by Tim Junkin
He’d lie in his bunk and watch the roaches crawl on the floor. A colorless despair took root in his belly. He had no interest in anything. The food at the prison was still barely edible. Starches, mostly—overcooked noodles, Stroganoff, macaroni and cheese, stews, anything that could be bulked up with flour and watered down. A vague nausea plagued him. He’d lie for hours staring at the wall, unable to find a reason to get up.
For a while Kirk was put in a cell with Frankie Marrone, a Jersey loan shark with a pockmarked face. Marrone was the kind who waited for someone else’s crumbs to fall off the table. He watched for weakness and tried to exploit it. Occasionally he ran drugs for one of the South Wing dealers. One afternoon late in the summer, Kirk lay in his bunk sweating and sick over his life, nearly comatose. Frankie asked him if he’d like to escape for a while. Frankie had that weasely grin on his face. Escape— what a sweet word. Escape . . .
Frankie had gotten a hold of two “sets”—the poor man’s speedball—a combination of the narcotic Talwin and an antihistamine. Frankie’d also boosted two sterile needles from the nurse’s clinic. He showed Kirk how to crush up the antihistamine, heat it with water in the concave bottom of an upside-down cutoff soda can, and mix it with the Talwin. Kirk watched, fascinated, as Frankie drew the solution up into the spike and gave Kirk his first mainline punch. Frankie was right. Kirk was transported immediately to a different place. He felt light, soothed out. For the first time in three years, the fear drained out of his chest. The world wasn’t so dark. He rushed along in a flood of sweetness, riding a wave. Afterward, he wanted it again.
Every community has its rules. In the joint you could borrow, but the levy was severe. The rule was you paid one back with two. You borrowed a pack of cigarettes, you had to pay back two. Kirk began trading whatever he had for these sets. The high would last three, maybe four hours. He wanted it more and more. He got to where all he could think about was a set and a clean needle to fire it.
Initially Kirk used the money he got from Curtis for commissary to buy the drugs. But it wasn’t enough. He’d met a woman named Anita Smith while at the detention center. Anita played the guitar for Catholic Charities at the church service there, and she began to believe in Kirk, believed he was innocent. Wanda Bloodsworth mostly disappeared after the first trial, but Anita began visiting Kirk, encouraging him, trying to offer him some solace. She’d also bring him money sometimes. They’d talk about their religious beliefs. Hold hands. After every visit, Kirk would be searched, a full body and cavity search. At first, he’d have Anita use a razor blade to slit open the edge of a Polaroid picture, then slip a folded up fifty or hundred inside the photo and reseal it. This worked for a while, until another inmate got caught doing it. Then Kirk had her bring him a balloon, and he’d swallow the money in the balloon and pass it later in his cell, so he could use it to buy his sets. Anita thought the money was to buy decent food at the commissary. She knew nothing of his growing drug addiction.
Kirk soon needed three or four sets a day. He traded his television, his radio, his typewriter, the care packages his mother would send every week; he traded his clothes. He’d still get up every morning and write at least one letter protesting his innocence to somebody. When he lost his typewriter, he began writing the letters longhand. When he finished the letter he’d get high.
Kirk still hung out some with Half and Bozo, though he’d been lifting less and less. The sets were a better way to hide from his life. He’d met the prison Islam leader, Abdul-Haleem, and often talked with him about religion. The Muslims tried to construct a separate way of living in the prison. Abdul always wore his kufi and carried with him his copy of the Koran. He prayed every afternoon, observed Ramadan and the other Muslim holidays. He refrained from eating pork, never touched the drugs, and never drank the jump steady—the prison wine. Few whites got along with the Muslims. But Abdul seemed intrigued with Kirk. There was something about him that was different. Kirk, in turn, liked talking with Abdul. He told him about his two convictions. Kirk had a knack for the country metaphor. He explained to Abdul how the state had turned an orange into a tomato. How from Jump Street he’d been put on the B&O express for that long railroad ride to prison.
Abdul asked him if he’d be interested in converting to Islam. Kirk declined. He was a solid Christian. Kirk told him he figured there was probably only one God anyway. He just went by different names for different people and allowed for different roads to get to him. Abdul liked this notion. Abdul was a large, very black man, with a commanding presence. And his word carried real juice in the joint. The Muslims were a unified and loyal group.
Whenever Kirk saw Abdul, they’d exchange the Muslim greeting that Abdul had taught him. “Assalaam alaikum,” Kirk would say, holding his hand over his heart. It was a blessing of peace. “Alaikum assalaam” was the reply—an acknowledgment of mutual respect.
When Kirk was high from his sets he relished talking about religion, music, prisoner’s rights, his own innocence. Like any addict, though, he gradually became more and more preoccupied with his next score, how to acquire his next fix. Kirk got to know all of the drug runners and the dealers in his section of the penitentiary. He also learned how to cop clean needles from the infirmary. He kept a disinfectant in his cell so he could reuse his own works. Most of the time he bought his drugs from Little Mussolini—Moose—who had guards on the take, his “whores,” as he referred to them. Moose was pleased to have another regular customer. Kirk was careful not to get too far behind in what he owed Moose, though. Moose, it was said, had shot a man’s testicles off with a .357 magnum over a dart game.
Kirk tried to keep abreast of all the prisoners who were in his building. This was necessary just for self-preservation. An inmate named Kimberly Ruffner had come to the joint about a month after Kirk had arrived the first time. Ruffner had been convicted of the attempted rape and murder of a woman in the Fells Point area of Baltimore. He kept to himself most of the time in a single cell one tier below Kirk’s. Kirk seldom saw him. Their paths rarely crossed. Whenever they did, Ruffner would turn and walk the other way.
Kirk broke one of Half’s maxim’s and started borrowing to pay for his sets. Demon lent Kirk cigarettes. So did Pepper and Angel, Dino, Black Smoky, Bull Starkey, and Rock from New York. Kirk used the packs to parley for his drugs.
Kirk’s habit was running out of control. It began to destroy his health, to consume him. He’d become vulnerable, more of a target. He got to where he owed over five hundred packs of cigarettes. He knew the men he owed them to were vampires, looking for any excuse to hurt someone. Whenever Kirk staggered out of his cell, high on a jag, the inmates on his tier would look at him like he were already dead. And the sets no longer made him feel so good. It was just that he felt sick without them. He’d been obliterating himself for close to a year.
Kirk lost track of time. He’d been writing his lawyers. The public defender had again been working hard on his appeal. This time, since the death penalty was no longer involved, the case would be argued before the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. Kirk assumed that the David Rehill issue would lead to a new trial, just like the Richard Gray issue had done before. He couldn’t have been more mistaken.
The case was argued in the spring of 1988. Julia Bernhardt again took up the gauntlet for Kirk. It was obvious to her, though, as the oral argument ensued, that the Court of Special Appeals was not interested in giving Kirk Bloodsworth a third trial. He’d had two chances and lost them both. The judges were simply not impressed with her arguments that he should get a third.
Kirk learned in July of 1988 that his appeal had been denied. He was shocked. He couldn’t believe it. The public defenders promised him that they would petition the Maryland Court of Appeals to see if it would hear the case, but they were not optimistic. Kirk was frantic. He wrote everyone. The passion and commitment of his lawyers seemed to have waned. What was the next step, he wanted to know? How was he going to clear himself? But no one had an answer. Th
e world out there was quiet. All this sent him farther down, deeper into the drugs, into debt, into a place where he could forget, where he could escape from his misery and hide from himself.
One morning in the fall, after he’d learned that his appeal had been denied, Kirk started out of his cell but found his way blocked by Bull Starkey. Starkey was a grizzled old lifer from the mountains in western Maryland. Word was he’d killed a man by whacking him forty-seven times with a ball peen hammer. A blue rose tattoo spread across his forearm. Starkey was a chicken hawk and as mean as men come. He held a shank tightly in his hand, his elbow bent and cranked back, his muscular arm coiled, ready to thrust. His mouth was tight, his facial muscles flexed. “I’m gonna’ drive this right into your heart if you don’t pay me the ten packs you owe me right now,” he growled.
Kirk stepped back. A crowd quickly gathered. Out of the corner of his eye Kirk saw Abdul-Haleem. Abdul walked over to Fresco, an Italian bank robber from the docks area of Baltimore and a big dealer in smokes. Abdul took a carton from Fresco and threw it to Kirk. Kirk caught it. Starkey hadn’t moved. Kirk tore open the carton and angrily threw the cigarettes at Starkey, two, three packs at a time. “Come on! Come on!” Kirk yelled in his face. “I’ll fight you with or without your goddamn knife.”
Starkey hesitated. He saw Abdul there and wasn’t sure how involved he might choose to become. Starkey didn’t want to pick a fight with the Muslims. And Kirk was large enough himself, and enraged. Starkey stooped over and picked up the packs.
“Come on!” Kirk shouted again.
“Debt solved,” Starkey hissed, backing away. “Debt solved . . .”
Abdul looked at Fresco. Fresco turned to Kirk. “Shit,” Fresco said. “You don’t even have to pay me back. It was worth it, seeing somebody stand up to Starkey like that.”
But Abdul wasn’t smiling. He took Kirk back into his cell. “You don’t have to be a Muslim,” he said to Kirk. “But look what you’re doing to yourself. I thought you were different. I thought you were innocent. That you stood for something around here. You’re in a stupor. You’re becoming a punk. You’re going to die in here if you don’t pull yourself together.”
After Abdul left, Kirk began to shake. Then he got sick in his toilet. He retched up everything in his stomach and then continued to heave. He sat there on the cold floor, his hand on the filthy steel bowl to keep himself from falling over. Finally, he shakily rose and looked in the cracked piece of mirror he’d taped to the wall. A skull wavered in the reflection. It transformed itself into another face, the one he’d seen in that cell block behind Judge Hinkel’s courtroom the day he was first sentenced. Then it became a skull again, dried up, devoid of flesh. His reflection was that of a changeling. He turned away. All of his possessions, all that had once decorated his cell, were gone. Only a small picture of his mother and father, taped above his bunk, remained. He was wearing a state-issued shirt, state-issued trousers, and state-issued shoes with no laces. He’d traded away everything he had. He had the chills. He was ill. That afternoon he told Sergeant Cooley Hall that he was sick and in danger from other inmates; he asked to be locked down in protective custody. For a week he lay under the bunk in his cell writhing with cramps, vomiting, wracked with the sweats, grasping on to the rails, holding on. He detoxed alone, with no one to help or even sympathize. After that he never touched the drugs again.
IT TOOK A WHILE, but Kirk gradually came back to feeling somewhat human, even healthy. He started watching his diet, trying to avoid all the starches fed to prison inmates. He tried to eat more protein, drink more milk. He avoided those prisoners who drank the jump steady and traded in drugs.
Anita Smith continued to visit Kirk regularly. He looked forward to spending time with her. The two thought they might have found a connection together. Anita was devout in her Catholicism. They’d sit in the visiting room holding hands. Kirk would describe the joy of working on the river, the sunlight and breeze playing off the water, the broad sky. He promised to take her crabbing some day. Anita would bring her Bible and they’d read from it and study it. She introduced Kirk to her priest, Father Al Rose. Eventually, Kirk decided to convert, to become confirmed as a Catholic. Anita helped him study, helped him regain a sense of hope and purpose.
Lifting weights every day also helped build his self-confidence. The lifters welcomed him back. Kirk was different, special. There was some quality about him that set him apart from the other cons in the joint.
With his recovery, Kirk renewed his efforts to gain his freedom. He recommitted himself to this more than anything else. He wouldn’t rest until he could find a way out. He decided one day that he needed more access to the prison library, more opportunity to read and do research. He applied to Sergeant Cooley Hall for a job as a library assistant and got it. Because of the experience of having his first conviction overturned on a constitutional violation, other inmates considered him knowledgeable about the law. Some of them came to him for legal advice. He’d copy cases from the library for inmates. He’d write letters for inmates who couldn’t write. After Black Smoky was found hanged in his cell by his shoelaces, Kirk wrote his family. Inmates forgave Kirk’s cigarette debts or traded them for his help. He began to acquire back his belongings.
Kirk used his time in the library to read everything he could find about the law and to research his own case. And he kept on writing his daily letters proclaiming his innocence, asking for help, all signed “Kirk Bloodsworth—A.I.M.—An Innocent Man.” His output was remarkable. He read and wrote tirelessly.
In March of 1988, Dan Rodricks, a reporter for Baltimore’s Evening Sun, published an editorial about Kirk titled “Haunting Questions.” “Too many questions still haunt the case of Kirk Noble Bloodsworth, who was recommended twice for execution by the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office,” Rodricks wrote. Others in the community remained uncomfortable about the Bloodsworth case. It hadn’t quite been put to rest.
Kirk knew that there were advocates out there still trying, people who’d come to believe he was innocent, people committed to helping him. He prayed and wrote every day to somebody who might come through. He wrote Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Paul Sarbanes, Governor William Donald Schaefer, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings. He wrote the public defenders who’d worked on his case. He wrote the prosecutors and the judges. Gary Christopher was one of the people who got letters from Kirk. Christopher was one who had not given up entirely.
Christopher realized that Kirk’s chances had diminished to almost nothing. He’d had two trials, two appeals, and the constitutional issues were not strong. Postconviction habeas relief was unlikely. What Kirk needed was a miracle. If there was any lawyer in the country who might deliver such a miracle, Christopher figured, it was Bob Morin.
And so it was that he called Morin in early 1989, and told him about Kirk. Morin responded that he was just too busy with death cases to take on a matter where the death sentence had been commuted. But Christopher had also told Kirk about Morin. Kirk wrote Morin a letter pleading with him to come see him. Morin also received a letter from Kirk’s father. Christopher tried to persuade Morin a second time to at least visit and talk to this kid. Reluctantly Morin agreed. It was the first step on Kirk’s road to freedom.
PART VII
FREEDOM
To be on the water and free is a glorious thing . . .
—KIRK BLOODSWORTH
TWENTY-SIX
IN THE EARLY 1970s when Bob Morin was in college at the University of Massachusetts, he’d volunteered to spend a semester in an offshoot of the VISTA program, working at a legal aid clinic as a low-income-housing specialist. The poverty and injustice he saw changed him. Young and idealistic, he decided he wanted to go to law school and figure out a way to use his degree to help people.
After graduating from Catholic University’s law school in 1977, Morin went to work for a small Maryland firm that needed a litigator and that promised to provide him with the o
pportunity to do pro bono work. His two pleasures, outside of the law, were romancing his girlfriend, Marty Tomich, and long-distance running. He began training for marathons and ran his first one that year. He had fallen hard for Marty and looked forward to his evenings and weekends with her. But as his private practice developed, he became frustrated over how little time he had to devote to public-interest work. He felt he wasn’t doing what he’d set out to do.
In 1981, Morin got a call from a law school classmate, Gerry Fisher. Fisher was the director of a Washington, D.C., program called Law Students in Court. The program taught third-year law students from area schools in a clinical setting, allowing them to handle civil cases on behalf of indigents. In the process of teaching, the program provided an important community service. Fisher had just been offered a position with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and asked Morin if he would agree to take over the program as codirector with Stephen Bright. Bright had been a public defender in D.C., a young star of a trial lawyer. He’d been almost too aggressive. He’d rankled some of his supervisors and was ready to move on.
Morin and Bright met and hit it off. They talked of their mutual aspirations to expand the Law Students in Court program, to turn it into a real force for justice in the city. They not only agreed to come aboard as codirectors, but they also convinced Fisher to forego becoming a federal prosecutor and to stay on with them. They’d all split the available salaries and work together to build the program.
It wasn’t long before they received an unexpected phone call from a civil rights lawyer in Georgia. There was an inmate in Augusta, they were told, on death row, awaiting execution, and the man didn’t have a lawyer. Morin thought it was a joke. How could a man be awaiting execution and not have a lawyer? Bright flew down to meet with Garnett Cape. Cape had been convicted of killing his wife. Morin, Bright, and Fisher took on his case. After they agreed to take this death penalty case, they began getting call after call. There was a flood of people awaiting execution in the South, they learned, and few had lawyers. They discovered that there were men awaiting execution whose lawyers had been drunk or asleep during their trials. In some places, lawyers hardly got minimum wage to defend a death case. The racial issues were profound and complex. The representation of many of these people had been nonexistent, at best a travesty. Morin and his colleagues couldn’t say no. They began having less time to devote to their program. Something had to give.