by Kyle Swenson
The optimism was unmistakable, more so because Clevelanders seemed so happy to embrace it, to celebrate the change working through the city. You began seeing this T-shirt everywhere, a clothing company’s motto that suddenly became so ubiquitous it read as an epigraph for a town grabbing hold of its potential: CLEVELAND AGAINST THE WORLD. The energy, the new buildings, the enthusiasm—it all seemed to suggest that after years of free fall and black-eye headlines, the town wouldn’t be left for dead as a ghostly relic of the last century. What had started back in 2014 had seemed to bloom. The “Cleveland Against the World” mantra itself read like a boiled-down version of Frederick Jackson Turner’s own nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the Midwest.
There were still reasons to question the refurbished new picture of the city. The energy collecting in Cleveland pooled downtown, leaving the neighborhoods sidelined even more. In 2015, Douglas Massey, the sociologist who first detected hypersegregation in his book American Apartheid, published a paper examining the 2010 census data. Overall the number of U.S. cities gripped by hypersegregation dropped from thirty-three to twenty-one between 1990 and 2010.2 Cleveland, however, was among the cities that had failed to pull itself out of hypersegregation, and the “Believeland” laser focus on downtown and gentrifying areas only indicated that the divide would remain in place.
But nothing undercut the smoke and mirrors of this municipal health more than the death of Tamir Rice.
One day after Rickey Jackson took his first steps outside the Justice Center, on November 22, 2014, a twelve-year-old black Cleveland boy was gunned down by police at a civic center on the West Side. The police had been alerted to a man with a gun at the Cudell Recreation Center. The Cleveland 911 dispatcher neglected to tell the responding officers the gun was probably a toy and the individual a young boy. Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback rushed to the scene. Exiting his car, Loehmann fired twice, killing Tamir on a lawn of melting snow.
Grainy security footage of the brutal, insensible death quickly sped around the world, splashing onto cable news programs and social media. The city settled into a tense waiting game as Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty announced his office would determine whether criminal charges were warranted against the officers.
Tamir’s death falling within hours of Rickey’s release—the two events weren’t isolated incidents in my mind but linked. Each spoke to the same story of a police department at odds with the city it serves thanks to long-running impunity. And both were a great shame on the city, searing black eyes that should have chipped away at any enthusiasm over grand openings or sports championships.
The Rice shooting initially felt very familiar—but then swung in an entirely new direction. I had covered enough police shootings to understand the process was of official obfuscation, delay, and erasure. The victim of a police shooting disappeared inside the bureaucratic machinery of the official investigation. Weeks would stretch into months; routine questions about the status would be roadblocked by radio silence and “no comment” from the city. Piles of official equivocation and delays would effectively wipe the victim from the record until most of the city forgot.
Yet here the mechanics seemed to be playing out differently. Officials were forced to confront questions about the Rice case in live press conferences. As the weeks stomped on, Tamir’s name didn’t fade out but echoed beyond Ohio.
This was because of what was rolling across the country. Black Lives Matter, a hashtag that had suddenly blossomed into a social idea with moral weight, was changing the public discussion. The killing of unarmed black men—Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown—was now a salient political point; people marched the streets chanting their names. The noise and intensity of the movement had hauled the national spotlight onto long-ignored issues regarding the justice system, activating a vociferous call for reform. The evidence was compelling. Cell-phone camera footage provided unimpeachable witness. Long-term statistics limned recidivism rates. Municipal and state budgets attested to the millions lost on failed law enforcement strategies.
The Rice investigation was not immune to this charged atmosphere. As the months passed, I became more hopeful that such an ugly moment of police violence would end with a just resolution. Criminal charges would be filed, I felt; the officers responsible would be held accountable. I ended up in intense debates—sometimes shouting matches—with friends and colleagues who said I was naïve, stupid, or complicit. But I truly believed.
The energy on the national stage only partly fueled my new optimism. My own recent experience was the second factor. I had been there when Rickey Jackson learned his nightmare was over. Those brief minutes inside the stuffy courtroom were profound in a way I was still struggling to understand. But my main takeaway was that the justice system had corrected its own horrific misstep. Yes, it took nearly four decades. But inside the high drama of those final moments in the courtroom in November, there was an official acknowledgment of a past wrong. Prosecutor Tim McGinty, the man now weighing the decision whether or not to charge Tamir’s killers, had spoken words to the court I kept returning to: “The State concedes the obvious.” So much of the court system was about denying the obvious. This was new.
The Brelo verdict should have been a check on my new optimism.
In May 2015, Cleveland patrolman Michael Brelo went on trial for his part in the 2012 deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. Brelo’s own role was undeniable. But after the state presented its evidence in Brelo’s manslaughter trial, Judge John P. O’Donnell determined prosecutors had not proven that any of the officer’s bullets had killed Russell or Williams.
What was really remarkable about the judge’s written opinion, however, was how it acknowledged but ultimately dismissed the long-standing outrage coiling around the case—the same energy building around the Rice decision. Seventy years of racial tension—Luna Park’s “Jim Crow Days”; Bruce Klunder’s death; Hough and Glenville; Carl Stokes’s frustrations; White Art’s police-approved drug sales—hung at the margins of O’Donnell’s decision.
“Some say the volatile relationship between police and the community is rooted in our country’s original sin. Whether it is or not, that sin won’t be expiated and the hostility between the police and people won’t be extirpated by a verdict in a single criminal lawsuit,” the judge wrote.3
“I will not sacrifice him to a public frustrated by historical mistreatment at the hands of other officers.”
* * *
On paper, Rickey, Kwame, and Wiley each quickly became millionaires.
After the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s decision to drop the fight against the exonerations, the three were officially cleared in the weeks following the events in November 2014. Ohio is one of the states that provides financial compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Because, as McGinty had said, the state conceded the obvious, the financial claims moved smoothly through the Ohio court of claims. Rickey would eventually receive $2.65 million from the state. Kwame and Wiley took home $2 million and $2.4 million, respectively. Rickey purchased his house on the eastern edge of Cleveland; Wiley, Kwame, and LaShawn all moved together into a house just north of Akron. The money freed them from their past ordeal while sealing their futures up in relative comfort. They purchased big cars and put pool tables into their finished basements.
But even though the state conceded the obvious, the city did not.
In July 2015, the three exonerees filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the department and the deceased officers involved in their arrest, including Eugene Terpay, John Staimpel, and James T. Farmer. The legal complaint alleged that poor training and mismanagement on the part of the city directly led to the wrongful arrests and prosecutions. The city, however, fired back in court against the three. Lawyers for the city even began to question whether the three men were actually innocent of the 1975 murder.
The city had set the stage for an extended legal siege in federal court—years of filings, depositions, and cour
troom arguments. But Kwame, Rickey, and Wiley wanted to proceed. It wasn’t so much about more money; seven-figure sums could only do so much to alter the texture of their remaining days. Rather, the federal lawsuit became about extracting a price from the police and city for what had happened—if that meant money, so be it; more importantly, it would mean a full account of who was responsible for what.
In Rickey’s mind, until that moment, this would never truly be over. “It’s the longest wrongful conviction in history, so it should be the biggest money settlement,” he explained to me one afternoon. “I just want my money and then never have to deal with the city again. Never have to go answer questions again. Never tell my story again. But until this is done, I feel like they still have a hold on me.”
And yet what the courts offered seemed paltry sized up against the immensity of the loss. What was taken could not be returned. And as with the Brelo case and the Tamir Rice shooting, the names of a few officers were standing in for a far deeper breakdown of the criminal justice process.
Kwame also understood that the justice offered by the courts paled compared to what was true justice demanded.
“It makes you question not just the system but everything,” he told me one day at his house. “Again, my thing is accountability. It’s not just saying, ‘We’re sorry,’ or giving somebody some money for compensation. You’ve got to go back and hold that judge or prosecutor accountable. All the way up the ladder. It’s on everybody. Because for me, it goes way further than the cops they keep wanting to put it on.
“Look at the Brelo thing,” he continued. “They cleared all them other cops, and then they put it on one guy. And then they let him go, so now no one stands accountable. How can that be? When there are two people dead with 137 Cleveland police bullets in them?”
He shook his round head, peering back into his own back lawn, where Wiley was slowly walking the hedges, admiring the swirling colors of the flower beds.
“This was something that was instilled in me from my mom,” Kwame told me. “Accountability. Way back from when I burned down Mr. Wittick’s car. If I did it, I did it. If I didn’t, I didn’t.”
* * *
It was always “they.” The specifics were swallowed up in the pronoun’s wide, indiscriminate arena.
“They tried to kill me, take my life,” Rickey told me.
“They fucked me up bad,” Wiley said. “I’m a bitter man now.”
“They did this to us,” Kwame said.
Kwame’s own read on the empty consolation of his federal lawsuit hit at a deeper reality. The current structure of the American legal system, besides being ill equipped to handle claims of innocence, also fails to deal with the fallout of exonerations. Justice in its most basic terms is about spotlighting responsibility. This has been a function of the modern state since it emerged after the Middle Ages. In Canada and European countries, a wrongful conviction can trigger an investigation into what went wrong. But the American justice system repeatedly fails to fully analyze its own mistakes and abuses. In wrongful convictions, lawsuits and cash settlements have become common, but the system itself has little inclination to push deeper with a detailed inquisition into how it could break down so catastrophically.
This continues despite the rise of CIUs and wider national attention to the issue. And although police officers are often named in federal lawsuits filed by exonerees, they are indemnified and defended by their departments; they regularly bear no personal cost in the eyes of the court. Prosecutors and judges involved in wrongful convictions are almost never asked to account for the role they played. As far as blame is concerned, it is fixed both too narrowly—on a few officers—and too broadly—on the “system” itself. It was no surprise that when the three men tried to aim blame at the bad actors behind their decades of wrongful incarceration, they were left reaching for an unspecific word, the foggy “they.”
These same issues about justice are particularly raw to the touch in foreign countries pulling free from violent periods of civil war or transitioning from authoritarian rule to democratic institutions. From Brazil and South Africa to Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia, each country weighed the question about the best way to come back from what had happened. The thinking traditionally breaks into two schools: Do you drill into the recent past, name names, pin accountability? Or do you move forward? Do you forget? Let go?
One school of thought firmly dug in behind the former is also the intellectual philosophy of the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. To march on from an ugly past without prosecuting bad actors only deepens the broad divide between people, the theory holds. Truth is the key to reconciliation, and truth means successfully laying blame. As Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist who worked on both the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals, told the journalist Lawrence Weschler,4 “specific individuals bear the major share of the responsibility, and it is they, not the group as a whole, who need to be held to account, through a fair and meticulously detailed presentation and evaluation of evidence, precisely so that the next time around no one will be able to claim that all Serbs did this, or all Croats or all Hutus.”
Here in the States, we don’t frame the last seventy years of social upheaval in such stark terms, and certainly our history is not marked by anything close to the mass graves, ethnic cleansings, and authoritarian clampdown experienced elsewhere. But this is a viewpoint stuck firmly in the experience of white Americans. Across the color line, the psychic toll of the twentieth century has been extensive. The push for equality in the 1960s was met with a vicious counterattack—snarling police dogs, bombed churches, assassins’ bullets. Redlining and school segregation deepened the social divide. And the correctives—Johnson’s War on Poverty and the Warren Court’s civil rights rulings—only put down the groundwork for further isolation and repression. For decades, all this has fueled the collective suspicion and grief black Americans feel toward the country’s institutions, particularly the criminal justice system. Yes, that suspicion and grief is often applied in broad strokes. But a justice system that fails to hand out blame and punish bad actors only perpetuates broad distrust and distance, rancor and anger, as the war tribunal’s proponents argue. If we don’t punish a police officer or prosecutor for misdeeds, the whole system becomes bad.
The Black Lives Matter movement drew from this deep-rooted suspicion and broadcast it widely. The speed of social media provided a rapid-fire version of accountability: facts and names were circulated as quickly as a lightning strike. In this, it was a street expression of the same principles driving the world court. We knew the names of the victims; we knew the names of the officers involved; we knew the details.
But the calls for justice on the street were not answered by the system, time and again. The movement may have unleashed new energy, but it ultimately couldn’t shake what had stood for decades—the system designed to protect its own. The Tamir Rice decision was a clear signal.
The announcement came in December 2015. It was an icebox Monday afternoon between Christmas and New Year’s, a patch of dead static when most people have unplugged or hit the mental snooze button. Prosecutor Tim McGinty called a press conference, described the situation a “perfect storm of human error,” and announced his office would not pursue criminal charges against the officers involved. Winter rain began dashing Cleveland. Small protests broke out that night, but the feeling was more of exhaustion than outrage. Tamir’s death ended as so many other Cleveland stories did, with weak words of equivocation, familiar bitterness, and a new grievance to enter on a long rolling list. The exonerations were steps toward optimism. The Rice decision yanked me back to familiar ground.
* * *
Beautiful was a word that came easily and often off Kwame’s lips. He found a kind of music in it, stretching the syllables out in a singsong delivery. After spending so much time with him over the years, hearing him reach for the word time and again, I realized it wasn’t just a quirk of personality. He meant it. That a man who had been for
ced to see so much damage and ruin and hate still had an eye for beauty was a lesson.
Beautiful was also the only word I could think of on a Saturday afternoon in June 2017. Rickey and Rissa’s wedding day. The ceremony and reception were held at the Great Lakes Science Center, right on the lip of the lake downtown. Guests were pouring into the seats on the second floor; R&B murmured from the speakers. Rickey—in an aqua-green vest and tux—stood with his groomsmen, waiting for his bride to walk down the aisle.
It was a bright day. The floor-to-ceiling windows behind the altar where the vows would be exchanged looked directly out onto the Cleveland skyline. The lake spread at our backs. The view I had in the audience put Rickey on a straight line with the municipal buildings where the main plot twists in his life had unfolded. Directly ahead stood the old courthouse, its battered stone dull in the sunlight. Behind loomed the Justice Center, where the case had ended. And then there was Rickey, smiling and unbowed, waiting to take his next step. From my angle he stood taller than either building.
Acknowledgments
This book was written over a three-year period. Countless people helped turn a jumble of fragmented ideas and uncharted feelings into the final story.
Although I take a (justified) shot at the city of Cleveland’s lackadaisical public records response in the book, the city’s records department did provide me with valuable documentation—until they stopped responding to my requests. Regardless, I am grateful for the material I got. The staff at the Cuyahoga County Clerk of Courts was incredibly helpful in tracking down old documentation, as were the folks at the Cleveland Public Library, which has done a wonderful job collecting the odds and ends of municipal business.
True conviction is in short supply out there. The men and women grinding through the courthouses and prison visiting rooms on behalf of the wrongfully convicted have this in abundance.
