One morning that autumn an inmate rushed hysterically into the kitchen, interrupting Willie on a breakfast shift. “They bombed New York!” the man shouted. “They’re gonna kill a whole bunch of people.”
Willie followed him into the dayroom, where on a television monitor he saw two buildings were aflame. He’d never seen buildings so tall, or so much smoke, billowing like thunderheads. A caption read “New York City.” Inmates overcrowded the dayroom, panicking about where might be next, after New York, but the thought hadn’t crossed Willie’s mind. A place like New York City was a geography he could no longer imagine. Thirteen years in prison had shrunk his frame of reference to the scale of a pinhead. He recalled a joke he’d heard once: no one ever heard of terrorists attacking a prison, just like no one ever heard of an earthquake striking one. Doesn’t matter what goes on in the world, a saying went. You don’t exist out there anymore.
He was transferred to Piedmont Correctional, an hour northeast, where after a month he learned that his brother Samuel Lee had died. Prostate cancer. Gladys wanted him at Samuel Lee’s funeral, but when she phoned Piedmont, a receptionist told her it was a bad idea. “He’ll be in shackles,” he kept repeating, and it was so much paperwork to get a day pass.
She’d gotten Willie out on a day pass once before, Gladys insisted.
Wherever she’d gotten that, it was someplace other than Piedmont, the receptionist told her. He doubted she realized how much paperwork this required.
Even if she got her brother a day pass, Gladys knew, he’d be chained to guards for the entire service. Seeing him like that had been so awful the last time, worse even than the funeral, and she didn’t know if Willie wanted to go through it again, either. Finally she gave up.
A new case manager identified four goals he wanted Willie to achieve while at Piedmont. He wrote these into Willie’s file: “1. Attend vocation schools 2. Enroll in the S.O.A.R. program 3. Attend the N/A [Narcotics Anonymous] program 4. Remain infraction free.” He was transferred back to Lincoln, but as soon as he arrived a guard told him he was backlogged for Piedmont. He’d just come from Piedmont, Willie complained; he didn’t understand why he kept being shipped back and forth. Not every inmate was tossed about this way. Some stayed on one camp for a dozen years at a stretch. The determination seemed random. A new psychologist confessed he had no idea about Willie’s transfer schedule, and promised his health care and records would follow him wherever he went. Willie knew this wasn’t true; several times already his prescriptions had gotten lost in transfer, and he’d had to find a new doctor to prescribe them. If only for the autonomy, he decided to stop his antidepressants. Then, clearheaded, he decided he would divorce Towana.
He’d lost touch with Towana years earlier; as far as he knew, she was still in DC, where he’d always assumed news of what happened to him must have traveled. But Towana had never reached out, so he wasn’t certain. For a long time he’d hoped they might reconcile one day, but now reality had sunk in—as long as he continued refusing SOAR, he didn’t expect ever to get out, and this guaranteed he’d never see Towana again. As long as their marriage was still valid, it prevented her from marrying anyone else, he realized. This was selfish of him. Wherever Towana was, probably she wanted to get on with her life. Legally, a divorce required that Towana sign papers, but Willie didn’t know where to find her. All he remembered was her mother’s address. He signed the relevant forms, had them notarized, and mailed them off, hoping eventually they would find Towana.
Virginia Moose learned that Willie had been offered parole and had refused, so she shared this with her husband Eddie, who got to thinking. For a while now Eddie had believed Willie was telling the truth, but to hear he had turned down a chance at freedom, if only he admitted guilt… that was something else, Eddie thought. He got his hands on a copy of the transcript from Willie’s trial, decided to read it for himself. And was astonished. Other than the hair comparison and Carrie Elliott’s ID, both of which seemed awfully flimsy, he couldn’t see a single thing that tied his friend to the rape. How could they have proven this? he thought. He mentioned his impression to Virginia, who urged him to do something about it. But what? Carrie Elliott had passed away, meaning her testimony could never be recanted.
He resolved to find a lawyer. In the newspaper recently he’d read of one over in Charlotte winning some high-profile case, and he recalled the lawyer’s name, Noell Tin. For a second opinion, he called a friend who lived over that way and happened to work in the district attorney’s office. Did his friend know any particularly good lawyer? Noell Tin, the friend answered, unprompted. This was enough for Eddie. He called Tin’s firm, made an appointment, and drove to Charlotte.
Tin didn’t fully understand why Eddie was interested in the case—was Willie Grimes a relative?—so Eddie explained he was a Jehovah’s Witness and about the prison ministry. He wasn’t any legal advocate, trying to free someone, he promised. “It just seems to me, reading his case, there was no evidence to support his conviction. But I don’t have any legal training. So I just wanted a professional to look at it.” Neither he nor Virginia had any idea what it would cost for Tin to do what they were asking, but Virginia had vowed to Willie they would find a good lawyer to at least read his transcript, even if it meant taking out another mortgage on their house.
That wasn’t necessary, Tin assured Eddie. He’d visited enough prisons to know what Witnesses did there. He offered to read Willie’s transcript for three hundred dollars.
A week later Tin phoned and invited Eddie back to Charlotte. He shared Eddie’s view, he agreed; Willie seemed to have been convicted without much evidence, so Tin thought the case was worth pursuing. That was the good news. The bad news was that Tin doubted Willie or even Eddie could afford his rate. Tin’s schedule was filled with other clients, and the cost of taking on another might be prohibitive. Still, there was another option. Tin knew of an organization out of Duke Law School that worked on cases like this one, and for free. Tin sometimes referred clients there. If Eddie was interested, this was what he wanted to do for Willie.
Eddie agreed.
That winter Tin phoned the director of the organization he’d mentioned, Pete Weitzel, to share he had a case he thought Weitzel might be interested in. Weitzel invited Tin to send it along, so a few days later Tin did, with an explanation: “I have done a preliminary review of the transcript, and concluded the case may have merit but requires further investigation.” Because he personally was at work on other cases, Tin couldn’t take this one on, too, so he hoped Weitzel might offer the transcript to “those energetic law and journalism students” he knew Weitzel worked with, “to see if anyone is interested in looking into this matter.” Finally he passed along contact information for Eddie Moose.
Tin had warned Eddie it might be a long while before the center responded, so he and Virginia waited for news. Then, in May, Willie received an envelope from a name he didn’t recognize, the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence. The letter inside had also been copied to Eddie Moose and Noell Tin. Included was a nineteen-page questionnaire, and a release form. Near the bottom of the letter was a disclaimer:
Proving innocence is never easy; it becomes more difficult with each subsequent year. There’s also a great deal of luck involved in any successful challenge. In most cases, because of these difficulties, we will have no course of action available to us once we have concluded our initial investigation. In only a few instances will we be able to pursue our investigation to the point where the inmate will benefit. We know you recognize these difficulties; we ask only that you have patience and understand the odds that are facing us—and you—in pursuing this inquiry.
During visiting hours, with Eddie’s help, Willie filled out the center’s questionnaire and signed and dated it: June 9, 2003. Then he dropped it in the mail.
20
We Recommend the Closing of This File
Most of the time she wasn’t at a commission meeting Chris spent at her center of
fice in the lonely basement of Duke Law School, a narrow, windowless room with two desks and a file cabinet. Besides Mitch and the kids, she didn’t have much of a social life; occasionally she met colleagues for dinner or coffee, but for as long as she remembered her closest friend had been her own sister, who threatened an intervention every so often, since she worried Chris worked too much. In spring and summer Chris liked pruning roses in her garden, but she didn’t enjoy just lying about, since that never felt restorative, only tormented her. One friend she did have, who lived down in Florida, had once bought her a gift, a T-shirt that read RELAXING STRESSES ME OUT. If she left her center desk even for lunch, new e-mails always filled her in-box when she returned, so she often stayed awake until midnight or later, sending replies. “Are you really that altruistic, or do you just have a rich husband?” someone had asked her recently, during a ceremony at the local bar association. “Both,” Chris had answered.
One of those e-mails was from Pete Weitzel. A lawyer over in Charlotte had forwarded Weitzel a letter about a potential client, so Weitzel in turn had forwarded this to Chris. Before piling it onto a stack with the others, Chris asked a staffer for a preliminary read; this meant a search of the Department of Correction database, then tracking down the inmate’s trial transcript, appellate opinions that were public record, and any newspaper articles that could be found on the Internet. By the time the staffer had finished, a complete questionnaire had arrived from the inmate himself, so Chris opened a new folder and labeled it with the man’s name: Willie Grimes.
Next Chris asked one of the center’s volunteers, a law student from Chapel Hill named Nadia Konstantinova, to begin a formal summary of the case. This included a synopsis of the initial crime, police investigation, and trial, plus a list of everyone who’d been subpoenaed and outlined arguments from both the prosecution and defense, and what Konstantinova regarded as weakness in each. Among these was the hair sample that police had recovered from the victim’s apartment. That hair had never undergone DNA analysis, Konstantinova realized, but an SBI technician had testified that, in his experience, distinct people almost never had microscopically identical hair.
Bull, Chris wrote next to this line in Konstantinova’s report.
Other than that hair, Grimes’s case had mostly come down to the victim’s identification, Konstantinova concluded. This “seemed to fade in and out. Her reports to the police were not consistent and became a lot more detailed once she spoke with Ms. McDowell,” the victim’s neighbor. Other evidence “was minimal,” which on the one hand cast the trial’s outcome under suspicion, but on the other hand meant Konstantinova wasn’t certain how to proceed. “While innocence issues exist, actual innocence may be difficult to prove due to the lack of collected evidence and the age of the case.”
So she met again with Chris, who suggested that Konstantinova reach out to the sheriff’s department, to see whether it held on to what little evidence it had collected. Konstantinova did. Within a month she had “reached a road block,” she e-mailed Chris; no one with the Hickory police was able to match the inmate’s report number to anything in their evidence room. When that hadn’t worked, Konstantinova had gotten in touch with Ed de Torres, the inmate’s original defense attorney. “While he strongly believes in Mr. Grimes’s innocence, he said that he is not sure whether anything can be done for him. He said that various groups have looked at this case and have not been able to do anything about it.” De Torres had suggested that Konstantinova try the Catawba County clerk’s office, since evidence typically was kept there after it had been introduced at trial, so Konstantinova had done this, but the clerk had checked her evidence room and found records only as far back as 1991. Grimes had been convicted in 1988. “She told me that I can come look myself if I want to. I’m not sure what to do next. It seems that everyone believes in his innocence. If he is innocent, it’s pretty horrible that he has to spend the rest of his life in prison. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do.”
Take the clerk up on her offer, Chris replied. “It sounds like the evidence should either be there, or there should be an order for it to be destroyed. Hopefully you can find one or the other.”
So Konstantinova drove the hundred and forty miles to Catawba County Superior Court, where she sifted through evidence logs only to confirm what the clerk had told her by phone: there was no reference at all to Willie Grimes. Somehow the evidence had been destroyed, without any order to do so or any formal record that it had been done. For Chris she drafted a fresh synopsis of the case, including her failure to track down any evidence or even a reliable clue for where it had been moved and why. “His defense counsel, prison ministries volunteer, and various other people who have looked at the case strongly believe in his innocence,” Konstantinova wrote. Which was sad, but, legally speaking, she didn’t see what else there was to do. “If there are any additional avenues to pursue, I will be glad to continue working on the case.”
Chris assigned three more student volunteers, each of whom read Grimes’s entire file and met a week later to match it with Konstantinova’s synopsis. They couldn’t find any discrepancies. “All of us agreed that we believed in Willie Grimes’s innocence,” they reported to Chris. One of the students had even phoned Ed de Torres to ask for his thoughts: “He immediately told me that he believed in Willie Grimes’s innocence, but he was not sure that there was any legal recourse left to free him. He believed that there was no bad faith on the part of the victim.” The student had also asked de Torres whether he knew where the rape kit was (de Torres didn’t) and whether, theoretically, de Torres would mind someone filing an MAR on Grimes’s behalf, alleging ineffective assistance of counsel. If it would help Willie, de Torres answered, they had his blessing to do anything they could think of. “He basically informed us that there was no real help that he could provide us with this case, but that he wishes us the best of luck.”
Several more times the students phoned the Catawba County clerk’s office to confirm that neither the rape kit nor the hair evidence still existed. Then they persuaded the clerk to phone colleagues in Raleigh, on the unlikely chance that somehow his records had been forwarded there. They hadn’t. “The three of us believe in Willie Grimes’s innocence,” they concluded in their final report. “Unfortunately, it will be difficult if not impossible to secure his release.” Willie had been convicted on two pieces of evidence: testimony from Carrie Elliott, and a hair recovered from the scene. “Both are unobtainable for review now, as the victim is dead and the hair is no longer with the Clerk of Courts. There are no samples on which to run DNA tests. All of Willie’s avenues for appeals have been exhausted. No suitable grounds for a Motion for Appropriate Relief exists.” So they didn’t see what more anyone could do. “We recommend the closing of this file.”
But Chris, who’d been anxiously reading each student report, couldn’t swallow this prospect. Closing a file meant archiving it into a cabinet that stretched nearly an entire wall of the center office, and then, eventually, since they’d run out of space there, into a box in the attic at Chris’s house, where she’d taken to storing overflow. Once she relegated a case to her attic, she’d never brought it out again. It was plain what this would mean for Grimes.
But she couldn’t justify keeping Grimes’s file in the cabinet she wanted, with the center’s active cases. Short of somehow finding new evidence, the center would never be able to move forward with it, she knew. Grimes’s file would only sit there, robbing space from others.
She settled on a lukewarm compromise. From her purse she drew out a sheet of paper where inmates’ names were listed in two columns: Cases of Innocence Still Open and Cases with No Avenues to Pursue. Reluctantly she scratched out Grimes’s name in the first column and wrote it in the second. Then she gathered together his file. Most center cases fit neatly into folders, but for this one she and her volunteers had collected enough documents to fill a short stack of purple binders. Rather than drop these into a drawer, she simply
placed them atop the office file cabinet, spread alone across several feet, and labeled them each with a handwritten sticky note: Willie Grimes. The case was no longer active, exactly. But she wasn’t closing it, either.
On the opposite side of the country, a district attorney in Oregon named Joshua Marquis, who also served as a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association, wrote an op-ed, published January 26, 2006, in the New York Times. Recently he’d seen previews for a new television show on ABC called In Justice, a drama that followed a fictional organization as it freed the wrongly convicted. A person who watched this “popular culture” or listened to its “conventional wisdom” must believe “that our prisons are chock-full of doe-eyed innocents,” he complained. That was “a misconception,” since “the hordes of Americans wrongfully convicted exist primarily on Planet Hollywood.” Marquis cited a study from a year earlier, in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, that had named three hundred and forty exonerees from thirty-eight different states who averaged more than ten years each wrongly imprisoned. Authors of the study estimated those numbers made up only a portion of a larger, unknowable total.
Even if their estimate was right, Marquis argued, those wrongful convictions amounted to a tiny fraction of the million-odd felony verdicts that American courts rendered accurately every year. An error rate of several hundred, even several thousand, per decade or so was a proportion worth admiring. “Most industries would like to claim such a record of efficiency.” True, human lives were “more important than widgets.” That was what appeals were for.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 22
