Justice Redeemed

by Scott Pratt

  I stood there looking at him for a few seconds, not quite knowing how to respond. When I did say something, it was idiotic.

  “So you’re telling me you’re gay?”

  “Congratulations, genius,” he said. “I just think we should be honest with each other if we’re going to live together. I promise I won’t try to get in your pants, and if you’re really a good guy, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep my little secret to yourself.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Over the next year, I fell into the mind-numbing routine of life at Rosewood. Birthdays and holidays were just like every other day. Nothing ever changed with the exception of my marital status. Six months in, Katie was granted a divorce. They didn’t go so far as to terminate my parental rights and my mother was allowed to continue her visitation with Sean, but it was a hollow victory.

  The only thing that made my existence seem real was the constant fear and the violence. Guards would attack inmates. Inmates would attack guards. Inmates would attack inmates. I’ll never forget the screams I heard one morning when an inmate went into another inmate’s cell and poured a cup of baby oil that had been super-heated in a microwave onto the sleeping man’s face. I stepped out of my cell and saw the man stagger out into the middle of the common area on the first floor. He was clutching at his face. The skin came off in his hands.

  The cells popped at 5:45 each morning, I rolled out of bed, and it began. Make the bed, do a hundred push-ups and a hundred crunches, shower, go to the chow hall, head for the law library and get some work done, back to the cell to stand for count, back to the law library, back to the chow hall, back to the law library, out to the rec yard for a run, to the workout room twice a week to exercise, stand for count, to the gym twice a week to play basketball, chow hall for evening meal, study law and work on cases in the evenings, stand for count, lock down at 9:30 p.m., go to sleep, get up and do it again the next day.

  Dino showed me the ropes initially—what little he knew—and I gradually made acquaintances with some guys I was comfortable talking with, a couple of whom were from Tennessee. I learned from them and Big Pappy how things worked, or at least how they were supposed to work, and all about the different cars and gangs in the prison. They also told me which guards were corrupt, which ones were half-decent human beings, and which ones were straight up hard-asses who liked to either hurt people or see them get hurt.

  Everybody had their hustle, including the guards. There were the card tables and the dice games, the homemade wine and liquor, the tobacco, the drugs, the protection rackets, and the stores. Most of the hustles, especially the most lucrative, were controlled by the gangs who paid the guards to turn their heads. Big Pappy controlled three card tables and about a quarter of the tobacco that was smuggled into the prison. There was a huge markup on tobacco, even though it was legal on the streets. One cigarette cost a book of stamps, which cost about six dollars. Pappy told me he could get a pouch of Bugler rolling tobacco smuggled in to him—by a guard—for about a hundred dollars. He got eighty cigarettes out of a pouch and sold them for six dollars each. Since almost everybody in the place smoked, he and his little crew sold more than a thousand cigarettes a week, which meant he was making nearly five grand a week selling cigarettes. I stayed away from all of it, though. I didn’t drink, didn’t touch a drug, didn’t gamble, and rarely spoke to a gang banger unless it was about a legal issue. I kept my distance from the guards, too. They were at the bottom of the law enforcement food chain, men and women who were underpaid and unappreciated and who would lie, cheat, and steal for each other if it meant saving their own asses. I actually had more respect for murderers, robbers, and drug dealers than I did for many of the guards.

  My hustle was law. I started taking cases about ten days after I was given a cell at Rosewood. Everything, of course, was postconviction appellate work, either direct appeals, petitions to the US Supreme Court for review, or habeas corpus petitions. I hadn’t done much appellate work on the outside, but I learned the rules and procedures of the appellate courts quickly. The prison provided me access to online legal databases, so I was able to work efficiently.

  The first thing I did was set up a corporation in Nevada where the privacy laws are so strong that corporate records are nearly impenetrable. My mom helped me with it. We sent the application through the mail and had the paperwork delivered to her. I was the president of our little corporation and she was the vice president. I then sent instructions to my mom to set up a corporate bank account into which I could have prisoners direct deposit money if they decided to hire me for a case. I hid those instructions to my mother in legal mail that I was sending to Grace, because the prison censors couldn’t read my legal correspondence. Grace could have gotten in trouble if anyone in the legal system found out, but when I sent her a letter and asked her if I could send something to my mom through her, she wrote back and said, “Absolutely.” Giving Mom access to the corporate bank account meant she could get to the money I was earning and use it for her and Sean. Katie didn’t know a thing about it, which was exactly the way I wanted it.

  Prisoners don’t have access to the Internet, but they do have access to tightly controlled e-mail accounts. If a fellow prisoner wanted to hire me and I agreed to take the case, I would quote him a fee and give him instructions on how to deposit the money into our corporate account. Once the money was transferred, I would get an e-mail from my mother about some random subject that ended with, “P.S. Sean is doing well. I’m very proud of him.”

  Big Pappy Donovan was my first client. He paid me, too. I asked him for $2,000 and he didn’t even flinch. It was no wonder, considering the amount of money he was making every week from the gambling and the cigarettes. It wasn’t until after we’d agreed on a fee that I learned how much he was pulling down with the gambling and tobacco. I should have charged him double.

  Pappy’s case was interesting from the beginning, and although I didn’t tell him, I thought we had a chance to get some relief. It was similar to mine, actually, although Pappy’s case involved a crooked cop instead of a crooked prosecutor. The cop had a personal grudge against Pappy because, according to Pappy, Pappy had stolen a woman from him when they were all in their early twenties. They came from a small town in Georgia called Hawkinsville, just south of Macon. Pappy had played football at Mercer University and had returned to Hawkinsville, where he was in his second year as an assistant coach on the Hawkinsville High School football team and teaching biology to sophomores. He ran into a woman named Paisley Grant in a bar one Saturday night. He’d known Miss Grant in high school. She was attending a birthday party for one of her friends. She and Big Pappy started talking, hit it off, and wound up having sex in his truck in the parking lot.

  “I actually liked the girl,” Pappy told me. “We started dating pretty seriously after that. I saw her almost every Saturday night and would talk to her once or twice during the week. It finally fizzled out after about four months, but I enjoyed it while it lasted. She didn’t tell me she’d been dating Ronnie Ray when we met at the bar and she didn’t tell me she broke it off with him, not that it would have mattered. I’d known Ronnie Ray since junior high. He was a pussy.”

  Not just any pussy. When Ronnie Ray first learned that Big Pappy Donovan had snaked his girlfriend, he was a patrol officer for the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Department, but within a year, Ray was assigned to a federal drug task force that worked southern Georgia. He apparently used that position to take revenge on Big Pappy, because he eventually arrested him for six counts of possessing and distributing crack cocaine, offenses that were punishable by up to life in prison. Ray filed the charge and, along with an informant, was the feds’ star witness at trial. Pappy was convicted and sentenced to thirty-five years, and he claimed to me that every word out of Ray’s mouth was a lie. He’d never seen or used crack, let alone sold it. I believed him, too. After what had happened to me and to my uncle, I knew how easy it was to rai
lroad someone if a cop or a prosecutor really wanted it done.

  Pappy had run the gamut of appeals and thought he might be finished the first time he came to see me. After we’d talked for a while, I asked him about the truck he said they had confiscated.

  “I loved that truck,” he said. “Hadn’t had it long, but I loved it.”

  “Let’s sue the county to get the truck back,” I said. “We won’t win, but we can ask for all of the investigative materials related to your case and maybe something will shake loose.”

  A month later, Pappy received an answer to the lawsuit, and a month after that, he received an envelope full of papers from the county’s lawyers containing discovery material I’d requested. Among the papers were some of Ronnie Ray’s investigative notes. Pappy brought them to me with a grin on his face the day they arrived in the mail.

  “This says there was a videotape of the informant being debriefed,” Pappy said to me. “That guy was a piece of garbage. I guarantee Ronnie coached him.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll try to get a judge to make them turn it over if nobody’s destroyed it.”

  “Cops keep everything,” he said. “That’s one thing I’ve learned after all these years of appeals. But there’s something better.”

  Pappy laid out several more sheets of paper. They were copies of Ronnie Ray’s investigative notes ostensibly created during the times that Pappy was selling crack to the informant. Ray’s notes said he was “observing” the buys. They listed the make, model, and license plate number of Pappy’s pickup and the dates and times of the buys, along with some brief descriptions of what was allegedly going on.

  “These might be it,” he said. “These might be the smoking gun.”

  I looked at them and shook my head. They looked pretty much like every other set of investigative notes I’d ever seen.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “See the dates?” Pappy said.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I traded trucks. I didn’t buy the truck that’s listed on here until six weeks after the last time he says I sold crack. He’s been lying all along and this will prove it. Can you get it in front of a judge?”

  “I can try.”

  “Make it happen. You get me out of this place, and I’ll owe you big time.”

  I filed Big Pappy’s motion for a new trial with the trial court in Georgia, and amazingly, we got a response in less than eight weeks. Apparently, Ronnie Ray had been accused of doing some unsavory things, and the federal magistrate wanted an evidentiary hearing. He even appointed Pappy a lawyer to conduct the hearing. They set a date, and two months after that, Pappy was shipped out. He was gone for five weeks. When he came back, he came straight to my cell.

  “He admitted that he lied, man,” Pappy said. “The lawyer pressed him, and he didn’t have an answer. And you know that tape you asked the judge for? He made them produce it. My lawyer took a look at it and said it was the worst example of witness tampering he’d ever seen in his life.”

  “So what are you doing back here?” I said.

  “The judge said he’d issue a written opinion. Should have it before too much longer. And guess what else? I called my lawyer when I was in Oklahoma on my way back here. They fired Ronnie Ray two days after the hearing. He’s gone, man. I hate to even think about it, but this could really happen. I could wind up getting out of here.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Not long after Pappy got his good news, I received a letter from Grace that contained the appellate court’s opinion in my own case saying my trial was clean and confirming my conviction. I read the opinion three times, and each time, I felt a little smaller, a little more insignificant. Judges are extremely careful at the trial level because they don’t want an appellate court tossing a case back into their lap a year or two later. In my case, Judge Geer had been particularly deliberate in his rulings. I had no doubt that he had called friends of his, other judges, including appellate judges, prior to making rulings in my case so he had the best possible chance of getting everything right. And after reading the opinion of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals over and over, I realized that I was not going to get any relief based on mistakes. If I was going to get my case reversed, James Tipton would have to step forward and tell the world why he’d lied. Not only would he have to tell the world he’d lied, he would also have to do it in an extremely convincing fashion. Witnesses recanting testimony was nothing new to the appellate courts; it happened all the time. And nine times out of ten, the appellate court said, “So what?” If I was to ever get out of federal prison, James Tipton would have to come into court with something explosive. The problem with that, of course, was that we didn’t have any idea where James Tipton was.

  After I read the opinion and fumed for a little while, I decided to go outside for a run around the rec yard to blow off some of the frustration I was feeling. A man walked up to me just as I finished. I’d seen him around my cellblock, but I didn’t know him. The tattoo on his right forearm told me he was a member of the Sons of Odin gang. The SOs were a relatively small, upstart group who said they patterned themselves after a German deity called Odin. Odin, they claimed, rode an eight-legged steed and traveled with ravens and wolves. They were known to be violent. I’d witnessed an incident in our cellblock a few weeks earlier in which an SO, after having been tipped off by a guard that a new inmate was a particularly scummy sex offender, beat the guy unconscious on the walkway that ran along the second tier of cells on our block, then dragged him down the steps by his feet onto the floor below, and then mounted him and started beating his head against the floor. The sex offender apparently lived, but I don’t know how. The beating was almost as brutal as the one the guards in Atlanta had dished out to the macho man. The gang member got three months in the hole. He didn’t even catch a formal charge.

  The guy who approached me looked like a juicer, a steroid user. A lot of guys in prison juiced. Bringing in steroids like Dianabol and Winstrol and Deca Durabolin and human growth hormone was one of the medium-size hustles, and from what I’d been told, there was decent money in it. He was about three inches taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier than me, and he had a puffy face and looked like someone had injected helium into his muscles. His neck was thick beneath his shaved head, both arms were sleeved in tattoos, and he had fierce-looking, aquamarine-blue eyes.

  “You the lawyer man?” he said as he folded his arms in front of his chest.

  “Yeah,” I said. I noticed immediately that something about him wasn’t quite right. His left eye wandered a tiny bit and he had a slight speech impediment. “Lawyer” was very close to “wahyer.”

  “You need to file an appeal for me.”

  “Really?” I said, sensing danger in his tone. “How far along are you in the process?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The process. How long have you been in prison? How many appeals have you filed? I need to know where you are before I can make a decision on whether we can file.”

  “I said you need to file an appeal for me, and that’s what you need to do.”

  “Do you have money?” I said. “I don’t work for free.”

  “You’ll work for free for me.”

  I looked over his shoulder and saw a few of his boys, fellow gang members, sitting at a picnic table they occupied every day on the yard. They were looking at us and laughing. One of them was pointing. Less than a hundred feet away was the table where Big Pappy was sitting with his usual crew. I noticed he was watching, too.

  “Mind if we walk while I cool down?” I said. I was still breathing pretty heavily from the run and I wanted to get closer to Pappy and his Independent White Boys in case something happened.

  “We stay right here,” he said.

  “You got a name, asshole?” I said belligerently, deliberately insulting him. He’d already disrespected me,
and I couldn’t just let it go.

  “Of course I got a fucking name,” he said. “Everybody got a fucking name.”

  “Mine’s Darren,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  “Robert Edward Lee Frazier,” he said. “My boys call me Bobby Lee. You can call me Sir Robert.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Go fuck yourself, Sir Robert.”

  I brushed past him and started walking away from the fence toward Big Pappy and his group. I needed to get away from Sir Robert. I didn’t want to get trapped against the fence. I could feel adrenaline kicking in as I anticipated a fight. It had been a while since I’d been in a physical altercation, but I’d stayed in excellent physical condition and I wasn’t afraid. I took three or four steps and turned to look at him to see where he was. He’d hesitated, probably because I’d surprised him. He was such an intimidating figure that I was sure he was used to people cowing to him. The hesitation didn’t last long, though. I heard him curse under his breath and the next thing I knew he was charging me like an enraged bull. I sidestepped him and managed to punch him in the ear with my right fist as he went past. I could hear and sense commotion to my left, but I had to stay focused on Sir Robert, who regained his balance, turned toward me, and put his fists up in a boxing stance. Around this time I heard amplified voices from the guard towers. I reacted to Sir Robert’s boxing stance by kicking him squarely in the scrotum. He bent over and I kicked him in the face. He staggered forward and I kicked him in the face again, which sent him to his knees.