Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  21

  Some Concerns About His Medical Condition

  He decided to enroll in a computer class. On the outside, before his arrest, no one he knew had owned a computer, but now he kept hearing about them—word among inmates was that everyone out there owned one, and he knew that even the DOC had digitized its records. On the activities board he found an announcement for a class called Computer Applications, up at Mountain View, so he signed his name and asked his case manager for a transfer there. A few days later a guard told him to expect his transfer the coming Thursday. But that same afternoon his case manager called him over the loudspeakers to share conflicting news: Willie was backlogged.

  As he waited for transfer, a letter arrived from the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, confirming it had received his questionnaire and assigned his case “to a team for an in-depth review.” Because the center was inundated with requests, its review might not begin for more than a year, the letter warned, and limited staff meant the center couldn’t provide regular updates on its progress. “We will be in touch when a decision has been made on your case.”

  Soon he passed a milestone. By DOC rules, an inmate qualified for promotion to minimum custody exactly five years before his parole eligibility date—according to Willie’s sentence, December 2, 2008. As of the previous Tuesday, he was four years and three hundred and sixty-four days out. For the first time, he was formally eligible for promotion. After fifteen years in prison. “Inmate has remained infraction free since 12-2-98,” his case manager praised, when he next was up for custody review. “He continues his assignment in the kitchen receiving excellent evaluations.” Nonetheless, she and her colleagues agreed he was too early in his eligibility. They issued an override, to keep him in medium.

  He was shipped to Craggy, which made no sense, since he’d asked for Mountain View—luckily Craggy turned out to offer Computer Applications, too, though here the class didn’t begin until spring. When finally it came around, he liked it so much—the way it hastened his afternoon, the orderliness of tapping a button and seeing its result on the screen—he signed up for another once the first eight weeks were finished. When this second one ended he asked for a transfer back to Lincoln, since the classes were the only reason he’d come to Craggy. That same month he came up again for custody review. “Inmate’s aggressive behavior shows that he could/would pose a threat to the community if promoted at this time,” a supervisor wrote in his file.

  He was transferred to Caledonia, all the way out in Tillery, three hundred miles east of Lincoln. “He wants to transfer to another facility,” his new case manager wrote, nearly as soon as Willie arrived. “He does not like it here.” Before he could be moved, a guard roused him in the middle of the night for a drug test. Every so often guards announced these unexpectedly, usually at midnight or later, when inmates were unlikely to be prepared for them. He corralled Willie and five others from their cells into the gymnasium, then handed each a clear plastic cup. Once they pissed, the guard told them, they could return to their bunks.

  He couldn’t urinate on command, Willie admitted sheepishly.

  The guard shrugged and handed him a cup of water. He had two hours.

  That wasn’t what he meant, Willie explained. He was on medication to help him with problems urinating. He promised he’d never taken drugs, but two hours might not be enough.

  The guard only glared at him, so Willie gulped his water and waited. He tried again. Two hours passed. This counted as refusal of a direct order, the guard decided, at two a.m. He charged Willie with an infraction: A14, refusal to submit to a drug test. A sergeant arrived and asked Willie to sign a form. Willie signed. Did he want to make any statement on his own behalf?

  He’d already told all he had to say.

  Rather than taking him to his bunk, the guard marched him to segregation, where Willie spent the rest of the night. In the morning he asked for a sick-call request, scribbled on the form what had happened, and asked a different guard to carry it to the nurses’ station. Another day and night passed before a nurse responded with a copy of his prescription. Willie had been telling the truth, she verified; he was on Cardura, 4 milligrams a day, for trouble urinating.

  Another guard revised the infraction note in Willie’s file. “It is recommended that his charge be dismissed and that inmate Grimes is tested at a later date.” He released Willie back to his bunk.

  His heartburn flared suddenly, then light-headedness, then a thudding, bone-deep fatigue, as though his limbs had been replaced with sandbags. When he used the bathroom, he noticed blood. Nurses referred him to a doctor—the first black physician Willie had seen on any camp, Dr. Land, who visited twice weekly. Land asked how recently Willie had had his prostate examined, and Willie told him it had been a couple of years. Would Willie mind if Dr. Land performed an exam now? Willie didn’t, so Land snapped on a latex glove. When he finished, he regarded Willie seriously. “I can tell you right now,” he said, “you’ve got prostate cancer. And you’ve had it for years.”

  Willie felt dazed. How could Land know?

  “The first couple years, cancerous tissue will feel bumpy, like a bunch of blisters,” Land explained. He held his thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart and squinted at the gap to demonstrate. Then he drew both hands into a circle, and held this before his chest. “Your prostate is hard as a rock, all the way around. That tells you how long it’s progressed. You know, prostate cancer—you can have it for twenty years, and if there aren’t any symptoms, and no one checks for it? You wouldn’t have known.”

  But the prison checked him almost annually. His urinating problems had been happening for years, and they’d even put him on pills for an enlarged prostate. No one had said anything about cancer.

  Land shrugged. He couldn’t be certain when the inflammation had turned cancerous, but the blisters he was describing usually were a year or two before they hardened around the edges. Willie’s might have been cancerous for a decade or more. Of course he’d refer Willie out for formal tests, he promised. But he had no doubt—Willie had prostate cancer.

  Land made an appointment for him at a nearby urology clinic, and two months later, in January, a specialist conducted the same exam, and then a biopsy. Of the six samples the urologist tested, five were positive for adenocarcinoma. He estimated this meant 30 to 35 percent of the organ was cancerous. “His cancer is really bad,” he wrote in Willie’s medical file. Then he wrote to Dr. Land, back at Caledonia. “I think he has an aggressive cancer. So I think he needs some aggressive treatment.” Before that began, he wanted a CT and a bone scan, to rule out metastases.

  Depending on the scan results, they had a decision to make, the urologist explained to Willie in his office after the biopsy. He could remove the prostate altogether. Or radiation might work, though it carried certain risks, mainly permanent bladder or bowel problems. Theoretically, Willie was a candidate for cryotherapy—this meant freezing the cancerous cells with liquid nitrogen—or even hormone therapy, but the urologist didn’t recommend either, given how far along Willie’s prostate was. A final option, watchful waiting, meant exactly what it sounded like: punting the decision for later, and observing how the cancer behaved. He didn’t think this was a good idea either, for the same reason.

  How would each treatment affect his life span?

  That was the right question, the urologist agreed—unfortunately, it was also impossible to answer. Willie’s cancer didn’t look to have spread from his prostate, so guessing his life span even if they did nothing was hazy enough. Predicting it after each hypothetical treatment? That was even hazier.

  Willie considered this. From his early despair in prison, two lessons had stayed with him. First, from his slew of failed appeals, that whatever control he felt was largely an illusion. Second, from Scripture, that Jehovah helped only those who helped themselves. Neither of these facts conflicted with the other. “All the things you ask in prayer, having faith, you will receive,” Jesus had told His
disciples in Jerusalem. But: “If I am not doing the works of My Father, do not believe Me,” He had told the Pharisees. A man was responsible for himself, for laboring on his own behalf, and he needed help. It was Jehovah, after all, who’d brought Willie to doctors, he realized.

  “It’s up to you,” the urologist said. But personally he recommended surgery.

  Willie agreed.

  A scan of his pelvis two weeks later confirmed what doctors already knew: a calcification, measuring seven millimeters. There was no evidence of metastasis. Next his chest was x-rayed, which came back normal, then his abdomen, which came back normal, too. More doctors examined him at UNC Health Care, the state hospital over in Chapel Hill. In Willie’s medical chart, under “Physical Examination,” one wrote, “Pleasant black man… in shackles.” He agreed Willie’s prostate was inflamed, and noticed that Willie’s prostate-specific antigen—a protein that oncologists used as a marker for prostate cancer—measured 8.5 nanograms per milliliter. A normal PSA was under 4. He diagnosed Willie with prostate cancer, stage 2, and explained the same options Willie already had discussed with Dr. Land, at Caledonia, and the urologist, at the clinic. He offered a consult with a radiologist, which Willie declined; he’d made up his mind for surgery.

  Finally, doctors recorded a complete inventory of all his medications, and wrote up the plan everyone agreed on in Willie’s medical chart. “The patient would like to pursue surgical intervention and will undergo radical retropubic prostatectomy in the near future. We need to get Department of Corrections’ approval… and we are working on this currently.”

  “Based on his age, management feels that he can be managed in a less secure environment,” a supervisor decided. He referred Willie to a psychiatrist for a DOC-mandated risk assessment, which included a review of his “social, criminal and mental health history data,” plus a psychological examination and a recidivism worksheet. Had he ever had sexual intercourse with his own mother? He checked No. What about his siblings? No. What about another man? No.

  Based on confidential findings, however, kept even from Willie, the psychiatrist assigned him a failing score. “Promotion [to minimum custody] not recommended due to unacceptable risk assessment,” an assistant superintendent wrote in June.

  That same afternoon Willie met again with the urologist. “I told him that with God’s grace I have never had any major complications,” the urologist entered in his notes. “I discussed with him for a long time, even though he was an inmate, he had a lot of questions and I answered them all patiently.”

  Two weeks later, Willie returned for surgery.

  Three days after his surgery he was transferred back to the inmate hospital at Central Prison. He still wore a catheter, and knifelike pain still quivered through his abdomen, but soon he was able to stand on his own and shuffle gingerly down the widely tiled corridors. The urologist had told him to expect the catheter for at least two weeks, after which he could turn to adult diapers. How long he would need those was harder to estimate. Midway through July, at his first follow-up, he appeared to be recovering on schedule; the urologist removed his catheter and cleared him for discharge back to Caledonia.

  A week later he was shipped. He met a new case manager, whose notes on him were straightforward: “Inmate stated that he had some concerns about his medical condition. I informed the unit manager.”

  A bladder sonogram six months after surgery showed a normally healing abdomen. Because the pain was still worst when he sat or lay down, he asked for a spare pad to soften his mattress. Then he came up again for custody review. “Willie is a sex offender and has not participated in any program to address this during his incarceration,” his case manager wrote. “Staff feel that Willie should participate/complete a SOAR program prior to custody promotion. The recommendation is to retain in medium custody with an override.” Three days later, a supervisor added: “Inmate has not been a management problem but states that he refuses to participate in recommended SOAR program because he’s not going to admit something that he did not do. Therefore retention in medium custody is recommended.”

  Loudspeakers summoned him that autumn to the guards’ office, where a sergeant told him his brother Cliff Jr. had died. From the office he phoned Gladys, who told him that Cliff had been on dialysis, awaiting a kidney transplant that had never come. Despite the distance, she wanted to get Willie to Lawndale for the funeral. But she’d run into a problem. A recent law in North Carolina forbade carrying firearms in any funeral procession. This turned out to apply even to prison guards, who couldn’t escort an inmate without their guns, and also couldn’t allow Willie anywhere unescorted.

  Cliff’s funeral proceeded without him.

  After a loop around the yard, he rested on a bench to watch a game of horseshoes, as other inmates milled about loosely in groups. From the game came periodic thumps and clangs. Then shouting, a commotion. He looked up and saw an inmate’s arm raised—was he celebrating?—but now the arm blurred downward, it was up and down again, Willie saw blood, he realized there was a knife. By then another inmate had spun and crumpled to his knees, gasping. Something was impaled in his chest, a stain spread down his shirt and into his pants. The horseshoes game had ceased and there was an unfamiliar silence. Where are the guards? A crowd blocked Willie’s view and abruptly there was noise again, then the crowd opened and one inmate was striding away, and the crowd closed again behind him. Where are the guards? At that moment guards appeared and Willie worried he’d accidentally spoken aloud. A guard was demanding to know what happened, but no one would answer. “What happened here?” he shouted, into downcast faces. Inmates began drifting away. Nothing good would come of answering, Willie knew. He rose from the bench and walked off.

  He was given a pad for his mattress, five months after he’d requested it. He wrote another letter to the Center on Actual Innocence: “They is trying to get me to sign papers saying that I’m guilty and go to the SOAR program before giving me any type of help,” he protested. “I can’t sign papers saying I did some thing that I didn’t do just to get some help.”

  A letter arrived with news the center had been contacted by the Denver Post, which was running a story on cases where evidence had been destroyed or gone missing. Now a reporter wanted to visit him in prison for an interview, and there was a consent form. Willie didn’t follow; had the center sent him this letter, or had the Post? Was he supposed to consent? He wrote the center again. “I’m asking you this because I have not heard from you all or been told if I have a lawyer in my case. I would appreciate if you could answer me and let me know if you all ask them to interview me or should I talk to them. I would like to thank you for your time and patience for any kind of information you can help with.”

  22

  Any Cases Where Evidence Had Gone Missing

  At her desk at the center, around the time she phoned Kendra Montgomery-Blinn at the Wake County DA’s office, Chris got an e-mail from a reporter at the Denver Post, which was planning a feature series on the problem of criminal-evidence storage—how much of it vanished or was destroyed, not only in Colorado but nationally. For leads, the Post had reached out to the original Innocence Project, up in New York, where someone had shared Chris’s e-mail address. The reporter, Susan Greene, wanted to know if Chris had any cases where evidence had gone missing, evidence that, theoretically, could have proved someone innocent. A case like that would help dramatize their series, Greene and her editors predicted. Did Chris know of one like that?

  She did.

  Greene wanted to visit Willie in prison, so Chris mailed a consent form to him at Caledonia Correctional, since she needed his signature to bring a reporter. Then Greene flew in from Denver, and Chris drove with her the hundred miles up to Halifax County.

  23

  In Three Dimensions

  The letter had come from them, the center confirmed, so Willie agreed to sign. On a humid, overcast Wednesday two weeks later, February 21, 2007, a pair of women showed up wearing gra
y and black suits and dress heels, each carrying a notepad. A photographer trailed in jeans and a T-shirt. Willie and the two women sat at an outdoor table under cloudy skies while the photographer hovered, snapping photos.

  In Willie’s own words, how had he gotten here? the Post reporter wanted to know. Where had he been that October night in 1987? What had he thought of Ed de Torres, his lawyer? How many appeals had he tried? How was he spending his time in prison, how long had it taken for him to adjust there, and how did he feel about his prospects?

  Steve Hunt, of the Hickory police, knew he was innocent, Willie replied. He saw no other reason Hunt would have arrested him so quickly, without evidence. This had to have been on purpose. But he had no idea why. He did know the solution: from trial he remembered that several fingerprints had been lifted from bananas on Carrie Elliott’s kitchen table, and that, back in 1988, police had compared those to his own, found they didn’t match, and guessed they must be Carrie Elliott’s. As far as he knew, though, no one had ever bothered to check. They weren’t his, and, if they weren’t hers, then they had to be her rapist’s, Willie knew. Someone had to find those prints and compare them to Carrie’s. At last Willie could go home.

  But those fingerprints had been destroyed, the reporter pointed out. This was the reason she was writing about Willie’s case in the first place. She’d seen for herself a photocopy of the county clerk’s 1991 message for de Torres—those fingerprints, along with the hair samples and both rape kits, were gone.

  Willie shook his head. He didn’t believe that, he told her. No one had found a paper trail showing they’d been destroyed. He couldn’t see a clerk destroying evidence without recording the action somehow—anyone on staff would know better than that. Until someone found a paper trail, there was no proof those fingerprints or anything else had been trashed, only that they had gone missing.