Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  The more he observed the situation, the longer he tracked Sedley Alley’s appeals, the more Jack realized that the heart of the problem was the need for habeas corpus reform.

  In his quest for justice for his daughter, he had to face a fundamental philosophical and practical question: Do victims and their families have any standing in the criminal justice system? Much of the system is structured—as it should and must be in a society like ours—to protect the rights of the defendant. The issue then becomes: Are those affected by the crime entitled to any relief from their suffering through that same system? Or: Are the rights of defendants and their victims so opposed to each other that both cannot be accommodated at the same time?

  Jack started frequenting law libraries for the first time since his own law school days. He began reading up on the history of habeas corpus and how it had evolved over the decades. Then he went up to Capitol Hill, to the congressional committee libraries, reading transcripts of every hearing on post-conviction procedure he could get his hands on.

  “I wanted to see who had testified and how they had testified. Maybe I’m a poor researcher, but I couldn’t find a single victim or anyone representing a victim who had ever testified before the House or the Senate on the need for habeas corpus reform. It was always judges or lawyers or jurisprudential experts or academics or legal technicians of one type or another, or politicians, but never victims. And I felt it was important for victims to be heard on this issue.”

  There was a series of House congressional hearings during the spring of 1990. Jack offered himself to the committees as a witness, but they couldn’t understand what place someone purporting to represent victims would have testifying about habeas corpus reform. Still, he kept calling, kept visiting Senate and House offices, and kept educating himself.

  Jack’s activities came to the attention of Cheri Nolan, deputy director of the Justice Department’s Office for Liaison Services. Accordingly, when Phyllis Callos, president of a prominent nonprofit victims’ rights organization—Citizens for Law and Order, or CLO, based in Oakland, California—] approached the Justice Department’s outreach office about how to get their message out on the need for habeas corpus reform, Nolan recommended that they get in touch with Jack and Trudy. So began a relationship that would make the Collinses among the most prominent, persistent, and effective crime victims’ advocates in the country. Jack and Trudy quickly became CLO’s Eastern Regional Directors. They succeeded in building a coalition of some two dozen victims’ advocates organizations across the country, representing more than fifty thousand members, working to give the movement enough critical mass to carry weight and influence.

  Frank Carrington was in many ways the father of the victims’ rights movement in the United States. A former Marine who went into law enforcement, then became an attorney, Carrington wrote several books on the subject and led or served on virtually every panel or commission related to crime victims’ rights. He was a founding board member of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, a chairman of the American Bar Association’s Victims Committee, and a member of the 1982 landmark President’s Task Force on the Victims of Crime. Carrington was not a crime victim or victim family member himself. He had simply observed the effects of crime on families and what he perceived to be serious abuses in the criminal justice system and wanted to do something about them. He carefully and systematically studied the facts and issues to see what habeas petitions were actually accomplishing and who they were actually protecting from unfair treatment. And he came to what he saw as an inescapable conclusion:

  “No person in his or her right mind can seriously argue that the otherwise intolerable effects of habeas corpus abuses can be justified because it results in ‘doing justice’ by freeing wrongfully convicted defendants. Basically, then, we have a situation in which victims or survivors of horrible, violent, vicious criminal activity must literally put their lives ‘On hold’ waiting for justice to be done, or at least be perceived to have been done.”

  Carrington became familiar with the Collins case shortly after Jack and Trudy joined CLO and was deeply moved by it. He urged Jack to publicize Suzanne’s story and the realities of the criminal justice system as seen by victims. He also encouraged the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime to publish and distribute this story.

  Inspired by Frank’s caring and concern, Jack produced a pamphlet, working closely with Lee Chancellor, Executive Director of the Judicial Reform Foundation. On the first page was a beautiful color photograph of Suzanne in her Marine uniform, and a description of what had happened to her and the history of the judicial process after the Tennessee Supreme Court denied Alley’s appeal. Inside was greater detail of the abuses of habeas corpus, including comments by experts on the subject.

  The pamphlet was widely circulated. Tens of thousands of copies were read throughout the United States. It came to my attention after Jack came to Quantico to speak to FBI and National Academy classes. I used to keep a stack on my desk at Quantico, offering it to visitors to my office.

  Around the same time the pamphlet was published, in early March of 1991, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh convened what was billed as a Crime Summit in Washington, D.C. Held at the Sheraton Park Hotel and calling together experts and interested parties from all over the country for a three-day conference, the summit featured law enforcement personnel, congressmen, state attorneys general, mayors, officials of rape crisis centers, other victims’ advocates and organizations, and about a dozen crime victims and family members. Jack and Trudy Collins were invited to attend. President George Bush came and made a personal statement and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor gave the keynote address, stating her opinion that current habeas corpus procedures represented an endless round of appeals that took place after normal safeguards had been followed and normal appeals exhausted.

  At the end of the conference, in a session chaired by Thornburgh, each group was given the opportunity to make a statement summing up its goals and assessing the current state of affairs. Jack was asked to do the summation for victims. The essence of his remarks dealt with the fact that almost to a person, crime victims agree that next to the crime itself, the most painful burden for them to bear is the lack of finality of criminal convictions. “Until we know that the punishment of those who have savaged us—or our loved ones—is final, we cannot begin to put our lives back together.”

  Two months later, on May 7, 1991, Jack first testified before Congress at a hearing on habeas corpus reform called by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Joseph Biden of Delaware. “I wanted to get their immediate attention, not simply to say, ‘Your statutory proposals are horrible,’ but make them feel what it means to be a victim, to have them grasp this type of thing. So I started by describing what happened to Suzanne, comparing her savage treatment on the night of her death with the relatively mild discomfort experienced by her brutal killer, who, thanks to abuses of habeas corpus, is allowed to live many years after his sentence even though a jury and court have said he should be executed. In effect, I said, ‘Let me tell you about the type of creature that’s inhabiting death row.’ I used strong language to describe how he ravaged her and made her suffer.”

  Stephen was there in the hearing room. So was Trudy, along with a full gallery who had come to hear a federal appellate judge, an American Bar Association president, the attorney general of California, and a former attorney general of Tennessee, among others. Before the testimony began, Senators Strom Thurmond and Orrin Hatch came down to greet the Collinses, which Jack found both touching and meaningful, the first tangible evidence he’d seen of concern from any member of the legislature. With them was Manus Cooney, a counsel for the Judiciary Committee, who had been staunchly championing Jack’s cause from within the Committee’s professional staff.

  One of the main messages Jack wanted to get across was that the post-conviction judicial process, particularly habeas corpus, needed to be treated as a vic
tims’ rights concern.

  “Make no mistake about it,” he testified, “habeas corpus is just as much an issue of victims’ rights and revictimization as it is an issue of jurisprudence or federalism.”

  He laid his feelings on the line when he said, “I am a retired foreign service officer of the Department of State. During my overseas appointments, I and my family actively promoted the merits of our democratic way of life and extolled its many by-products, including the criminal justice system. Mr. Chairman, Committee members, I could not and would not do that today. When I came home and our daughter was murdered, our nation’s vaunted criminal justice system showed me and my family its true face. Yes, justice—’ justice aplenty for the killer, with delays, continuances, reviews, stays, tests, hearings, examinations, rehearings, appeals, and petitions. For us, the victims, neglect, uncertainty, waiting, frustration, more waiting, injustice, and growing sense of despair.”

  As a result of the hearing, Jack felt the rules of the game had finally begun to change. This was the first time the victims’ perspective on habeas corpus had been presented. He had made the issue human and personal and accessible to the average citizen, rather than an arcane matter for legal scholars.

  “We served notice that victims were not going to be quiet any longer.”

  They continued building a national victims’ coalition. They contacted small and medium-sized groups throughout the country and got to know the people running them. They asked some of those people who were victims themselves to testify before Congress and publicly relate their personal experiences with the criminal justice system. Senators and congressmen finally began hearing from a wide range of victims on a matter which previously had been reserved for “experts.”

  In his retirement years, when most people begin winding down and taking it easy. Jack had become a militant. He and Trudy went on television to get their message across, either by themselves or lending their support to others. They appeared on the Maury Povich show with a couple from Kansas City whose daughter had been viciously raped and murdered. The producer told them it would be good to have a psychiatrist or psychologist on with them to explain why killers and rapists behave this way.

  Jack had just the person. He recommended the distinguished Washington area psychologist Dr. Stanton Samenow, author of such landmark works as Inside the Criminal Mind, who, with the late psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Yochelson, conducted a pioneering study on criminal behavior at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Along with Dr. Park Dietz of California, Samenow is one of the few mental health professionals who really understands the criminal personality from the perspective we’ve studied at Quantico. Predictably, many psychiatrists and psychologists who haven’t done the research these two have don’t appreciate their views or their attitudes toward criminal behavior.

  On the program, the Collinses and the other crime victims told their stories. Anyone who could do such things must be sick …crazy …insane …right? No. Call him sick if you wish, Samenow explained, but he is not “insane” because he is rationally faithful to his own ideas and values. The perpetrator of this type of crime differs from the rest of us in his character and thinking. We find it difficult to comprehend that someone would want to do something so terrible. But that’s the way it is.

  As a result of his work on behalf of victims and his impressive performance at the national Crime Summit, Jack was asked by Attorney General William Barr (who had succeeded Dick Thornburgh) to join the Justice Department as special assistant to the director of the Office for Victims of Crime, a job he began in December 1991 and held for two years. His role was to be an official government advocate for crime victims and their families. In that capacity he handled inquiries from victims and victims’ organizations, advised on legislative initiatives, prepared a major proposal for better publicizing the office’s services, counseled, and in general tried to put a human face on bureaucracy and procedure.

  Part of that involved traveling around the country, speaking about the Crime Victims’ Fund, a provision of the 1984 Victims of Crime Act, which mandated that criminal fines be placed into a special fund that would be earmarked for direct compensation of victims as well as for various support services. These could include therapy and counseling, battered women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, and transportation to court hearings, baby-sitting during those hearings, anything that would support victims as they made their way through the system.

  Meanwhile, Jack continued speaking out and testifying before congressional committees as Sedley Alley’s collateral appeals dragged on. Hank Williams said, “Jack dedicated himself to keeping Congress on track on this issue.”

  What kept him going? What kept him and Trudy so focused on taking on an entire system, no matter what it required of them? They said they simply wanted to see justice done, that they would not have the closure they needed until they’d walked that final mile with Suzanne.

  Stephen says, “They feel Suzanne is watching their every move and I think they’re trying to show her even in death how much she means to them. The more they can fight for her and people like her, the more they can show their love. Suzanne died in the process of becoming a mature woman and they never got a chance to enjoy her as an adult. This is their way of dealing with unfinished business.”

  Throughout the direct appeals process and protracted collateral review proceedings, Alley’s prosecutors were initially batting a thousand. So he petitioned again, this time appealing the lower court’s denial of his petition for post-conviction relief, and this time it would go to the state Court of Criminal Appeals, to be heard by a three-judge panel in Jackson, Tennessee, in October of 1992. As they did every time anything important in the process came up, Jack and Trudy went to the oral arguments.

  Now Alley’s lawyers were arguing not only ineffective counsel, but also that the trial judge should have recused himself from the hearing because, among other things, he had made a supposedly prejudicial statement at a speech he gave to a civic group. What he said, in what might have been considered an unfortunately lighthanded manner, was that some of the prison overcrowding could be solved if they would “just execute some of these people that are already in line for it.”

  The appeals panel was headed up by Judge Penny White, a well-spoken woman in her late thirties, with impressive credentials. But right from the start, Jack felt they were in deep trouble with Judge White.

  “It became evident to us right away from body language, attitude, manner of speaking, everything, that she was very pro-defense. There was a marked difference in her attitude toward them and the prosecution team. There were smiles for the defense and some side comments, almost smirks, to one of the other judges while the prosecution was making its case. She gave relatively short shrift to the prosecution while encouraging the defense to tell her more.”

  It took the Court of Criminal Appeals from October 1992 to April 1994 to hand down a decision that, in effect, said that the judge should have recused himself so we aren’t going to decide all the issues raised—we’re going to order a new lower court hearing with a new judge. That hearing took up the time from April 1994 until August 1995. Part of the claim of ineffective counsel was that not enough medical experts were brought in on the issue of Alley’s mental state, despite the fact that, on direct appeal, the State Supreme Court had seen no problem here and, in fact, the trial date itself had been delayed three or four times to provide for various medical evaluations.

  “Essentially,” Hank Williams commented, “they were asking for even more doctors to see what in the world Robert Jones could have possibly missed. In other words, Jones was ineffective for assuming that a bunch of medical experts knew what they were talking about.”

  In all the years since the trial, by the way, neither Hank Williams nor I have heard one scintilla more evidence of either Billie or Death taking over Sedley Alley’s personality again. We haven’t heard any evidence of Alley expressing any degree of sorrow or remorse. The defense continued grasping at str
aws.

  In the meantime, Jack could feel himself burning out. He didn’t want to give up the fight on the national level, but he knew if he didn’t step back and let someone else lead the charge for a while, he was going to lose his effectiveness, and possibly a lot more. He was tired, depressed, his breath was short, and his cholesterol level and blood pressure were high.

  Trudy said to him, “You’re going under and I’m not far behind. We have got to get out of the D.C. area. If we don’t, this is the way we’re going to end our lives.”

  They looked around, talked to friends, and finally decided on the old and venerable community of Wilmington, North Carolina. They moved there in the summer of 1994. Located along the Cape Fear River less than ten miles from beautiful Atlantic Ocean beaches, it was a long way, geographically and physically, from their New York origins, but it fit the bill.

  Once ensconced in their one-level house, surrounded by the mementos of a lifetime of world traveling and many photos of Stephen and Suzanne, they tried to calm down and get their lives in order.

  On August 31, 1995, Judge L. T. Lafferty, the new judge brought in because of Penny White’s 1994 decision, ruled that there was no basis for the claim of ineffective counsel. In addition, during his own hearing of Alley’s petition, he permitted the introduction of a great deal of additional medical testimony from expert witnesses. Suzanne Collins had been dead more than ten years.

  A month or so later, a case that already had been in the pipeline was decided by the Tennessee Supreme Court, saying that in certain circumstances, state-funded expert testimony should be allowed during collateral appeals. As of this writing, Alley’s defense team appealed Judge Lafferty’s decision and has sent in a new written brief to the Court of Criminal Appeals. The Tennessee Attorney General’s office has likewise prepared its own response brief and both sides are now awaiting the date for oral arguments. Yet once this issue is dealt with—however long it takes—based on their experience, Jack and Trudy are fearful that yet another issue will be brought up, and another, and another.