“Because I hadn’t done anything. I wanted to know—I was told someone was looking for me. I came down to see why they were looking for me. And they arrested me.”
So Gladys returned to San Antonio, where she phoned a lawyer, who charged her five hundred dollars even to look at Willie’s case. “This is cut-and-dried,” he promised, once she’d paid. “They don’t have any evidence against him.” All Gladys and her brother had to do was wait for the confusion to pass. So Gladys went back to work. A few months later she received a letter from the same niece who had phoned after Willie’s arrest. “It doesn’t look good for Woot,” the letter read. “They have no proof, but I believe they’re really going to charge him.” Soon afterward, the niece phoned again, to say she’d been attending the trial and worried the jury might make a mistake. Gladys phoned Willie’s lawyer, Ed de Torres, to find out what was happening. De Torres admitted it wasn’t going well. In fact, he told her, Willie had just been convicted.
The news stunned her. From Silver Spring, Maryland, where recently she’d been transferred to a job at Walter Reed medical center, she drove down to see him again. This time she brought her son, David, for company, thinking it might lift both their spirits if he and Uncle Woot could see each other.
By then Willie had been shipped to Central Prison. During her first visit to him, back in county jail, Gladys had known to expect a prohibition on physical contact, even a hug, but now that he’d been convicted she imagined that at least the logistics might be easier. They’d already had their way with him, and in maximum security Woot wouldn’t be a flight risk. Gladys had been approved for a visit; CP had forced her to submit an application before she’d left Silver Spring. She assumed this meant they would allow her to sit with him.
But security at CP was tighter than she had ever imagined, startling even to someone who worked at a military hospital. Before long she had lost count of how many checkpoints she and David were waved through. She checked in at a visitors’ desk, where guards found her name on a list and showed her to a waiting room: half a dozen wood-framed couches, a dull linoleum floor, a Coca-Cola vending machine. Obscuring a wall clock was some sort of plastic shield. A stack of cubbyhole lockers held any belongings forbidden inside, which guards listed as though they were annoyed she didn’t already know. When her name was called, they told her she would be seeing Willie in a visitors’ booth, behind thick glass, unable to touch him. This dazed her. David was only sixteen. She didn’t want him to see his uncle like that, even after he’d come all the way from Silver Spring with her. She told him to stay in the waiting room. Through another doorway was a wide, gleaming hall, lined along one side with a symmetrical row of cinder-block booths. As soon as a guard let her inside one she began to feel sick. The booth was airless and sweltering. Its pale walls were barely as far apart as her arm span, and she was claustrophobic. The window to the other side of the booth, where they would bring in Woot, was puny, only a few feet above a grate to carry their voices.
He shuffled in wearing his prison clothes—brown pants, a white T-shirt. He looked awful. Was it supposed to be this hot? She was too upset to speak, even once he sat. This was so much worse than she’d imagined. “W-Willie,” she finally stammered. “What are you doing here?”
He looked near tears. “I didn’t do anything,” he told her.
There was more but she struggled to follow it. She would ask a question, then after some undefined period—she couldn’t keep track—she would notice him straining for words, and she wouldn’t know what about. He was answering something, she would realize, she must have asked him a question, but she couldn’t recall what it had been. The booth was suffocating. She stayed as long as she could last. When she stepped out, a guard—was it the same guard from earlier?—led her back to the holding room, where David was waiting.
Soon she was driving in her car, then she was stopped along the highway shoulder, turned toward David in the passenger seat. “You know? This is the worst thing I’ve ever been to in my life,” she told him, weeping. “You’d better make sure you never have to deal with this.” She tugged the sleeve of her shirt to dab her eyes. “And it doesn’t mean you have to be guilty,” she added. “Sometimes you can just be in the wrong place.” People like them had to be careful; just look at their skin. Anyone might accuse them of anything, and folks would assume they had done it. What had happened to Woot was even worse. She knew that Linda McDowell, Carrie Elliott’s neighbor, who had implicated Woot in the first place, was black, as was Steve Hunt, the officer who’d arrested him. When your own people don’t listen to you, she wondered, who do you have?
6
Rosen
Rich Rosen, who’d recently turned fifty, was a slight man with gold wire-rim glasses whom Chris had studied under in law school. In addition to his work as a professor, Rosen was an accomplished defense attorney, so his particular goals didn’t always align with Chris’s; at Chapel Hill, she’d told him she wasn’t sure she could represent a guilty person, and certainly wouldn’t want to, since a criminal belonged in prison. Still, she and Rosen had gotten along, and because he’d made a career of representing the disenfranchised, Chris thought he might know what to do about the cases that unnerved her. Rosen agreed to meet her for lunch at a local diner. There, over sandwiches, she described her problem. Lake himself had always been generous, but she’d put her job at risk by filing the clemency petition. And there were eight other justices to think about. She’d gotten herself banned from some of their chambers, and knew other clerks had begun to resent her. But she hadn’t become a lawyer only to learn that she was just as powerless as she’d been in the first place. “What else can I do?” she asked Rosen. “What haven’t I thought of?”
Rosen sighed and admitted she wouldn’t like his answer. “You’ve done everything you can,” he told her. Certainly she could go on agitating, if she wanted, at the risk of alienating everyone on the court. But what Lake had told her was right; in that situation, a judge didn’t reexamine innocence or guilt.
“So what am I doing here?” Chris wondered aloud. She’d turned down lucrative corporate offers in order to clerk. She didn’t expect to agree with every ruling she saw, but the doubts she felt now were not over technicalities. It was ludicrous to think the courts couldn’t distinguish between basic guilt and innocence. How was she supposed to work in a field like that? How, for that matter, did anyone?
Sometimes he felt the same frustration, Rosen admitted. “But listen,” he added, and he leaned toward her confidentially. “We’re getting something together. We’ll need help.”
Chris was right, Rosen agreed. Cases like these deserved attention, and there were more out there than she’d seen. Then he smiled and waved for the check. “You want to do something about it?” he asked. “Come work with us.”
Rosen had begun his career as a public defender up in Washington, DC, before back problems forced him out of regular practice and he’d accepted a position on the faculty at Chapel Hill. He’d become a lawyer in the first place to represent the poor, and he soon discovered he could do this nearly as well as a professor as he had as a public defender, since his faculty salary allowed him not to charge his clients. Few lawyers in North Carolina did similar work, and quickly he earned a reputation as the person to call for free advice. In this way he’d learned of Ronald Cotton, who was serving life plus fifty-four years for two rape convictions up in Burlington. Cotton’s public defender thought he’d probably committed one of those rapes, but not the other—even if the defender was right, though, he knew it wasn’t enough to merit an appeal, since a convicted person couldn’t just demand a new trial on the grounds his jury had gotten it wrong. To be heard at all, he had to demonstrate that his legal rights had been violated. For help with this, the defender called Rosen.
Rosen read Cotton’s transcript, decided he could wring an appeal from it, then encountered an obstacle he hadn’t anticipated. Cotton himself didn’t want a simple appeal. From prison he was asking
for DNA testing. He hadn’t raped anyone, he insisted, and this DNA he was hearing about could prove it. But a DNA test was perilous, Rosen knew. Without it, he had grounds for an appeal. If they pursued DNA instead, and this turned out to match, Cotton would be hamstrung. Rosen visited the man in prison to explain the risk. “There’s not a judge in the world who’ll let you out, no matter how unfair your trial was, if DNA shows you’ve done it,” he cautioned. Still Cotton insisted. So Rosen approached the local district attorney, and suggested they file jointly for testing. Legally he was entitled to pursue DNA on his own, but Rosen saw no reason to make enemies. If the results matched, he promised the DA, Rosen wouldn’t file any more appeals. Cotton would be finished. He only wanted to be sure of the truth. That sounded fair, the DA agreed; the state would even pay for testing. On the minuscule chance some mistake had been made, the DA wanted to know as much as anyone. “But between you and me,” he told Rosen, “you know, don’t you? It’s just going to show he did it.”
Rosen shrugged. “If it does, it does,” he said.
It didn’t.
After Cotton, letters arrived by the dozens. They too had been wrongly convicted, inmates wrote Rosen, not only from North Carolina but also beyond. They had heard what he’d done for Cotton. Would he help them? But Rosen was a law professor, not a full-time attorney, and couldn’t possibly accept so many cases. To one after another he wrote back that he regretted he wasn’t in a position to help. Still more letters came, and he wrote still more apologies, until they haunted him. Certainly some of the letters were bogus, he knew, but if even a fraction were valid, then there were more Ronald Cottons out there, imprisoned without reason.
He was still mulling this over three long years after Cotton’s exoneration, in autumn 1998, when he attended a conference at Northwestern University. There he watched more than thirty men climb onto a stage to announce their names and when exactly they’d been sentenced for crimes they had never committed. “My name is Joseph Burrows,” one of them said, holding a sunflower. “The state of Illinois sought to kill me. I was put on death row in 1989, and released in 1994. If the state had its way, I’d be dead today.” Then he dropped his sunflower into a vase with the others.
As he left the conference, Rosen contemplated what he’d seen. He tried to tally all the letters he’d received since Cotton, plus the sunflowers filling that vase onstage as the conference ended. If 97 or 98 percent of all cases were resolved correctly, that was pretty good, for a human endeavor, Rosen figured. But even a 2 or 3 percent failure rate—or whatever the number was, which he guessed was unknowable—over the course of years meant hundreds of Ronald Cottons, all across the country, incarcerated simply for having woken up in the morning. That was too many, Rosen decided. He had to do something. When he got back to Chapel Hill, he hauled a box of unopened letters into a class on criminal procedure and, before a crowded lecture hall, dumped them onto a table. “I’ve got all these letters,” he announced. “Does anyone want to volunteer to look into these cases? And help me answer them?”
7
Some Ideas of Persecution
When Gladys was gone and his evaluations were through he was transferred upstairs to O dorm, where he waited to be shipped. By policy, an inmate was told only at the last possible moment that he was about to be transferred, and to where, partly because these were subject to change literally until he had boarded the bus, and partly as a security measure. A felon who knew his destination might also guess his route, and no one wanted him with time to confer with associates on the outside. The result was that no one in O dorm had any idea where he was bound, or how long it would be until he was sent there, which could be a few weeks or longer than a year. Nearly twice as many men hung in this suspension as were being evaluated downstairs in K dorm, and Willie couldn’t sleep any better here than he had there. If anything O was worse, since its rooms were larger, meaning still more criminals whose breath he could feel, whose every movement he could measure by the squeak and shudder of a mattress, whose muttering kept him interminably conscious. Until his trial, back in Newton, Brenda had visited him weekly, on Friday afternoons, but now she stopped—not because she no longer believed him, but because CP was too far from Hickory. After one or two letters, he stopped hearing from her. By the end of his first month he was so sleep-deprived and disoriented his vision had gone blurry, and his tongue was as dry as a cotton sock. An unfamiliar pinching took hold in his forehead, then expanded, viselike; when he swung his vision to either side, he swore he could feel connective veins tugging from their anchors. Light began to chafe at him, then grew nearly blinding.
When he’d first arrived at K dorm he’d been relieved to find he was allowed outdoors onto a yard; in this small way, perversely, prison was better than county jail. But now his headaches made sunlight insufferable. He asked to stay indoors but a guard refused. Instead, he found a shaded spot and clenched his eyelids. When it was over he begged to see a nurse, who couldn’t find anything wrong with him. A day later, the pain worsened into nausea, and he pleaded again for sick call, where a doctor examined him and agreed with the nurse from a day earlier—nothing was wrong. On the third day he was nearly debilitated. The prison brought in a specialist, who asked Willie to describe his symptoms. Willie did. He was having a migraine, the specialist told him. Willie didn’t know what that was. A migraine, the specialist repeated. He had never had one?
No.
Well, it was a migraine, the specialist said. If he felt one coming on again, he ought to try to avoid sunlight.
The following month they brought him to the manager of psychological programs. During his initial evaluation, in July, a staff psychologist had ruled Willie an unlikely threat either to himself or to others. Now CP wanted a fuller screening. “Projection of responsibility to others and possibly some ideas of persecution are also suggested,” the manager determined. “Denies any responsibility for the crime.” Willie also seemed depressed, and anxious, but these appeared “situational in nature,” an ordinary part of “initial adjustment reaction to prison.” They also fit Willie’s admission that he felt uncomfortable in crowds of strangers, and had always been something of a loner. Otherwise, the manager decided, Willie was “very soft spoken in manner” and “pleasant, responsive and cooperative.” He wasn’t surprised when Willie complained of insomnia. “My impression is that the sleep disturbance is due to approximately 11 months of inactivity due to housing and jail and here for processing.” He predicted Willie’s sleep would improve as he acclimated to life inside the walls. Until then, the manager didn’t think Willie required any mental-health treatment, though he recommended Willie be assigned to some job or other, or else to classes, either of which he predicted might speed along his adjustment.
More colleagues followed up in early autumn to evaluate Willie for a job assignment. “During the interview he presented himself in a polite manner,” the committee reported, and suggested Willie be assigned to work in the kitchen.
Cell and hallway lights never cut out entirely inside prison, but dimmed gloomily each night at eleven and brightened at five thirty the next morning; at six, breakfast was called, a dormitory every fifteen minutes. If Willie worked a morning shift in the kitchen he might rise as early as two or three to prepare breakfast for inmates who left before daylight on job assignments, or a transfer to another prison. Because of the early hours, most inmates avoided breakfast shifts in the kitchen, but Willie was glad for them. He often woke this early regardless, and it was better to rise and busy himself than to lie in predawn silence with time to consider his circumstances. If he helped with breakfast, usually he got to fix his own plate. Technically, this was forbidden, but guards rarely hassled an inmate on the kitchen staff, at least during that prisoner’s shift, since an inmate in this position could, if he wasn’t too closely supervised, make extra sandwiches, pile them with meat, and slip them into guards’ hands. The better the cook, the more lenient his guards.
A good cook also had sta
nding among fellow inmates, who often complained; meals were always too dry, or too salty, or too overdone. Most mornings Willie avoided the issue altogether and kept to oatmeal, or a banana, or eggs with juice. Then he returned to his cell block and showered, under one of three open spigots in what looked like a tiled bunker. If he wanted to shave, a guard issued him a disposable razor, then returned fifteen minutes later to collect it. Some inmates bypassed this hassle by trimming their goatees or mustaches with fingernail clippers, at least until they made minimum custody, where an inmate could buy and keep his own razors. Besides his mustache, Willie shaved every morning, as he had on the outside. Once a week he was issued identical replacements for his clothes, a single roll of toilet paper, and a bar of soap that had been stamped with the outline of North Carolina.
After he showered usually he returned to his bunk to lie down for a half hour or so; if he was lucky, he might drift off, after sleeping so little the night before. Soon guards opened the yard and blasted assignments from loudspeakers, which screeched constantly throughout the day and could be heard everywhere on the grounds: Patty Billings, report to sick call! Les Robeson, report to your block! School call! Yard call! Work call! Chow call! Mail call! Church call! Inmates on the yard could be overseen from inside an observation tower, and from behind the nose of a rifle, both of which conditions guards preferred. An inmate on the yard wasn’t dirtying his cell block or the mess hall, or slinking through a poorly surveilled corridor. This arrangement worked fine except when it rained. Then guards corralled inmates into a particular block and kept them the entire afternoon, so the remaining blocks could be scrubbed. No one liked this—guards for security reasons, inmates because it bored them. On the yard CP had basketball, horseshoes, card tables, a volleyball net, and a weight pile. Even on a clear day, Willie touched none of these. When he wasn’t suffering from a migraine he roamed huge solitary loops around the fenced perimeter, just yards inside the wire chute, five or six miles a day.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 7