Surprisingly, the Alabama Supreme Court agreed to stay our direct appeal process so that the Rule 32 petition could proceed. The general rule was that the direct appeal had to be completed before a postconviction collateral appeal under Rule 32 could be initiated. By staying the case, the Alabama Supreme Court had signaled there was something unusual about Walter’s case that warranted further review in the lower courts. The Baldwin County Circuit Court judge was now obligated to review our case and could be forced to grant our discovery motions, which would require disclosure of all police and prosecutorial files. This was a very positive development.
We needed to have another meeting with the district attorney, Tommy Chapman, but this time we’d be going in armed with a court order to turn over police and prosecutorial files. We would also finally meet, in the flesh, the law enforcement officers involved in Walter’s prosecution: the D.A.’s investigator, Larry Ikner; ABI agent Simon Benson; and Sheriff Tom Tate.
Chapman suggested that we come to his office in the Monroe County courthouse so that they could turn over all the files together. We agreed. When we arrived, the men were already there. Tate was a tall, heavy-set white man who had come to the meeting in boots, jeans, and a light shirt. Ikner was another white man in his mid-forties, wearing the same outfit. Neither of them smiled much—they greeted Michael and me with the bemused curiosity to which I was getting accustomed. The men knew that we were accusing them of misconduct, but for the most part they remained civil. At one point Tate told Michael that he knew, as soon as he saw him, that he was “a Yankee.”
Michael smiled and replied, “Well, actually, I’m a Nittany Lion.”
The joke died in the silent room.
Undeterred, Michael continued, “I went to Penn State. The mascot at Penn State is—”
“We kicked your ass in ’78.” Tate made the statement as if he had just won the lottery. Penn State and the University of Alabama had been football rivals in the 1970s, when both schools had had successful programs and iconic coaches, Bear Bryant at Alabama and Joe Paterno at Penn State. Alabama had defeated the number-one-ranked Penn State team 14–7 to win the 1978 national championship.
Michael, a huge college football fan and a “JoePa” devotee, looked at me as if seeking nonverbal permission to say something reckless. I gave him a cautionary stare; to my great relief, he seemed to understand.
“How much is ‘Johnny D’ paying y’all?” Tate asked, using the nickname Walter’s friends and family had given him.
“We work for a nonprofit. We don’t charge the people we represent anything,” I said as blandly and politely as I could.
“Well, you’re getting money from somewhere to do what you do.”
I decided to let that pass and move things forward.
“I thought that it might be a good idea to sign something that verifies these are all the files you all have on this case. Can we index what you’re turning over to us and then all sign?”
“We don’t need to do anything that formal, Bryan. These men are officers of the court, just like you and I. You should just take the files,” Chapman said, apparently sensing that this suggestion had provoked Tate and Ikner.
“Well, there could be files that have inadvertently been missed or documents that dropped out. I’m just trying to document that what we receive is what you give us—same number of pages, same file folder headings, et cetera. I’m not questioning anyone’s integrity.”
“The hell you ain’t.” Tate was direct. He looked at Chapman. “We can sign something confirming what we give him. I think we may need a record of that more than he does.”
Chapman nodded. We got the files and left Monroeville with a lot of excitement about what we might find in the hundreds of pages of records we’d received. Back in Montgomery, we eagerly started reviewing them, and not just the files from the police and prosecutors. With our discovery order from the court, we were able to collect records from Taylor Hardin, the mental health facility where Myers was sent after he first refused to testify. We got the ABI file from Simon Benson, the only black ABI agent in South Alabama, as he had proudly told us. We got Monroeville city police department records and other city files. We even got Escambia County records and exhibits on the Vickie Pittman murder. The files were astonishing.
We might have been influenced by the pain of Mozelle and Onzelle or drawn in by the elaborate conspiracies that Ralph Myers had described, but we soon started asking questions about some of the law enforcement officers whose names kept coming up around the Pittman murder. We even decided to talk to the FBI about some of what we had learned.
It wasn’t long after that when the bomb threats started.
Chapter Eight
All God’s Children
UNCRIED TEARS
Imagine teardrops left uncried
From pain trapped inside
Waiting to escape
Through the windows of your eyes
“Why won’t you let us out?”
The tears question the conscience
“Relinquish your fears and doubts
And heal yourself in the process.”
The conscience told the tears
“I know you really want me to cry
But if I release you from bondage,
In gaining your freedom you die.”
The tears gave it some thought
Before giving the conscience an answer
“If crying brings you to triumph
Then dying’s not such a disaster.”
IAN E. MANUEL, Union Correctional Institution
Trina Garnett was the youngest of twelve children living in the poorest section of Chester, Pennsylvania, a financially distressed municipality outside of Philadelphia. The extraordinarily high rates of poverty, crime, and unemployment in Chester intersected with the worst-ranked public school system among Pennsylvania’s 501 districts. Close to 46 percent of the city’s children were living below the federal poverty level.
Trina’s father, Walter Garnett, was a former boxer whose failed career had turned him into a violent, abusive alcoholic well known to local police for throwing a punch with little provocation. Trina’s mother, Edith Garnett, was sickly after bearing so many children, some of whom were conceived during rapes by her husband. The older and sicker Edith became, the more she found herself a target of Walter’s rage. He would regularly punch, kick, and verbally abuse her in front of the children. Walter would often go to extremes, stripping Edith naked and beating her until she writhed on the floor in pain while her children looked on fearfully. When she lost consciousness during the beatings, Walter would shove a stick down her throat to revive her for more abuse. Nothing was safe in the Garnett home. Trina once watched her father strangle her pet dog into silence because it wouldn’t stop barking. He beat the animal to death with a hammer and threw its limp body out a window.
Trina had twin sisters, Lynn and Lynda, who were a year older than her. They taught her to play “invisible” when she was a small child to shield her from their father when he was drunk and prowling their apartment with his belt, stripping the children naked, and beating them randomly. Trina was taught to hide under the bed or in a closet and remain as quiet as possible.
Trina showed signs of intellectual disabilities and other troubles at a young age. When she was a toddler, she became seriously ill after ingesting lighter fluid when she was left unattended. At the age of five, she accidently set herself on fire, resulting in severe burns over her chest, stomach, and back. She spent weeks in a hospital enduring painful skin grafts that left her terribly scarred.
Edith died when Trina was just nine. Trina’s older sisters tried to take care of her, but when Walter began sexually abusing them, they fled. After the older siblings left home, Walter’s abuse focused on Trina, Lynn, and Lynda. The girls ran away from home and began roaming the streets of Chester. Trina and her sisters would eat out of garbage cans; sometimes they would not eat for days. They slept in parks and public bathrooms
. The girls stayed with their older sister Edy until Edy’s husband began sexually abusing them. Their older siblings and aunts would sometimes provide temporary shelter, but the living situation would get disrupted by violence or death, and so Trina would find herself wandering the streets again.
Her mother’s death, the abuse, and the desperate circumstances all exacerbated Trina’s emotional and mental health problems. She would sometimes become so distraught and ill that her sisters would have to find a relative to take her to the hospital. But she was penniless and was never allowed to stay long enough to become stable or recover.
Late at night in August 1976, fourteen-year-old Trina and her friend, sixteen-year-old Francis Newsome, climbed through the window of a row house in Chester. The girls wanted to talk to the boys who lived there. The mother of these boys had forbidden her children from playing with Trina, but Trina wanted to see them. Once she’d climbed into the house, Trina lit matches to find her way to the boys’ room. The house caught fire. It spread quickly, and two boys who were sleeping in the home died from smoke asphyxiation. Their mother accused Trina of starting the fire intentionally, but Trina and her friend insisted that it was an accident.
Trina was traumatized by the boys’ deaths and could barely speak when the police arrested her. She was so nonfunctional and listless that her appointed lawyer thought she was incompetent to stand trial. Defendants who are deemed incompetent can’t be tried in adversarial criminal proceedings—meaning that the State can’t prosecute them unless they become well enough to defend themselves. Criminally accused people facing trial are entitled to treatment and services. But Trina’s lawyer failed to file the appropriate motions or present evidence to support an incompetency determination for Trina. The lawyer, who was subsequently disbarred and jailed for unrelated criminal misconduct, also never challenged the State’s decision to try Trina as an adult. As a result, Trina was forced to stand trial for second-degree murder in an adult courthouse. At trial, Francis Newsome testified against Trina in exchange for the charges against her being dropped. Trina was convicted of second-degree murder, and the trial moved to the sentencing phase.
Delaware County Circuit Judge Howard Reed found that Trina had no intent to kill. But under Pennsylvania law, the judge could not take the absence of intent into account during sentencing. He could not consider Trina’s age, mental illness, poverty, the abuse she had suffered, or the tragic circumstances surrounding the fire. Pennsylvania sentencing law was inflexible: For those convicted of second-degree murder, mandatory life imprisonment without the possibility of parole was the only sentence. Judge Reed expressed serious misgivings about the sentence he was forced to impose. “This is the saddest case I’ve ever seen,” he wrote. For a tragic crime committed at fourteen, Trina was condemned to die in prison.
After sentencing, Trina was immediately shipped off to an adult prison for women. Now sixteen, Trina walked through the gates of the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, an adult prison for women, terrified, still suffering from trauma and mental illness, and intensely vulnerable—with the knowledge that she would never leave. Prison spared Trina the uncertainty of homelessness but presented new dangers and challenges. Not long after she arrived at Muncy, a male correctional officer pulled her into a secluded area and raped her.
The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery.
Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma.
Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers.
In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.
In 1990, Ian Manuel and two older boys attempted to rob a couple who were out for dinner in Tampa, Florida. Ian was thirteen years old. When Debbie Baigre resisted, Ian shot her with a handgun given to him by the older boys. The bullet went through Baigre’s cheek, shattering several teeth and severely damaging her jaw. All three boys were arrested and charged with armed robbery and attempted homicide.
Ian’s appointed lawyer encouraged him to plead guilty, assuring him that he would be sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The lawyer didn’t realize that two of the charges against Ian were punishable with sentences of life imprisonment without parole. The judge accepted Ian’s plea and then sentenced him to life with no parole. Even though he was thirteen, the judge condemned Ian for living in the streets, for not having good parental supervision, and for his multiple prior arrests for shoplifting and minor property crimes. Ian was sent to an adult prison—the Apalachee Correctional Institution, one of the toughest prisons in Florida. The correctional staff at the prison processing center couldn’t find any uniforms that would fit a boy Ian’s size, so they cut six inches from the bottom of their smallest pants. Juveniles housed in adult prisons are five times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault, so the staff at Apalachee put Ian, who was small for his age, in solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement at Apalachee means living in a concrete box the size of a walk-in closet. You get your meals through a slot, you do not see other inmates, and you never touch or get near another human being. If you “act out” by saying something insubordinate or refusing to comply with an order given to you by a correctional officer, you are forced to sleep on the concrete floor of your cell without a mattress. If you shout or scream, your time in solitary is extended; if you hurt yourself by refusing to eat or mutilating your body, your time in solitary is extended; if you complain to officers or say anything menacing or inappropriate, your time in solitary is extended. You get three showers a week and are allowed forty-five minutes in a small caged area for exercise a few times a week. Otherwise you are alone, hidden away in your concrete box, week after week, month after month.
In solitary, Ian became a self-described “cutter”; he would take anything sharp on his food tray to cut his wrists and arms just to watch himself bleed. His mental health unraveled, and he attempted suicide several times. Each time he hurt himself or acted out, his time in isolation was extended.
Ian spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement.
Once a month, Ian was allowed to make a phone call. Soon after he arrived in prison, on Christmas Eve in 1992, he used his call to reach out to Debbie Baigre, the woman he shot. When she answered the phone, Ian spilled out an emotional apology, expressing his deep regret and remorse. Ms. Baigre was stunned to hear from the boy who had shot her, but she was moved by his call. She had physically recovered from the shooting and was working to become a successful bodybuilder and had sta
rted a magazine focused on women’s health. She was a determined woman who didn’t let the shooting derail her from her goals. That first surprising phone call led to a regular correspondence. Ian had been neglected by his family before the crime took place. He’d been left to wander the streets with little parental or family support. In solitary, he met few prisoners or correctional staff. As he sank deeper into despair, Debbie Baigre became one of the few people in Ian’s life who encouraged him to remain strong.
After communicating with Ian for several years, Baigre wrote the court and told the judge who sentenced Ian of her conviction that his sentence was too harsh and that his conditions of confinement were inhumane. She tried to talk to prison officials and gave interviews to the press to draw attention to Ian’s plight. “No one knows more than I do how destructive and reckless Ian’s crime was. But what we’re currently doing to him is mean and irresponsible,” she told one reporter. “When this crime was committed, he was a child, a thirteen-year-old boy with a lot of problems, no supervision, and no help available. We are not children.”
The courts ignored Debbie Baigre’s call for a reduced sentence.
By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime. All of the youngest condemned children—thirteen or fourteen years of age—were black or Latino. Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.
The section of South Central Los Angeles where Antonio Nuñez lived was plagued by gang violence. Antonio’s mother would force her children to the floor when shooting erupted outside their crowded home, which happened with disturbing regularity. Nearly a dozen of their neighbors were shot and killed after being caught in the crossfire of gun violence.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Page 16