Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  The psychology of all this was complicated. No one wanted to trivialize the experience of victims, many of whom had lived through horror. But NCVAN had chosen an unnuanced view toward an issue that was provably nuanced. And Chris could extend only so much sympathy toward a person who refused to extend sympathy toward others.

  No one exemplified this more vividly than Jennifer Thompson. After Ronald Cotton was exonerated, Jennifer, obviously still a victim, had instantly become something else, too. It was her, wasn’t it, who’d put Cotton behind bars? Wasn’t that her fault? Strangers on the Internet had sent her death threats. In a sense, this made her precisely the sort of victim NCVAN existed to support. Except that Jennifer had begun advocating for reform, which placed her counter to NCVAN’s interests, so that many in that group felt she’d effectively changed sides. Now Jennifer worked for defense attorneys; now Jennifer was shielding criminals. And, more simply, now Jennifer symbolized what many at NCVAN continued denying categorically. Many victims still insisted what Donna Pygott had never felt able to, that the chances any convict was innocent were zero. But it was harder to insist on this when Jennifer was around, harder to square one of these facts with the other. Though she was a gifted public speaker, Jennifer had never once been invited to present to a victims’ organization. One time she’d been heckled from the audience: “Do you have any idea what you’re doing to the victims?” In more than a year of commission meetings, she and Pygott had barely said a word to each other. Pygott’s colleagues, seated with her in the rear, hadn’t acknowledged Jennifer at all.

  Friction between victims and the commissioners had menaced from the start, but finally Dick Adams had heard enough. It was Adams who had founded NCVAN, two decades earlier, after his own son was murdered during a robbery. Periodically he’d spoken up at commission meetings to protest what he regarded as its abandonment of victims. This prospect of reopening cases exasperated him. Now he stood up. The commission had forgotten why the courts were even in place, he nearly shouted. Didn’t they know? The courts existed to provide justice for victims—

  Before he could finish, Beverly Lake interrupted him. “An innocent person who is in prison is a victim,” Lake said.

  17

  Does Not Admit to Crime

  Late one afternoon in February 1995, a guard approached him in the yard at Cleveland County Correctional. It had been a mild day but now the temperature was falling. Behind the guard trailed three inmates, and abruptly Willie realized that each owed him repayment on a loan. What were they doing with Sergeant Orsky? He never collected more than a single loan at a time—this was too risky, since camp rules forbade inmates to hold more than thirty dollars, and multiple loans would put him over.

  But now Orsky ordered all three inmates to pay him. Reluctantly, each man handed Willie his twenty-five dollars. Then Orsky, looking on, announced he had no choice but to search Willie. In addition to the seventy-five dollars, he found eighty-eight cents in Willie’s pockets. This meant he had no choice but to search Willie’s locker, Orsky said. There he found another three dollars and twenty-three cents. “Inmate Willie Grimes is in violation of DOC prison policy of possessing funds in a form other than authorized,” he scolded in a note in Willie’s file. “Due to the amount of funds involved staff feels subject should be removed from his assignment pending disciplinary action.”

  Because of the violation—D10, unauthorized fund—administrators removed him from his job in the library. Then they transferred him to Craggy Correctional, out in Asheville, eighty miles west. A month later, without explanation, he was transferred to Central; three days after that, he was transferred back to Craggy. There he came down with the first of two ear infections. The entire right half of his skull throbbed, and he had trouble eating. “My ear infection is hurting real bad like I have not took any thing for it,” he wrote on a sick-call request, though he’d tried eardrops and an antibiotic. Now he was out of both. “I think that I needs to see the doctor! I am hurting.”

  Near the end of his first summer at Craggy he volunteered for DART, a drug and alcohol recovery treatment program; he’d never used drugs, but his case manager had told him the more programs he completed, the more likely he was to be promoted to minimum custody. In a brochure he read the goals of DART were “breaking through denial and admission and ownership of the problem” and “transition from treatment to recovery.” Willie signed up. In his final report the following autumn, his DART counselor remarked that Willie had “done very well,” and invited him to serve as a peer counselor in the future. Willie declined. Three days earlier he’d asked for a transfer back to Shelby, and since the request had been approved, he doubted he’d remain at Craggy long enough to be a counselor. He turned out to be wrong about this; it would be more than a year before he was transferred. While he waited, he took a job in the laundry, then as a janitor.

  In spring he was promoted to canteen operator. This ranked among the most important jobs on any camp, along with head cook. The canteen was part supermarket, part drugstore, and only a single inmate operated its window, meaning others had to go through him for noodles or cough drops or Diet Coke. But in the middle of a shift that June, loudspeakers ordered Willie to the guards’ office. There had been a tragedy in his family, the sergeant told him, and he ought to call his sister Gladys. His brother John Thomas—the oldest of his half siblings, from Mozella’s first marriage—had died.

  JT had lived to seventy-one. His funeral was planned for First Baptist Church, in Lawndale, this coming Wednesday, Gladys told him over the phone. Because this was an hour and twenty minutes east of Craggy, she’d lobbied prison administrators for six hours of temporary leave, beginning that noon. The form they’d signed to grant his leave also listed his conditions: “Inmate will be accompanied by two (2) armed correctional officers and will be restrained to one officer at any time outside the security vehicle.”

  First Baptist Church sat in a mostly black section of Lawndale, but the guards Craggy assigned were both white. To transport him they put Willie in handcuffs and leg shackles, each threaded heavily to a waist chain. He wore an ill-fitting navy suit and black loafers the prison had lent him from its donated collection. After parking their cruiser, the guards escorted him by his elbows into the church, to sit in a rear pew. Up front stood his remaining siblings—Robert Lee, Samuel Lee, Gladys, and Cliff Jr.—who stepped as near as they dared to say hello. He saw his childhood friend Thomas Hill, too, beside other familiar faces from Lawndale, but guards let him speak with no one but family. To see everyone like this felt better than a prison visit, and also worse—to be so near them, so many at once, and still feel so distant. As soon as the service ended guards led him back to their cruiser and set off back for Craggy.

  A few days later he was closing the canteen window at the end of a shift when one of Craggy’s administrators, its head programmer, appeared at the counter.

  Fetch me something, will you? the programmer asked, reaching for his wallet.

  Willie shook his head apologetically. The canteen had already closed, so he wasn’t allowed to wait on anyone.

  Don’t worry about that.

  He was sorry, Willie repeated. His supervisor had just told him not to wait on anyone once the window was closed. He couldn’t.

  The programmer stared at him incredulously. Then he spun and marched away.

  Later that week Willie’s bunk was chosen for a shakedown. This was an excuse for guards to upturn all an inmate’s belongings—supposedly in search of drugs or weapons, though they rarely found either. Normally a shakedown exposed nothing more than paper clips, rubber bands, or hardcover books. Depending on the guard, any of these could be violations. In Willie’s bunk a guard found a spare radio, in addition to the one Willie carried around with him. He’d brought this spare from Cleveland County, where inmates had been allowed two. Here at Craggy, inmates were allowed only one, the guard announced. A spare radio was a violation. He flipped open its battery cover and then a wad of bills was
in his hands.

  What’s this? he demanded. You hiding fifty dollars?

  Willie shook his head, startled. He had no idea where the bills had come from.

  You been hiding money?

  I never saw that fifty dollars before, Willie insisted.

  Arms wide, the guard commanded him. He patted Willie down and discovered eight more dollars in his pockets.

  That was his, Willie agreed. He was allowed to have eight dollars. But he’d never put anything inside his radio.

  Can’t be hiding money, the guard scolded him. Hide money, you lose privileges. He pocketed the fifty-eight dollars and snatched the spare radio, leaving the rest of Willie’s things strewn across the floor. Then he revoked Willie’s phone privileges for two weeks and assigned him fifteen hours of extra duty. These Willie could work off by washing dishes.

  He was demoted from canteen operator back to assistant cook, then to baker. When he came up again for custody review, his case manager noticed the violation had added five points to his record; this made him ineligible for minimum custody, even if he were within sixty months of his release date, which he still wasn’t.

  When he completed the extra duty hours he asked again to be transferred nearer to Lawndale. More than a year had passed after his first request, which had been approved, but he’d been backlogged ever since. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, the request was approved again. As he gathered his few belongings that morning to bring with him on the Goose, the head programmer appeared suddenly at his bunk. “A lot of jobs, they go to a man’s head,” he remarked, peering around Willie’s cell. This was too bad, he added. “Makes them do crazy things.” He stared at Willie. Then he turned and was gone.

  By the afternoon Willie was at Marion Correctional, nearly forty miles east.

  “I have had long johns on every camp I been on to keep me from getting sick,” he wrote on a sick call request five days after arriving, “plus I don’t have a jacket or cap here; they took them.” Over the next six weeks Marion pinballed him between five different bunks. Then, the day before New Year’s Eve, less than two months since he’d arrived, he was transferred right back to Craggy.

  Since meeting Bryan Garner on the benches on the yard at Harnett, each time Willie was transferred from one prison to another, the former congregation phoned ahead to the next, so a new Bible teacher could visit him as soon as he arrived. In all the transfers he’d lost track of Bryan, whom he’d heard had been paroled early for good behavior. Still, at Sampson and Vance, then Cleveland County and Craggy and Marion, there were always new Witnesses to teach him, in addition to the Scripture he was reading on his own. Otherwise he noticed that guards and inmates regarded him with vague suspicion. He was part of a cult, they told him, and tried to talk him out of it. They’d heard Witnesses didn’t salute the flag, which meant they were Communists. They’d heard Witnesses didn’t celebrate Christmas.

  No one he’d met was a Communist. It was true they didn’t celebrate Christmas, but for good reason—according to Scripture, the day men had assigned the holiday was all wrong. The Bible itself provided no date for Jesus’s birth, but it did mention that, during the same season, “there were also in the same region shepherds living out of doors and keeping watch in the night over their flocks.” Did this make any sense in the cold of a Bethlehem winter? No. So Witnesses had chosen to ignore it.

  Nonetheless, there were reasons that Witnesses could be hard to get along with, even for Willie, and these saddened him. The removal of Jehovah’s name from Scripture they saw as one instance of a broader, hazardous migration away from the literal truth of the Bible, a migration they took seriously. Other religions had strayed, they believed, and it was up to Witnesses to correct them. They disapproved of preachers, ministers, rabbis, monks, all titles men had invented to govern who could be nearest to God. They disapproved of a religion like Lutheranism, named literally after a man. Who were Lutherans really worshipping? In His very first commandment, Jehovah had said to worship no god but Him.

  For these reasons, a Witness’s faith meant to some degree his opposition to any other. Theoretically this principle applied to most anyone, but it applied to Witnesses more literally than most. It was even how a Witness asked whether a stranger shared his religion: Not “Are you a Jehovah’s Witness?” but “Do you know the Truth?” Different Witnesses practiced this habit with varying amounts of humility and tact. Willie understood how, in the wrong combination, it might turn a stranger away.

  Privately he doubted one or two of his teachers’ lessons. Most Witnesses resisted close friendships with those outside the religion, but Willie couldn’t see any sense in this. How could a Witness share Jehovah’s word, as He had bid them, without interacting daily with nonbelievers? Jesus Himself had been kind to prostitutes and criminals. To spurn another person conflicted with everything Jehovah had taught him. The less judgmental his thoughts, the more faithful he felt. So many of the people who’d been good to him in his life—his friends from Douglas High, most of the Shufords—weren’t Witnesses. Neither was Mozella or any of his siblings.

  Witnesses had simply gotten that part wrong, Willie decided. A good person was a good person, regardless of what he called Jehovah. Scripture said so. No one would persuade him otherwise.

  He began struggling to urinate. Often he felt the urge to go but couldn’t, for as long as ten minutes. Nurses examined his prostate and found it tender and enlarged; a screen for prostate cancer returned negative. During a follow-up a few weeks later, a doctor decided he had prostatitis, a type of inflammation. He prescribed Willie an antibiotic, and something else called Hytrin. He lost more than ten pounds in two weeks. Nurses prescribed him another antibiotic. In late summer they transferred him to Central Prison, for further examination; by then he’d lost another fifteen pounds.

  A week before the start of autumn he was transferred back to Craggy. By October he’d gained back the weight he’d lost, but now his recovered health allowed him time to think, which was a problem. He could while away only so many hours walking loops around the Craggy yard, and the remainder he inevitably filled by ruminating on his case. He simply had no idea what to do. The realization made him tremble. If his appeals were used up, and he was never promoted to minimum security, and he never got work release or parole, then he was certain to die in prison. His siblings and a few close friends knew the truth, but otherwise that would die with him. No one else would remember him at all, and if they did, they would remember him a rapist.

  His sleep was fitful, then ceased almost altogether. At least once a week, exhausted and despondent, he was moved suddenly to tears. One afternoon another inmate asked to borrow his headphones, which Willie had purchased from the canteen, and Willie agreed. Then the inmate turned unexpectedly and jogged away. When Willie caught up, the inmate insisted the headphones were his.

  But I just lent you those, Willie protested.

  Nope, the inmate replied. These headphones always been mine.

  Sputtering, Willie complained to a guard, who returned the headphones to him. The following afternoon, though, a different guard appeared and snatched them from him again. Heard you tried to steal these, he told Willie.

  Again he asked for a transfer nearer to Lawndale, and was denied. To keep himself occupied, and to prevent the piling up of empty hours, he volunteered for double shifts at the canteen, where Craggy had reinstalled him after his brief stay at Marion. But the job was harder than he remembered. Inmates often made rude customers; in the past this had never bothered him, but now he grew instantly, convulsively angry. Sometimes he boiled over even before registering why. Afterward he felt overcome with guilt. He’d invested so much in becoming a new kind of person, and now he could feel himself unspooling, like yarn. He knew Jehovah would consider him a failure. He asked to leave his position at the canteen window and take a job in the warehouse instead, loading and unloading merchandise out back. There he wouldn’t need to interact with other inmates. Then he filled out a request for
mental-health services.

  The psychologist he met noticed Willie made “poor eye contact,” and seemed to hold a “low self image.” His trouble sleeping the psychologist attributed to “anxiety regarding his placement in the center of the prison dormitory. He tells me that he has always been most comfortable in prison either in a cell or at the corners of the dormitory where he is not surrounded by others. He has asked to be moved to a corner bed assignment… A related factor is that he has been losing weight and nursing staff have ruled out any medical reason for this.” He referred Willie to a psychiatrist.

  “Willie continues to be slow and deliberate in his movements, speech, and he shows poor eye contact,” the psychiatrist observed after Thanksgiving. “I suspect he is a quiet, shy person and he displays this, but I also detect the presence of a depressed mood.” Willie still wasn’t sleeping well, but a new antidepressant, Paxil, had calmed him. “Overall, he seems to be doing better. He has decided that he does not want to be at the window at the canteen. He feels that it is less stressful working in the back.”

  He made it off the backlog to Cleveland County, but stayed there less than a week before being shipped to Lincoln, twenty miles northeast. He didn’t understand this; after being the last to arrive at Cleveland County, then he’d been the first to leave. He asked his new case manager why this had happened, but his case manager had no idea. Still, Lincoln was an improvement, Willie decided—only a thirty-minute drive from Lawndale, a third of what Craggy had been. He asked for a job in either the rear of the canteen or the kitchen. “Appears to be easygoing and presented good attitude,” the case manager wrote in his file.