however, he needed to be within five years of eligibility for parole. He was nowhere close.

  That same week he met again with a psychiatrist, who thought him “friendly” and “talkative.” In Willie’s medical chart, under “Comments/Progress/Explanation,” the psychiatrist wrote, “Denies guilt.”

  After a month or so of mostly restful nights, his trouble sleeping returned. Nervous that all his medications were agitating his symptoms, rather than helping them, he asked to stop his antidepressant; before prison he’d never taken a single medication, and he’d heard of inmates growing addicted. He also suspected they were causing his nightmares. But he didn’t know how else to soothe his colds. His psychiatrist replaced his Sinequan with Trazodone. He petitioned again for habeas corpus—this time in district court, rather than the state supreme court, which had already denied him. A few weeks later he received an unexpected letter from Phillip Griffin’s boss at Prisoner Legal Services, Marvin Sparrow. Sparrow too had reviewed Willie’s entire file, he wrote, and come to the same conclusion as Griffin. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any way of attacking your conviction that has any reasonable chance of success,” he admitted. He and Griffin had spoken several times about Willie’s case over the previous year. “He has said that you are an innocent man and he wanted to find some way to prove that,” Sparrow relayed. Both men initially had hoped to challenge Carrie Elliott’s ID of Willie at trial, which they agreed was suspect. “The problem is, that, at least by the time she got to court, the victim was convinced that you were the person who attacked her. As unlikely and unbelievable as that identification was, the jury believed it.” Sparrow was forced to agree with Griffin, though it unsettled him; without any new evidence, Prisoner Legal Services simply had no grounds for overturning Willie’s conviction. “As a man in prison due to mistaken identification, you are naturally angry at our failure to try anything, no matter how slim the chance, that might get your case reversed. But we must use our judgment and take only cases which stand some chance of accomplishing something. Because there seems to be no promising way to attack your conviction, I find that Mr. Griffin was correct in not filing any petition or motion in your behalf. I understand that you have now asked for documents back and that you intend to file your own motion. Good luck. We are closing your case file in our office.”

  At the end of summer he was transferred again—to Vance Correctional, near the Virginia border, where he took a job as an assistant cook. In the fall he came up again for custody review. “Willie is presently working in the kitchen, and gets good reports from his supervisor,” his case manager noted. “Has caused no problems since his assignment to this center.”

  Three months after his latest petition for habeas corpus, he began worrying the court might not respond to him at all, in which case he would need to refile with another circuit. He wrote to a lawyer he found in Charlotte, who agreed to help him draft another petition for a fee of four thousand dollars. He wrote to a cousin in Lawndale, who found a different lawyer, who made the same offer, for the same fee. Even if he found someone to help him for free, he realized, another petition required a form he didn’t have, so he wrote to a third lawyer, at the Department of Justice, to ask if she would send it to him. While he waited, he used the prison phone to call his niece Shirley collect, hoping he might feel better if he heard a voice from home. “I hate to be the one to tell you this,” Shirley told him, “but Brenda died two weeks ago. Then her mama died last week.”

  For a long moment he was disoriented. “W-what?” he finally stammered. Until Brenda had moved to a different apartment, and Willie had lost track of her, the pair had written letters. Not as often as he would have liked, and she hadn’t visited him after his trial, but he knew how far he was from Hickory, and the long hours she worked at the nursing home. They had dated just a year before his arrest, and he didn’t expect she would wait for him forever. Still, he counted her a friend. He didn’t see how she could possibly have died. She was only forty-one years old. He hadn’t even known she was sick.

  Almost no one had known, Shirley told him. But Brenda and her mother had both had breast cancer.

  It pained him that Brenda had not reached out with this news. Had she purposely not told him? Or had her illness moved so quickly she’d had no chance? He knew almost nothing about how cancer worked. Possibly she’d been driving to and from her doctor for months, in the same car they’d once driven together down to Shelby, to collect his tax money. Now she was gone. He felt a surge of loneliness—no longer a temporary feeling, but now a constant in his life. He told his case manager he wanted to be transferred to a camp nearer Lawndale. Maybe, if he had been housed closer to her, Brenda could have visited. His case manager referred his request on, where it was approved. But two months later he was transferred instead to Central Prison, and a week after that back to Vance, where he’d been in the first place. No one explained why. Reluctantly he wrote again to Phillip Griffin, with a copy of the habeas corpus petition he’d filed in district court and still hadn’t heard any result from. A month later Griffin replied that he didn’t see how he could help, for the reasons he and Marvin Sparrow had explained previously.

  On a good night that winter he slept five hours, rarely straight through. In his medical chart someone entered “Major depression in full remission.” His psychologist crossed a line through “full remission” and, in its place, wrote “partial remission.”

  There were a number of reasons an inmate might be transferred between prisons, including a custody change or a job or a class or a rehabilitation program that one camp offered but not another. If an inmate caused trouble on a particular camp, he might be transferred. If he sensed he was in danger, or might get along better elsewhere, he could request this himself. The reverse was also possible; if administrators noticed an inmate growing too close to his guards, they were likely to transfer him, since the friendlier that relationship, the likelier a guard was to give favors or ski
rt rules, and the simplest way to halt this was to remove one of them. If an inmate had been shipped especially far from his family, he could request a transfer nearer his home, to facilitate visits. Sometimes this was granted; sometimes it wasn’t. Or he might be transferred simply for processing reasons. For every new batch of inmates shipped from O dorm, back at CP, beds had to be cleared to receive them, which meant other inmates had to be moved, either to another prison or to a different bunk in the same facility. At Vance, Willie kept being reassigned to a new cell block, as he had continually at Harnett and Sampson. This was one reason he had such trouble sleeping. Each reassignment dropped him into another unfamiliar environment, where he was surrounded anew by strangers.

  During a work shift in the kitchen, he mentioned his failed transfer request to his supervisor, a sergeant. He had to get back to Cleveland County, he insisted. It was the only way anyone could visit him. He didn’t see why the prison had promised this only to send him back to Vance.

  Personally, she was glad Willie hadn’t been transferred, the sergeant admitted. Since he was a good worker, it would be hard to replace him. Then she realized how upset he was.

  The next day she pulled him aside. “I’ll tell you the best way to get there, if you really want,” she whispered, glancing around. “But it’s possible it could hurt your record, down the line.”

  Willie didn’t care about down the line.

  Here’s what you do, the sergeant told him.

  That Sunday evening he retired to his bunk early, before others on his block. After only a few hours he woke to a crowd of inmates staring at him. “We’re going to fuck you up,” one said.

  He cried out and a guard appeared. “They’re going to attack me!” he shouted, gesturing toward the crowd. “They’re going to attack any minute!”

  The guard looked around. He saw no one. Willie lay alone on his bunk.

  Again the guard asked what the trouble was. Again Willie pointed toward empty space. His eyes darted and he startled at nothing. He rubbed his palms as though washing his hands. “I’ll hurt them before they can hurt me,” he warned.

  The guard didn’t follow.

  “Get me out!” Willie hissed. “Get me away from them!”

  The guard rushed him to the nurses’ station, where Willie was placed in an observation cell—“for his protection,” nurses wrote. In the morning they transferred him to Central Prison’s mental-health clinic for evaluation, where Willie explained what had happened the night before. “He is paranoid, feeling others may harm him and that he may harm others, feeling he needs to protect himself,” a psychiatrist observed. In addition to the voices he was hearing, Willie “appeared jumpy and nervous,” and was “physically shaking and obviously anxious… Inmate Grimes stated that he was ready to go off.” In Willie’s chart the psychiatrist read he was being treated for depression but also that he’d never had any episode like this—according to his file, Willie met with a prison psychiatrist only once a month, on an outpatient basis, and had responded just fine to treatment. Under “Relations with Other Inmates,” some staffer had written, “No problems. Stays to himself most of the time.”

  Until he deciphered what had gone wrong, the psychiatrist was taking no chances. As a suicide precaution and “to protect staff and other inmates from the threat of harm,” he placed Willie in another observation cell.

  When he returned the next morning, however, whatever had happened appeared to be over. Willie seemed fine. “The patient cleared quickly from this acute psychotic episode and was tolerant to his medications and his treatment plan,” the psychiatrist wrote. Besides the initial alarm, Willie hadn’t presented any problems. Now he told the psychiatrist he felt much better, didn’t think he needed any more treatment, and was willing to go back to Vance. The psychiatrist agreed. “This hospitalization was unremarkable,” he recorded. To Willie’s medical chart he added a diagnosis of “schizoid personality disorder,” though a note revealed his uncertainty: “? Psychotic (doesn’t seem so).” He prescribed Elavil, another antidepressant, in addition to the Prozac and Trazodone. Then he discharged Willie back to Vance.

  As soon as he returned there, Willie applied again for a transfer. If he wanted to be shipped to a particular camp, the trick was in not asking for it, the sergeant had told him. Administrators were reluctant to accommodate a request so specific, since they didn’t like an inmate thinking he ran the place. Instead, she had told him to find the next closest prison to the one he wanted, and ask for transfer there; administrators likely would send him to the other one. Because he had already been denied Cleveland County, this time he chose Lincoln, twenty miles northeast. He told his case manager he suspected his recent incident had to do with being kept so far from home, without any visits. This time his transfer was approved. But only partially, administrators told him. They couldn’t send him to Lincoln.

  By June he was at Cleveland County Correctional.

  For the first time this was near enough to home for visitors. Twice that year his sister Gladys drove down from Silver Spring, and his brothers Samuel Lee and Cliff Jr. from Lawndale. A friend from high school came, too. It had taken nearly five years, but he felt more like himself than he had since being arrested. Finally he was sleeping entire nights through. He told a psychologist he didn’t think he needed any more monthly therapy. In his medical records his diagnosis was changed from depression to dysthymic disorder. “Friendly and cooperative, rather subdued,” the psychologist noted in Willie’s chart. “He explained that he is actually feeling better now that he is housed at a camp near his family.”

  A month later Willie learned that district court had finally denied his petition for habeas corpus. It had taken them twenty months.

  Soon his colds returned. Nurses prescribed him Robitussin. When this didn’t help they put him on amoxicillin, and also theophylline, in case it was bronchitis. Then they put him on Rhinatate, for cold and flu symptoms. Then Organidin, a decongestant; then Drixoral, in case it was allergies. In May they ordered a chest X-ray, which turned up normal. Whatever illness he had lasted into winter, when finally Cleveland County placed him under medical observation. But after twenty-eight hours there he’d neither improved nor worsened, so nurses returned him to his block. From there he asked them for a spare pair of thermal underwear; he owned only one, and when he removed it to wash laundry he often got chills and was overcome by coughing fits. Would nurses write him a note for another?

  Despite the illness he took a job as a library clerk. From eight to eleven in the morning, then again after lunch, he restocked books, signed them in and out to inmates, dusted shelves and tables. He discovered he liked this better even than breakfast shifts in the kitchen, because it was so quiet. Often he had the library to himself, his favorite part of the job. Besides medical observation, and the one time he’d been placed in segregation, for drinking buck, he’d never been apart from other inmates like this, hadn’t found anyplace in prison so peaceful and still.

  Now that every court he knew had denied his petitions for habeas corpus, he turned his attention elsewhere. If no one would grant his appeals, he wanted the next best thing, which was minimum custody. From there he knew he might be paroled. In the solitude of the library he reread his conviction and sentence, and realized one had been filed incorrectly. He’d been convicted of first-degree rape, which corresponded to a class B life sentence. But for some reason the judge had assigned him a class A life sentence, normally reserved for capital murder cases. This made him forever ineligible for parole. He wrote to the Newton courthouse, where he’d been tried, to find out why and whether they could fix it, but Newton wrote back to tell him they couldn’t. Even more confused, he wrote to the parole commission. “If its not supose to be a class A why can’t the court change it,” he wanted to know. “They tell me here the Clerk of Court should be able to change it since it supose to be a class B anyway.” The parole commission lacked authority to change or commute his sentence, they replied. Exasperated, he fou
nd another jailhouse lawyer, who told him the only way to amend a sentence was through the governor. Then he asked his case manager, who suggested he try writing to Ed de Torres. Like Willie, his case manager didn’t fully understand the distinction between class A and class B sentences, but he agreed it looked like Willie had been assigned the wrong one. He helped Willie draft a letter to the governor and enclosed it in a note to de Torres.

  When he received Willie’s letter, de Torres reexamined his case file, and saw that Willie was right. Back in 1988, when Judge Kenneth Griffin had consolidated Willie’s two sentences, he’d made a clerical error. Today Griffin no longer served on the bench, so de Torres phoned the clerk of court to learn how the error could be amended. The clerk told him he needed something called a motion to amend the judgment and commitment order, signed by a superior court judge in Catawba County. This didn’t need to be the same judge who had made the error. So de Torres drafted the motion and mailed it, along with an explanation and a stamped, self-addressed envelope, so the judge simply could sign the order and return it. As soon as the judge had done this, de Torres would forward it to the Department of Correction, he promised Willie, so the DOC could update its records and Willie would recover his chance at parole. “I will do this at no charge to you. If I can help you on any further appeals, let me know. Good luck.”