by Kyle Swenson
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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To Kim
Seem like the whole city go against me
—KENDRICK LAMAR, “M.A.A.D CITY”
To know a place, like a friend or lover, is for it to become familiar; to know it better is for it to become strange again. Not novel in the easy way of the new, but strange in a deep, disturbing way that does not dissipate, an unsettling revelation of what should have always been known, a revelation that implicates its belated discoverers.
—REBECCA SOLNIT, SAVAGE DREAMS
Author’s Note
Rickey, Wiley, and Kwame were incarcerated for a total of 106 years, one of the longest wrongful imprisonment cases—if not the longest—in American history. Many carry the blame for that injustice. And many were integral in righting that wrong. At certain points over four decades, people made choices and took actions that would lead to the exonerations. Carrie Wood decided to keep Rickey Jackson’s OIP file open. Anthony Singleton asked Ed Vernon a hard question in a hospital room. Terry Gilbert sent me an email. Each of us carried the ball down the field as far as we could. Passing the finish line was a collective effort. This book aims to string those moments and contributions together.
This is a work of nonfiction. The book is based on hours of interviews with Rickey, Wiley, Kwame, and other subjects. Scenes, dialogue, and interior thoughts attributed to subjects were all mined from these interviews, as well as cross referenced with accounts from other sources.
When possible, these accounts were backed up by documentation. The paper trail on this case is significant; the original court transcripts, crime scene photos, police files, prison records, psychological reports, and depositions from civil litigation all helped fill in the picture. My own reporting notes and recordings from 2011 and 2014 were also key. In instances where police misconduct is alleged, the accounts are pulled from legal documents, depositions, and interviews.
A number of sources were critical in forming the historical accounts in this book, as well as some of the legal theory sitting behind the narrative. Few texts do a better job of sketching the city’s backstory than Kenneth Kusmer’s A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930. Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America deeply shaped my understanding of the federal government’s impact in black urban areas. My thoughts on the legal system were heavily influenced by William J. Stuntz and James Q. Whitman. Jane Leovy’s essential Ghettoside completely rearranged how I thought about the mechanics of the American law and order. Robert J. Norris’s recent history of the Innocence Movement, Exonerated, was also essential.
Prologue
BUSTED PAVEMENT
Cleveland, March 2011
Start in close with the pavement. This is a Cleveland story, so there will be some abused infrastructure in the mix. Asphalt chopped and diced by winters past, roadways split like bad fruit—eyesore miles in all directions. There are places in the city where winter and neglect and budget priorities have knifed open the street, revealing the old brick or cobblestones below, history riding under the modern routes. In Cleveland—and in a Cleveland story—the past is always near and persistent.
This particular no-account chunk of municipal pour was just a bent elbow of sidewalk on the city’s eastern lip. Midmorning traffic floated by steadily, spinning off the streets to the north coiling around University Circle, a prim collection of hospitals, college greens, and museums. The money there—the new money reaching up in abstract glass medical buildings, the old money anchored in beaux arts marble and stone—was a one-eighty contrast from the surrounding neighborhoods, among the poorest in the country. The drivers slinging past us like pinballs in the chute likely had stopped paying attention to the blight long ago. I had. I’d probably driven past this street corner hundreds of times without ever eyeballing the spot where we were now standing.
We were an odd pair, a mixed-race Laurel and Hardy with twenty-odd years stacked between us. Me: skinny, twenty-five, white, shivering in a parka, fingers wrapped around a spiral notebook, sneakers knocking rocks into the gutter. Kwame: fifty-four, black, athletically built from head to toe, meaty hands stuffed into his hoodie pocket. He usually gave off a friendly vibe, his cheeks tending to wander up his face into a half smile. But today his mouth was a tight nervous dash, his eyes clocking the surrounding street.
Perhaps he was placing his memories up against what he was seeing now. Weeds and grass where the Cut-Rate store had once stood. A quiet mosque in place of the flower shop. What had once been a tight line of two-story houses filling the streets to the south now was a battered run of gutted lots. Even the name of the thoroughfare pouring traffic into the nearby suburbs had changed in the last thirty years—no longer Fairhill Boulevard, now Carl Stokes Boulevard.
If he couldn’t place the old neighborhood, the old neighborhood probably couldn’t place him. The last time he’d stood on this pavement, he’d been seventeen, his name had been Ronnie Bridgeman, and he was on his way to catching a murder charge.
It was now March. This was the overcast time of the year in Northeast Ohio when the days look like they’ve been rubbed over with charcoal. After a few minutes of silence, Kwame nodded north to a stoplight where another street, Cedar Avenue, crossed Stokes. “The bus will be coming from there.”
In 1975, a white man was robbed and gunned down outside the Cut-Rate store where we now stood. Kwame was arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime. His older brother, Wiley, and best friend, Rickey Jackson, were also found guilty. No physical evidence tied the three young black men to the killing. The prosecution’s only witness was a twelve-year-old neighborhood kid named Ed Vernon. The boy testified that he’d seen the three commit the homicide. On this alone, they were sentenced to death, only missing the electric chair thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Kwame was paroled in 2003. At the time we were standing together, his brother and best friend were still locked away, all due to lies.
“We weren’t guilty,” Kwame had explained to me six weeks earlier, when we first met. “My mother, who was very religious, told me, ‘Trouble is easy to get into but hard to get out of, but if you’re not guilty of anything, the truth will set you free.’ But that won’t work in politics and the law.”
This was not something Kwame had broadcast loudly since his release. He only trusted me now because he wanted help. As a reporter for a local weekly paper, I’d agreed to dig around his case. Yet as we stood on the corner, I wasn’t sure whether or not I believed him. I’d only been a journalist for three years, but I already knew belief was tricky terrain in journalism. From white-lie shading to outright prevarications, reporting, I learned early, largely involves unknotting bullshit.
There was also the drawer. Back at my desk downtown at the newspaper, my cubicle’s left bottom drawer was filled with letters. The metal space was overflowing on my first day of work, and I imagine every newsroom in the world has a similar dumping ground. S
ome were written on prison library typewriters, others in careful, neat lettering, many in kindergarten-blackboard scrawls. They all told the same story: I didn’t do it. I’m innocent. These jailhouse pleas were often trapdoors: you read one, fall into the case, spend untold hours reporting out the nooks and crannies of what happened, only to find, well, the guy was in the house that night robbing the place when the old lady was murdered; or, hey, even though she says she didn’t shoot him, she did get arrested with his drugs. It’s easy to say guilt and innocence are rarely black and white; it’s harder to reconcile, both professionally and personally. “Nobody,” a journalist friend once said to me, “is completely innocent.” That cynicism was taking root in me: Some complicity must tie most offenders to their convictions, I reasoned; the criminal justice system had the proper safety nets installed to catch the truly innocent. So the letters piled up.
It turns out experts on wrongful conviction have the same problem. Despite the legal organizations devoted to the issue, hard numbers on innocent men and women in prison remain difficult to come by. We can pin down actual exonerations—by 2011 the National Registry of Exonerations counted nearly nine hundred.1 But this tally only started in 1989. What about cases experts have missed? Have we missed them? One team has estimated that as many as two thousand to four thousand wrongful conviction cases slip into the legal system each year. Another theory puts the number of innocent inmates between 1 and 5 percent of all convictions.2 What frustrates a determination of the size of the actual problem is the avalanche of frivolous claims—those stuffed drawers at the newsroom. One legal expert has written that finding a truly innocent inmate is like looking for a “meritorious needle in the meritless haystack.”3
Kwame, however, didn’t remind me of those letter writers. He had a booming voice, keyed in a bebop mix of prison-yard slang, legal-speak, and touches of Arabic. He radiated calm, wisdom, and a been-there, seen-it-all attitude. He delivered his story simply, not with the heat of someone desperate to convince me but as if he was just relating the facts of his case. This, his calm delivery seemed to say, was just how it all went down.
“At seventeen, I didn’t know a whole lot about nothing, let alone the law,” Kwame told me. “There was no DNA or evidence. It was all who said what, and how strong who said what could be supported. But there were so many things that just didn’t jive. Just check out the bus route.”
The bus. In court, Ed Vernon, the state’s only eyewitness, had laid out a simple story for the jury: On the day of the crime, he’d left his middle school early, catching a city bus home. While the bus was waiting at the light at Cedar, a car pulled up to the driver’s side. The boy recognized three older guys from the neighborhood—Ronnie, Wiley, and Rickey. He waved. They waved back. Side by side, the bus and car made the left-hand turn. The boy got out. As he walked up the street, he saw the same young men attack the victim.
As I was replaying that testimony in my head, standing on that very same street corner, I spotted a city bus, its sides graffitied with streaks of road salt, huff to a stop at the Cedar light. Left-hand turn signals blinked. Kwame swung around to make sure I was watching, the air between us foggy with frozen breath. The bus swung left and drove off. Despite the traffic piled up behind the bus to make a similar turn, nobody moved alongside the bus. There was only one turn lane. If a car had been riding close to the bus, it would have banged into the curb.
“Edward Vernon said that he saw us in the car while we were turning,” Kwame said, his voice jumping with excitement. “But you can’t make that turn at the same time.”
What the witness had described was physically impossible, I realized. “And if you’re going to commit a crime,” Kwame said, “what the hell are you doing waving at somebody on the street for?”
* * *
Like loops on an elaborate signature, the Cuyahoga River splits Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs into east and west. It’s less a natural divide than a marker for social division—between economic status, ethnicity, and race. Much of your life in this city is rooted in where your days play out in relation to this zigzagging waterway garlanded overhead with elegant steel bridges and navigated by barges and container ships off the Great Lakes. They say even your accent—whether you murder your vowels with the sharp end of that characteristic midwestern nasal or not—depends on whether you’re an East or West Sider.
Public Square is the middle ground, the original municipal center plotted by the town founders in 1796. Stand here and you see all the downtown architectural touchstones: the Old Stone Church; the Civil War Memorial; and, shadowing the green space, the city’s most iconic building, Terminal Tower, fifty-two stories of Jazz Age elegance that until 1964 held the bragging rights as the tallest building in North America outside New York City. Turn west, toward the river, and you’re facing white working-class neighborhoods—Tremont, Ohio City, West Park, the Detroit Shoreway, Old Brooklyn. Swing east, and you’re looking at a long run of African American areas—Central, Hough, Fairfax, or “down the way,” in the local-speak. These black neighborhoods run more than a hundred blocks to the eastern edge of the city line, where the terrain itself climbs up to a shelf of land holding some of the most exclusive and wealthy—and white—suburbs in the country: Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights.
The town I knew growing up was hard edged but bighearted. No one would argue it was an easy place to live, and this seemed to stamp resilience onto the natives. The winters were endlessly Siberian. The sports franchises were heartbreaking laughingstocks, bereft of championship trophies since 1964. The river was so choked with toxins, it had burst into flames numerous times. But the circumstances also fed a fierce sense of hometown pride. It might be a mess, but it was ours. Philip Wiley Porter, a longtime Cleveland newspaperman, put it well in 1976: “A comfortable place to live and work, but a great place to complain about,” he wrote. “Volatile, emotional, gung-ho for winners, merciless toward losers, torn by the two-bit view point and a suicidal yen toward disunity.… Unhappy about the status quo, but sensitive to criticism, and quarrelsome about how to change.”4 Around the same time those words went to press, a T-shirt was popular around town: CLEVELAND: YOU’VE GOT TO BE TOUGH.
But by 2011, Cleveland’s civic struggles seemed to be in overdrive. The Cleveland stories were all ugly. We were poster-child postindustrial. The numbers were all bad.
In 2010, Cleveland’s population was sitting near 390,000 residents, a significant downgrade from the 478,000 people counted in the city a decade earlier.5 The poverty rate was the second highest in the country, with 35 percent of Clevelanders below the poverty line—a figure that had increased significantly in just two years.6 Around half of Cleveland’s children were living in poverty.7 A rising murder count regularly slotted the town in rankings of America’s most dangerous cities.8 In 2010, Forbes crowned Cleveland “America’s Most Miserable City”; the French government even issued a travel advisory warning citizens to stay clear.9 And in one final kill shot to our collective pride and ego, LeBron James—NBA supernova and beloved son of Northeast Ohio—exited the Cleveland Cavaliers’ organization to splash around the waves in South Beach.
Cleveland wasn’t the only city sinking. The 2008 Great Recession seemed to kick off a parade of grim forecasts for similar heartland metros, places that had apparently spent all their capitalistic mojo in the first giddy-up decades of the last century and now were struggling to segue to the next. Milwaukee, Flint, Toledo, Youngstown, Erie, Buffalo—the familiar steel, iron, and auto hubs that hang from the Great Lakes like a necklace. But you could argue that Cleveland’s case was worse because we’d lost the most. In 1950, Cleveland was the seventh-largest city in the country, widely known for its booster motto as “the best location in the nation.” The only city that had suffered a comparable fall was Detroit, regularly put in the spotlight by the national media as the main crash site of American industry. But behind the doomsday headlines on Motor City, Detroit was celebrated as a test lab f
or any and all long-shot ideas about the future of American urban spaces. No such optimism framed Cleveland’s deepening woe.
As 2010 rolled into 2011, in Cleveland we weren’t really sure whether we’d hit the bottom or were still in free fall. It could get worse. The only fact we had was that the basic mechanics of the civic apparatus seemed completely busted. The city had stopped working. Urban melodrama here bounced between slapstick and operatic tragedy.
Consider local politics. In 2008, the FBI launched a massive public corruption probe on the government of Cuyahoga County, the region including Cleveland. The main target of the investigation was a former sanitation worker turned county commissioner named Jimmy Dimora. Three-hundred-plus pounds stuffed in cheap suits and tacky ties, Dimora was the undisputed kingfish of the local Democratic Party. By the time of his arrest in 2010, federal prosecutions had uncovered a vast system of payoffs and bribes. Court documents showed Dimora would trade county business and votes for money, steak dinners, nights with high-end call girls, discounted Rolexes, even a tiki hut for his backyard pool. Phone taps caught Dimora salivating over payoffs or demanding sex from women in return for county gigs.10
The investigation turned up hundreds of names: the entire local political elite was implicated, from the county sheriff and state senators to Cleveland’s city council president and a future gubernatorial candidate.11 Such was the scope of the corruption—eventually forty individuals served jail sentences—that it was clear Dimora had not rigged this system himself but merely inherited it. The backroom chutes and ladders of graft and sex were apparently how the city and county had been run for more than thirty years. Reeling in disgust from this, county residents voted to tear the whole damn thing down, passing a referendum ushering in a new style of countywide government based on an elected executive and sixteen-person council.
