Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  Was it? Did we have our share of hardship? Maybe not enough. Why didn’t we think ahead? What of the future? Would retirement fill us with enough for our future? Would being idle be acceptable—bearable—once the “horrible” occurred? Did we once think about the possibility of something so horrendous? Now what’s to become of us? What worse occurrence could there be than losing our only daughter? Losing our only son?? If you didn’t want us to have them, Lord, why did you give them to us?

  She became very protective of all those around her. One of Suzanne’s best friends still lived in the neighborhood and used to jog alone after dark. When she came over to see them, Trudy said, “Please, promise me you won’t go out jogging—even in our neighborhood—after dark. It’s just not worth it; it just isn’t. Do your exercise in the morning, or with other people. Please.”

  Eventually, Trudy says, you have to reach the final stage, and that is acceptance. Still, though, she and Jack knew that the most important thing to them was to “go the entire distance” with Suzanne, and until they can do that, says Trudy, “We have unfinished business.”

  They want to see the murderer of their daughter pay the ultimate price which the people of Tennessee imposed upon him.

  They are religious people and not vengeful; they say they do not even hate Sedley Alley, that he is beneath such a human emotion. Though I personally feel that vengeance within the context of the law can have a useful and morally uplifting power, they are content to leave the issue of vengeance to higher authority than ours. Their interest, pure and simple, is to see justice done for their beloved daughter.

  Like many, if not most, people who’ve been personally associated with or seen close-up the effects of violent murder, the Collinses favor the death penalty. But if there were such a thing as life imprisonment without possibility of parole, that would at least assure society that predators like Alley would never again be able to destroy other lives.

  “As long as there was absolutely no parole, no hope ever for parole,” Trudy says. “But we know in this country, that’s ludicrous.”

  “The so-called life-without-parole laws can always be changed,” Jack states, “either by court decision or by legislative action whenever a new set of politicians comes into the statehouse. Also, a governor has the power to pardon or commute a sentence. As it is, even with a death-penalty conviction, we’re terrified the conviction could still be overthrown, as long as this thing has dragged on. In any event, the nature of the deed demands a response more severe and definitive than life without parole.”

  Since the trial and verdict, Jack and Trudy simultaneously and continuously have fought two battles: the battle to keep their lives intact and Suzanne’s memory alive and her presence felt, and the battle to see justice done for victims of violent crime and their families. They are not unique in either of these respects; many others have joined the fight and there is ever-growing strength in their numbers. But they are representative of the good people who are beginning to say, in Jack’s words, “If society is not serious about responding strongly and effectively to the worst crimes, then how can we expect its citizens to act? How do you expect to have a society with any set of reasonable moral rules and standards about how people should treat each other if the crime is not followed swiftly and surely by meaningful punishment?”

  They began counseling other victims of loss, and they became activists. Their message to other families was simple: You will never again be the same and you will never again be whole, but you can get through this, you can go on, your lives can still have real value, and you can keep your loved one’s memory alive in a happy and positive way.

  “Fundamentally, we share our experience with them,” says Jack. “We say, ‘We’re making it, we’re not so special. You can make it too.’

  “But it’s really not so much what you say; there are no magic words. It’s simply letting your compassion show through, and they’ll know you understand. You might just put your arm around them and simply say, ‘God, I’m sorry,’ and give them a hug and look into their eyes. And don’t be afraid if tears start falling. We’ve learned so much about ourselves and about grieving since this happened to us.”

  Another message they shared was that you get each other through. Couples that have suffered devastating loss can either be brought closer together or torn apart. And it’s important to be aware of this.

  The anguish was often overwhelming. “There were times when I was devastated and didn’t know if I was going to cope,” Trudy recalls, “and Jack helped me get back up. And I think there were times when he was really down and I helped him.”

  Jack adds, “If I did not have Trudy, I think I would be a basket case. As much as my faith means to me, it’s not enough to have carried me through. We had to do it together or we couldn’t have done it.”

  While still living in Springfield, Jack and Trudy also participated regularly in a support group for surviving family members of homicide victims. They looked forward to its biweekly meetings, where they could link up with others who had suffered similar losses and share their own grieving experiences, coping tools, and survival techniques. The group’s two coordinators—Carroll Ellis and Sandra Witt—became valued and trusted friends to all the members, and true heroes to Trudy and Jack.

  At the heart of the group’s activities were once-a-month “caring and sharing” sessions. Tears and laughter ran together, joined by a link of trust and understanding. In addition, members frequently provided direct support to one another by attending the constant parade of hearings and trials related to the criminal proceedings against the indicted killers of their loved ones. Members also met with law enforcement officials, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, correctional personnel, probation-parole officers, and FBI agents to sensitize them to the specific needs of victims and their families. In time, the group became increasingly media savvy. Members began seeking invitations to testify before legislative committees. Television stations began covering some of their meetings and public activities.

  There are now many such groups throughout the country, varying widely in scope and program. From their own experience and travels, Trudy and Jack believe that their “old” Fairfax County group is one of the very best of its kind in the nation, and could easily serve as a model for groups just starting out or ones that would like seasoned advice on program content and approach. Readers interested in more information should contact: Director, Fairfax Peer Survivors Group (FPSG), Victim Witness Unit, Fairfax County Police Department, 10600 Page Avenue, Fairfax, Virginia 22030.

  The Collinses became advocates for people like themselves, began appearing on television and radio programs—usually together—saying to anyone who would listen: “Do we realize what we’re losing in this country? Do we understand we’re losing quality people, like Suzanne, who could be our salvation for the future? Do we, as a society, really care?”

  “You see what’s happening,” Jack says. “The worst thing that any of us can imagine in terms of a crime is the violent, brutal, vicious murder of a loved one. And yet that happens over and over again in our society. And by the cavalier way we deal with those crimes today, through the abuse of the criminal justice system, we’re giving out a message that the worst things that can happen in our society are either forgivable or are not worth pushing on to their full and final conclusions. That’s why you see kids throwing other kids out of windows in Chicago or killing each other over a leather jacket in New York. Murder is no big deal any more. When do we start getting the true message acrss?”

  Jack has spent a lot of time and emotional energy thinking about this, and speaks for the way many of us in law enforcement have come to feel.

  “The only crimes people get excited about now seem to be ‘societal’ crimes—’you know: threats to the environment, racism, political incorrectness, inadequate treatment for the poor and homeless. It’s all generic; it’s all group sins. There’s no individual sin anymore, no ‘I’m responsible for my actions, I�
�ve got to answer to somebody.’ There’s none of that, no personal responsibility, no sense of one’s own accountability. We keep coming up with situations where the bad guys and their lawyers will say, ‘Oh, what do you expect in a society like this? How do you expect a kid to act?’

  “Well, who is society? Society is people, individuals who have to answer for themselves.”

  From the day Sedley Alley was charged, the one thing they sought was closure—a word you will hear over and over again from victims of violent crimes and their families. As long as the process remains ongoing, as long as appeals continue and the jury’s sentence is postponed, as long as the survivors have to relive the horror and have the scar tissue torn off at every hearing or court appearance or parole board review, there can be no closure.

  And throughout the entire process they found that while the defendant was accorded every consideration, the victim of the crime—actually the victims, for each crime leaves many—was virtually disregarded by the system.

  As Trudy wrote in her notebook:

  Can others look at him with pity when they hear of his rage and what he did to this lovely young girl for no reason? Can society condone this, tolerate this behavior? Others need to know it cannot be tolerated.

  In Tennessee, when a defendant like Sedley Alley is found guilty and sentenced to death, there is an automatic appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court. The middle level, the Court of Criminal Appeals, is bypassed. It took more than a year, until October of 1988, for the trial transcript to be prepared and for oral arguments in Alley’s appeal to be made. By this time, he had a new set of lawyers—Art Quinn and Tim Holton. In August of 1989, roughly two and a half years after the trial and four years after Suzanne’s murder, the Tennessee Supreme Court unanimously affirmed Sedley Alley’s conviction and sentence.

  Quinn and Holton then made the standard appeal to the United States Supreme Court. In January of 1990, the request for certiorari was denied, in effect stating that the court saw nothing in the case record indicating or suggesting a reversible error. Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall—both longtime death penalty opponents—dissented. But it seemed that for all intents and purposes, the long slog through the legal system had run its course. Execution was set for May 2, 1990.

  So at that point the Collinses felt this part of the ordeal would soon be over and at least when they visited Suzanne’s grave, they could tell her that justice had been administered.

  But it wasn’t over. In actuality, Jack had been given a foreshadowing of why not. two years before. Back in 1988, he had read a speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist regarding problems of delay and repetition which he saw in the habeas corpus appeals process in capital cases. When Jack found out what it was all about, he realized that this could present a significant problem in bringing their own case to closure.

  The concept of habeas corpus is at the very heart of AngloAmerican ideas of law and justice, dating back at least to the fourteenth century. Literally, it is Latin for “you have the body,” and was intended to compel whoever was holding a prisoner to present him before a legal magistrate at a specific time and place for a judicial review of his status. It is considered the fundamental weapon and bulwark against illegal detention and false imprisonment—by a ruler without cause or a court without jurisdiction. In effect, it lets anyone in custody petition for a hearing as to the legality of that custody.

  In the 1969 Supreme Court opinion in Harris v. Nelson, Justice Abe Fortas wrote: “The writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action. Its pre-eminent role is recognized by the admonition in the Constitution that: ‘The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended….’ The scope and flexibility of the writ—its capacity to reach all manner of illegal detention—its ability to cut through barriers of form and procedural mazes—have always been emphasized and jealously guarded by courts and lawmakers. The very nature of the writ demands that it be administered with the initiative and flexibility essential to insure that miscarriages of justice within its reach are surfaced and corrected.”

  No one I know of denies that all this is right, proper, and as it should be. But it must be viewed in its correct context.

  The Writ of Habeas Corpus rooted in Anglo-Saxon common law and enshrined in our own Constitution is directed specifically at the unlawful detention of an individual by either an executive authority such as a president, governor, or attorney general or by a court without proper jurisdiction. It is not a privilege intended for persons lawfully sentenced by legally constituted courts.

  But in 1867, on the heels of Reconstruction, Congress passed a statute that made this federal writ available to state prisoners already convicted by a state court. Under the terms of this new law, the prisoner had to allege that he was being held in violation of the Constitution or a federal law or treaty. What this federal statute foresaw was a collateral review by a federal court of the state court’s judicial proceedings. It did not view the writ as a vehicle for reexamining findings of law and fact already determined by the state court. The federal review was supposed to deal with such matters as lack of due process, lack of equal protection under the law, prejudicial conduct by a judge, and the like.

  It was the abuse of this latter writ, rooted in the 1867 federal statute, that Chief Justice Rehnquist was concerned about, specifically as it related to death penalty cases. In his view, and in the view of many observers, this federal appeals process was taking far too long, and was allowing too many repetitious and frivolous petitions into the system. The result, they felt, was a loss of credibility for the federal appellate process and the erosion of a sense of finality for court judgments.

  One additional element must be mentioned here, too. At the state court level, there is also an appeals mechanism similar to federal habeas corpus. In fact, though technically referred to as “a petition for post-conviction relief,” it is often referred to as “state habeas corpus.” What this means in capital cases such as Sedley Alley’s is that, after the state’s highest court has affirmed on direct appeal the trial court’s verdict and sentence, the convicted murderer can petition the trial judge to set aside that conviction or sentence on the grounds that there has been a fundamental defect in the trial. If the trial court denies the petition, then that decision, too, can be appealed up the line again to the state’s highest court, and so on and so on, using this collateral attack mechanism.

  In June of 1988, Justice Rehnquist appointed a special Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Habeas Corpus in Capital Cases. This committee, chaired by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., issued its report in August of 1989, proposing a series of statutory provisions to remedy the defects in the system. In its findings, the Powell Committee noted that for the 116 executions which had taken place in the United States since 1976, the average length of time for the total appeals process was eight years and two months, with some dragging on considerably longer. The greatest proportion of this time was consumed not in trial or normal appeals, but in federal habeas corpus proceedings.

  Up until 1953, there had not been this great delay. But in the case of Brown v. Allen, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that federal courts in habeas proceedings had the power to review de novo—from the very beginning—those issues of federal law already decided by state courts during their full and fair litigation of those issues. This case opened the floodgates for a torrent of new petitions that began to inundate the federal courts. Combined with an increasingly permissive attitude on the part of many federal courts in accepting petitions for review of obviously frivolous, repetitious, or marginal issues and a system in which there was neither a time limit for filing nor a time limit on the courts to decide, what we ended up with was a process marked by excessive delay and abuses.

  Defendant advocates and opponents of the death penalty will say that repeated habeas corpus rounds are necessary to assure that eac
h defendant has been given a fair trial, free from errors of omission or commission. Critics will say that the Constitution guarantees each of us a fair trial, not a perfect trial, and as long as any error or omission didn’t materially affect the jury’s decision, then it is just a delaying tactic to gain the defendant some of the additional years of life he denied to his victim. Also, it clearly prolongs the agony and pain of family members and loved ones of the murder victim and prevents closure to the grieving.

  A month before Alley’s scheduled execution, his lawyers filed a petition for post-conviction relief, appealing the case on collateral issues having to do with the alleged ineffectiveness of his original counsel. Hank Williams, by the way, had thought his legal adversaries very competent, raising every possible issue and benefit of the doubt for their client. “Jones and Thompson are the number one team for capital defense in Shelby County,” he says. “They’re both very bright guys, they’ve got a tremendous organization, and more experience than anyone else.”

  The fact that the jury didn’t buy their arguments had nothing to do with effectiveness of counsel.

  But by the time Judge W. Fred Axley decided that there was no merit to Alley’s claims in his petition, it was September 1991. Almost another year and a half had gone by. Still, Williams doesn’t fault the judge; in fact, he has the highest praise for Axley. He was giving Sedley Alley every possible opportunity so the case couldn’t be reversed on any technicality.

  But Jack realized that with the tools available through state and federal habeas corpus statutes, Alley’s lawyers could postpone imposition of the sentence virtually indefinitely. Alley was more likely to die of old age than electrocution.

  As Hank Williams put it, “The Suzanne Collins case is a classic example of how you have no justice. Through the jury the People decided in a matter of hours what they wanted to do. The System has spent the last ten years messing around with that. It becomes a ridiculous game. I’ll be frank with you, it is a nightmare.”