Robert Caston had been at Angola for forty-five years. He lost several fingers working in a prison factory and was now disabled as a result of his forced labor at Angola.
I traveled back and forth between the trial courts in Orleans Parish quite a bit on the Carter and Caston cases. The Orleans Parish courthouse is a massive structure with intimidating architecture. There are multiple courtrooms aligned down an enormous hallway with grand marble floors and high ceilings. Hundreds of people crowd the hallways, bustling between the various courtrooms each day. Hearings in the vast courthouse are never reliably scheduled. Frequently, there would be a date and time for the Carter and Caston resentencings, but it seemed to mean very little to anyone. I would arrive in court, and there would always be a stack of cases, and clients with lawyers gathered in an overcrowded courtroom, all waiting to be heard at the time of our hearings. Overwhelmed judges tried to manage the proceedings with bench meetings while dozens of young men—most of whom were black—sat handcuffed in standard jail-issued orange jumpsuits in the front of the court. Lawyers consulted with clients and family members scattered around the chaotic courtroom.
After three trips to New Orleans for sentencing hearings, we still did not have a new sentence for Mr. Carter or Mr. Caston. We met with the district attorney, filed papers with the judge, and consulted with a variety of local officials in an effort to achieve a new, constitutionally acceptable sentence. Because Mr. Carter and Mr. Caston had both been in prison for nearly fifty years, we wanted their immediate release.
A couple of weeks before Christmas, I was back in court for the fourth time trying to win the release of the two men. There were two different judges and courtrooms involved, but we felt if we won release for one it might then become easier to win release for the other. We were working with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, and their lawyer Carol Kolinchak had agreed to be our local counsel in all of the Louisiana cases. At this fourth hearing, Carol and I were busily trying to process papers and resolve the endless issues that had emerged to keep Mr. Carter and Mr. Caston incarcerated.
Mr. Carter had a large family that had maintained a close relationship with him despite the passage of time. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many family members had fled New Orleans and were now living hundreds of miles away. But a dozen or so family members would dutifully show up at each hearing, some traveling from as far away as California. Mr. Carter’s mother was nearly a hundred years old. She had vowed to Mr. Carter for decades that she wouldn’t die until he came home from prison.
Finally, it seemed like we were close to success. We got things resolved so that the Court could grant our motion and resentence Mr. Caston so that he would immediately be released from prison. The State usually wouldn’t bring inmates from Angola to New Orleans for hearings but instead had them view proceedings on a video hookup at the prison. After I made our arguments in the noisy, frenetic courtroom, the judge granted our motion. She recited the facts about the date of Mr. Caston’s conviction, and then something quite unexpected happened. As the judge spoke about Mr. Caston’s decades in prison, the courtroom, for the first time in my multiple trips there, became completely silent. The lawyers stopped conferring, the prosecutors awaiting other cases paid attention, and family members ceased their chatter. Even the handcuffed inmates awaiting their cases had stopped talking and were listening intently. The judge detailed Mr. Caston’s forty-five years at Angola for a non-homicide crime when he was sixteen. She noted that Caston had been sent to Angola in the 1960s. Then the judge pronounced a new sentence that meant Mr. Caston would immediately be released from prison.
I looked at Carol and smiled. Then the people in the silent courtroom did something I’d never seen before: They erupted in applause. The defense lawyers, prosecutors, family members, and deputy sheriffs applauded. Even the inmates applauded in their handcuffs.
Carol was wiping tears from her eyes. Even the judge, who usually tolerated no disruptions, seemed to embrace the drama of the moment. A number of my former students now worked with the public defender’s office in New Orleans, and they, too, had come to court and were cheering. I had to speak with Mr. Caston by phone and explain what had happened, since he couldn’t see everything from the video monitor. He was overjoyed. He became the first person to be released as a result of the Supreme Court’s ban on death-in-prison sentences for juvenile lifers.
We went down the hall to Mr. Carter’s courtroom and had another success, winning a new sentence that meant that he, too, would be released immediately. Mr. Carter’s family was ecstatic. There were hugs and promises of home-cooked meals for me and the staff of EJI.
Carol and I busily began making arrangements for Mr. Caston’s and Mr. Carter’s releases, which would take place that evening. The protocol at Angola was to release prisoners at midnight and give them bus fare to New Orleans or a city of their choice in Louisiana. We dispatched staff to Angola, which was several hours away, to meet the men when they were released, sparing them the midnight bus trip.
Exhausted, I wandered the halls of the courthouse while we waited for one more piece of paper to be faxed and approved to clear the way for the release of Mr. Caston and Mr. Carter. An older black woman sat on the marble steps in the massive courthouse hallway. She looked tired and wore what my sister and I used to call a “church meeting hat.” She had smooth dark skin, and I recognized her as someone who had been in the courtroom when Mr. Carter was resentenced. In fact, I thought I’d seen her each time I’d come to the courthouse in New Orleans. I assumed that she was related or connected to one of the clients, although I didn’t remember the other family members ever mentioning her. I must have been staring because she saw me looking and waved at me, gesturing for me to come to her.
When I walked over to her she smiled at me. “I’m tired and I’m not going to get up, so you’re going to have to lean over for me to give you a hug.” She had a sweet voice that crackled.
I smiled back at her. “Well, yes, ma’am. I love hugs, thank you.” She wrapped her arms around my neck.
“Sit, sit. I want to talk to you,” she said.
I sat down beside her on the steps. “I’ve seen you here several times, are you related to Mr. Caston or Mr. Carter?” I asked.
“No, no, no, I’m not related to nobody here. Not that I know of, anyway.” She had a kind smile, and she looked at me intensely. “I just come here to help people. This is a place full of pain, so people need plenty of help around here.”
“Well, that’s really kind of you.”
“No, it’s what I’m supposed to do, so I do it.” She looked away before locking eyes with me again. “My sixteen-year-old grandson was murdered fifteen years ago,” she said, “and I loved that boy more than life itself.”
I wasn’t expecting that response and was instantly sobered. The woman grabbed my hand.
“I grieved and grieved and grieved. I asked the Lord why he let someone take my child like that. He was killed by some other boys. I came to this courtroom for the first time for their trials and sat in there and cried every day for nearly two weeks. None of it made any sense. Those boys were found guilty for killing my grandson, and the judge sent them away to prison forever. I thought it would make me feel better but it actually made me feel worse.”
She continued, “I sat in the courtroom after they were sentenced and just cried and cried. A lady came over to me and gave me a hug and let me lean on her. She asked me if the boys who got sentenced were my children, and I told her no. I told her the boy they killed was my child.” She hesitated. “I think she sat with me for almost two hours. For well over an hour, we didn’t neither one of us say a word. It felt good to finally have someone to lean on at that trial, and I’ve never forgotten that woman. I don’t know who she was, but she made a difference.”
“I’m so sorry about your grandson,” I murmured. It was all I could think of to say.
“Well, you never fully recover, but you carry on, you carry on. I didn�
��t know what to do with myself after those trials, so about a year later I started coming down here. I don’t really know why. I guess I just felt like maybe I could be someone, you know, that somebody hurting could lean on.” She looped her arm with mine.
I smiled at her. “That’s really wonderful.”
“It has been wonderful. What’s your name again?”
“It’s Bryan.”
“It has been wonderful, Bryan. When I first came, I’d look for people who had lost someone to murder or some violent crime. Then it got to the point where some of the ones grieving the most were the ones whose children or parents were on trial, so I just started letting anybody lean on me who needed it. All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they’re not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don’t care. I don’t know, it’s a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.”
I chuckled when she said it. During the McMillian hearings, a local minister had held a regional church meeting about the case and had asked me to come speak. There were a few people in the African American community whose support of Walter was muted, not because they thought he was guilty but because he had had an extramarital affair and wasn’t active in the church. At the church meeting, I spoke mostly about Walter’s case, but I also reminded people that when the woman accused of adultery was brought to Jesus, he told the accusers who wanted to stone her to death, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The woman’s accusers retreated, and Jesus forgave her and urged her to sin no more. But today, our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused even the Christians to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. I told the congregation that we can’t simply watch that happen. I told them we have to be stonecatchers.
When I chuckled at the older woman’s invocation of the parable, she laughed, too. “I heard you in that courtroom today. I’ve even seen you here a couple of times before. I know you’s a stonecatcher, too.”
I laughed even more. “Well, I guess I try to be.”
She took my hands and rubbed my palms. “Well, it hurts to catch all them stones people throw.” She kept stroking my hands, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt unusually comforted by this woman. It would take me nearly five hours to drive back to Montgomery once I got things settled for Mr. Caston and Mr. Carter. I needed to keep moving, but it felt nice sitting there with the woman now earnestly massaging my palms in a way that was so sweet, even though it seemed strange, too.
“Are you trying to make me cry?” I asked. I tried to smile.
She put her arm around me and smiled back. “No, you done good today. I was so happy when that judge said that man was going home. It gave me goose bumps. Fifty years in prison, he can’t even see no more. No, I was grateful to God when I heard that. You don’t have anything to cry about. I’m just gonna let you lean on me a bit, because I know a few things about stonecatching.”
She squeezed me a bit and then said, “Now, you keep this up and you’re gonna end up like me, singing some sad songs. Ain’t no way to do what we do and not learn how to appreciate a good sorrow song.
“I’ve been singing sad songs my whole life. Had to. When you catch stones, even happy songs can make you sad.” She paused and grew silent. I heard her chuckle before she continued. “But you keep singing. Your songs will make you strong. They might even make you happy.”
People buzzed down the busy corridors of the courthouse while we sat silently.
“Well, you’re very good at what you do,” I finally said. “I feel much better.”
She slapped my arm playfully. “Oh, don’t you try to charm me, young man. You felt just fine before you saw me. Them men are going home and you were fine walking around here. I just do what I do, nothing more.”
When I finally excused myself, giving her a kiss on the cheek and telling her I needed to sign the prisoners’ release papers, she stopped me. “Oh, wait.” She dug around in her purse until she found a piece of wrapped peppermint candy. “Here, take this.”
The gesture made me happy in a way that I can’t fully explain.
“Well, thank you.” I smiled and leaned down to give her another kiss on the cheek.
She waved at me, smiling. “Go on, go on.”
Epilogue
Walter died on September 11, 2013.
He remained kind and charming until the very end, despite his increasing confusion from the advancing dementia. He lived with his sister Katie, but in the last two years of his life he couldn’t enjoy the outdoors or get around much without help. One morning he fell and fractured his hip. Doctors felt it was inadvisable to operate, so he was sent home with little hope of recovery. The hospital social worker told me that they would arrange home health and hospice care, which was sad but dramatically better than what he feared when he was on Alabama’s death row. He lost a lot of weight and became less and less responsive to visitors after returning home from the hospital. He passed away quietly in the night a short time later.
We held Walter’s funeral at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church near Monroeville on a rainy Saturday morning. It was the same pulpit where over twenty years earlier I had spoken to the congregation about casting and catching stones. It felt strange to be back there. Scores of people packed the church, and dozens more stood outside. I looked at the mostly poor, rural black people huddled together with their ungrieved suffering filling the sad space of yet another funeral, made all the more tragic by the unjustified pain and unnecessary torment that had proceeded it. I often had this feeling when I worked on Walter’s case, that if the anguish of all the stressed lives, the pain of all of the oppressed people in all of the menaced spaces of Monroe County could be gathered in some carefully constructed receptacle, it could power something extraordinary, operate as some astonishing alternative fuel capable of igniting previously impossible action. And who knew what might come of it—righteous disruption or transformational redemption? Maybe both.
The family had a large TV monitor near the casket that flashed dozens of pictures of Walter before the service. Almost all of the photos were taken on the day he was released from prison. Walter and I stood next to each other in several of the photos, and I was struck by how happy we both seemed. I sat in the church and watched the pictures with some disbelief about the time that had passed.
When Walter was on death row, he once told me how ill he had become during the execution of one of the men on his tier. “When they turned on the electric chair you could smell the flesh burning! We were all were banging on the bars to protest, to make ourselves feel better, but really it just made me sick. The harder I banged, the more I couldn’t stand any of it.
“Do you ever think about dying?” he asked me. It was an unusual question for someone like Walter to pose. “I never did before, but now I think about it all the time,” he continued. He looked troubled. “This, right here, is a whole ’nother kind of situation. Guys on the row talk about what they’re going to do before their executions, how they’re going to act. I used to think it was crazy to talk like that, but I guess I’m starting to do it, too.”
I was uncomfortable with the conversation. “Well, you should think about living, man—what you’re going to do when you get out of here.”
“Oh, I do that, too. I do that a lot. It’s just hard when you see people going down that hall to be killed. Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain’t right. People are supposed to die on God’s schedule.”
Before the service began, I thought about all the time I had spent with Walter after he got out. Then the choir sang, and the preacher gave a rousing sermon. He spoke about Walter being pulled away from his family in the prime of his life by lies and bigotry. I told the congregation that Walter had become like a brother to me, that he was brave to trust his life to someone w
ho was as young as I was then. I explained that we all owed Walter something because he had been threatened and terrorized, wrongly accused and wrongly condemned, but he never gave up. He survived the humiliation of his trial and the charges against him. He survived a guilty verdict, death row, and the wrongful condemnation of an entire state. While he did not survive without injury or trauma, he came out with his dignity. I told people that Walter had overcome what fear, ignorance, and bigotry had done to him. He had stood strong in the face of injustice, and his exonerated witness might just make the rest of us a little safer, slightly more protected from the abuse of power and the false accusations that had almost killed him. I suggested to his friends and family that Walter’s strength, resistance, and perseverance were a triumph worth celebrating, an accomplishment to be remembered.
I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. I told the congregation that Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Page 33