Still, the cumulative effect of each commission and report was plain. DNA testing had provided the equivalent of a random audit of trial verdicts, which in turn had laid bare a vulnerability no one foresaw. In 2001, a national poll found that 73 percent of U.S. adults believed an innocent person had been executed within the past decade. “If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed,” Sandra Day O’Connor admitted that July, before an association of women lawyers in Minnesota. O’Connor had changed her mind from eight years earlier. Within another year, in Atkins v. Virginia, five of her colleagues had, too. Read their majority decision: “We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.”
A few weeks after Rosen, Newman, and Coleman returned to North Carolina from their Innocence Project training in New York, Pete Weitzel read in the local News and Observer that Duke and Chapel Hill law schools hoped to merge their respective innocence programs. Weitzel was a lanky, rheumy-eyed man in his sixties whose ruddy complexion resembled a carpenter’s on some cold-weather job. In fact he’d spent forty years with the Miami Herald before retiring and moving to North Carolina, where his wife took a position at Duke as an associate dean. Since then he’d been teaching journalism part-time, and looking for something else to do. He’d never reported much on law at the Herald, but this idea of an innocence project intrigued him. He imagined it might feel satisfying to help investigate cases, uncover where the law had been misapplied, and repair its abuses, if he could. He also happened to live down the street from Jim Coleman. That afternoon he laid down the newspaper, strode across his yard, and knocked on Coleman’s door.
Coleman was relieved for the help. Neither he nor Newman had any clue about administration, he admitted to Weitzel. The pair of them wanted to collaborate with Rich Rosen, but law school hadn’t taught them a thing about how to go about it. Weitzel, an editor, knew how to get disparate parts working together. He drove to Chapel Hill to introduce himself to Rosen, where he recognized in Rosen’s office several of the same cases from Coleman’s files. This wouldn’t do, he chided. The two campuses weren’t in competition, and both had complained of being submerged in paperwork. Why were they fielding letters from the same inmates? What they really ought to do was incorporate as a nonprofit. Some sort of umbrella organization, even staffed modestly, could screen letters from prospective clients, forward those with promise along to Rosen at Chapel Hill, or Newman and Coleman at Duke, and help to avoid duplicates.
That arrangement sounded perfect, the lawyers told Weitzel. But none of them knew how to organize it.
Weitzel did. In 2000, he helped them found a nonprofit called the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, “to identify, investigate, and advance credible claims of innocence made by inmates convicted of felonies in North Carolina,” its mission pledged. Their center would accept nearly any case of wrongful conviction, the four agreed—not only capital cases, or cases where DNA was available, as the original Innocence Project did. “What DNA investigations illustrate is just how wrong the system can be in normal circumstances,” Weitzel told Duke Magazine. “Whether you have the conclusive proof—the silver bullet of DNA—or not.”
Without any budget, Newman and Coleman persuaded Duke to donate the center office space, and Rosen borrowed resources from Chapel Hill, mostly funds the law school had set aside for pro bono projects, assuming that, since he was a professor, no one would ask him many questions. Then he persuaded a dean to fund a research assistant. A proper nonprofit also needed a board of directors, Weitzel insisted. Since there were only the four of them, this would have to be themselves. He personally would be executive director; Rosen could be president. Newman agreed to be vice president. She didn’t know what this entailed, exactly, except that whenever Rosen got his wish and stepped down, Newman would replace him as president. Besides Weitzel, none of them knew exactly what that entailed, either.
The center made everyone’s job easier except for Weitzel’s. Of the four, only he had never worked on wrongful convictions before, or, for that matter, gone to law school. He’d imagined he understood criminal justice in America, at least broadly; he was a journalist, after all, he wasn’t naive. He knew that not everyone could be relied on. As he read through cases, however, what surprised him was the reverse; not how often there were villains, but how often there weren’t. He’d assumed that any false outcome would be traceable to misbehavior at trial: a biased judge, a negligent lawyer, a witness who’d lied on the stand. Sometimes this prediction held up. Other times it didn’t. The cases that unnerved him most had been tried precisely as they ought to have been, and still had turned out all wrong. One small error, somewhere down the line, then bad luck to compound it—that was all it took, especially for a defendant without money or influence. A defendant like this couldn’t afford his own lawyer, so the state appointed him one, and now Weitzel saw the sheer volume most court-appointed lawyers carried; even if they were conscientious, which of course most of them were, their workload was just unsustainable. Others, it was true, weren’t any good. Once Weitzel phoned a lawyer whose client was serving a life term in prison. “I don’t remember much about it,” the lawyer confessed, “that was my first-ever case.” Another time Weitzel asked if he might photocopy a particular file. “Oh, I didn’t keep them,” the lawyer told him. “I don’t keep any files.” Weitzel hadn’t foreseen cases like these, and now they were piled all around him; packed into boxes at Chapel Hill, stacked atop conference tables at Duke, stuffed inside envelopes at the center, spread across the carpet in his home.
To help screen these cases, the center relied on law students, but now Weitzel wondered about recruiting journalism students for the same job. He knocked on the dean’s office at Chapel Hill: what if he taught a course in investigative reporting? The dean was intrigued, but listed a handful of concerns. Then Weitzel added that, since he was retired, he didn’t need any salary. He would teach the course for free. The dean forgot his concerns.
The next semester, under Weitzel’s guidance, student journalists began combing through center cases. There they discovered James Bernard Parker. Parker was serving a life term for child abuse in Monroe, a growing Charlotte suburb. Nearly fifteen years earlier, in 1990, an elementary-school counselor there had learned that several students were being “bothered” in their neighborhood, a vague claim she’d shared with police, to whom several of the boys admitted having been abused, and pointed toward Parker. Parker was tall, ebony-skinned, and easy to recognize; he lived in a housing project near the school. Four of the accusations against him had held up in court.
Weitzel’s journalism students, however, had questions about the case. More than four boys had claimed abuse. Why only this many charges? What evidence had counted against Parker, besides the testimony of schoolchildren? They drove up to Monroe to ask for Parker’s files, where a desk sergeant told them he didn’t think his department had kept any. But he remembered the officer who’d originally investigated the case; that officer had since retired, but maybe, if students got lucky, he’d kept a few files from his time on the force somewhere around his house. The sergeant gave an address.
“I don’t have them,” the retired officer answered, scratching his chin, when students showed up at his door. “But I know where they are. Want me to get them for you?” Together they all drove back to the station, where the officer disappeared inside, then reappeared minutes later with a cardboard box so large he could barely wrap his arms around it. “Here you are,” he said.
Students hauled this box back to campus, where Weitzel’s entire class helped pore through it. Lying flat on the very bottom, beneath what might have been forty pounds of paper, were the elementary-school counselor’s original reports. According to those, two of the schoolboys had never mentioned the race of their assailant at all. Two others had been abused by “a light-skinned negro.” Six had been abused by a white man.
; IS THE WRONG MAN BEHIND BARS? read a Charlotte Observer headline the following December. After reading the article, a local attorney agreed to represent Parker pro bono. The DA, however, was reluctant to reopen the case—Parker’s original prosecutor had since become a chief circuit judge, and the political implications of this were unappealing. Instead, he offered a deal: if Parker pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, the DA would settle for time served. Parker did, and was released. Still, the conditions of his deal didn’t sit well with Rich Rosen, who told the Observer he thought it was “a great accomplishment” that Parker had been freed. “But I think the system didn’t work for James Parker,” he added. “It didn’t work at the time of trial. And frankly it didn’t work at the end, when he was pressured to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t do.”
Around the same time Weitzel began teaching free journalism courses at Chapel Hill, Chris Mumma, disillusioned by those cases she’d seen under Beverly Lake at the state supreme court, phoned Rosen to ask for guidance. She didn’t much need a salary, Chris admitted, over their lunch at the local diner. She only wanted meaningful work, and the feeling that she was empowered to achieve something. To Rosen those terms sounded like a bargain, since meaningful work was precisely what he could offer, and a salary was precisely what he couldn’t. Their center needed a staff attorney. He and Newman and Coleman were lawyers, but all three of them held faculty jobs, so lacked the flexibility to add full-time nonprofit work.
Chris accepted.
To keep one another abreast of cases, the center’s original four board members—Rosen, Newman, Coleman, and Weitzel—had gotten into a habit of lunch every so often at the Weathervane, a Southern-themed restaurant just a few minutes north of the Chapel Hill campus. Now Chris joined them. Over cornmeal-crusted catfish and coastal shrimp and grits, the five shared their recent cases and what they imagined was next for the center. It was satisfying to work so directly on the issues—an unfamiliar sensation for Chris, who’d felt so disempowered as a clerk. She still shared Weitzel’s surprise that cases like these existed in the first place. Without DNA testing, or a cooperative prosecutor, many couldn’t be relitigated. That was the most discouraging scenario: a wrongful conviction, and nothing they could do about it.
Rosen had learned, from his experience with Ronald Cotton, how the process could work when everyone collaborated. But he also knew how rare that was. A prosecutor had no incentive to reexamine a closed case; at best this meant more labor for him, and, at worst, a discovery that he or someone in his office had made a mistake. It was extraordinary the DA in Cotton’s case had been so amenable. Rosen, too, had helped the process along, by risking his client’s fortunes simply to find the truth.
That was what they needed in a case like that. Some way to find the truth—the nonpartisan, supralegal truth. But such a model was hard to envision. Of the lawyers they knew, how many would risk their own interests to learn whether they personally had gotten a case wrong? For that even to be possible would require conversation with DAs, and also with sheriffs and police, who had something at stake, too. And who was supposed to bring all those parties to the table? Rosen, Newman, and Coleman were all outspoken, anti-death-penalty liberals. Weitzel was a journalist from out of town. Say one of them went ahead and organized a statewide meeting, a summit, of sorts, on the issues. A roomful of defense attorneys would show up, and no one else. They’d be preaching to no one but themselves.
Chris set down her fork to contemplate what she was hearing. How seriously were they considering this? she asked the others. This idea of a summit?
Newman shrugged. They were serious, she answered, if only it would happen.
What if they had a person like Beverly Lake? Chris asked. The pair had a good relationship. What if she were to approach him with their idea?
The others regarded her skeptically. Wasn’t Beverly Lake a Republican? An old-fashioned, law-and-order conservative?
He was, Chris confirmed. For that matter, so was she. But Lake was also fair-minded, and Chris had grown close with him over the three years of her clerkship. Plus, he had something personally at stake, she happened to know. Public trust in the courts had long been Lake’s signature issue. Every false verdict left that trust more brittle, and Lake knew it. Chris had made sure he knew it, had hassled him about those cases in his chambers. What she’d wanted from him then was for him to intervene single-handedly, and he’d declined to. This was different. They weren’t proposing that Lake overturn any verdicts, only that he lend his reputation to a dialogue about them. What if Chris could persuade him to lead the discussion they were imagining?
Rosen, Newman, Coleman, and Weitzel all glanced at one another. Then, in unison, they looked at Chris.
Yes, they told her. Try.
9
The Benefit of Every Reasonable Inference
There were only so many ways for a man to occupy his time in prison, and he saw every one of them. The value of a job was not that it paid but that it passed hours. When he wasn’t eating, working, reading, sleeping, or exercising, chances were good an inmate was gambling—on cards, on televised football or basketball or NASCAR, on footraces or on duels between insects captured from the yard. Technically gambling was prohibited, but a rule in prison meant only as much as guards’ enforcement of it, and guards had larger concerns than petty gambling.
Because de Torres had told him to be a model prisoner, and a crowd of inmates unsettled him anyway, Willie rarely gambled. If he happened to win he walked away before the stakes rose too high, to avoid any trouble. Or he gave away his winnings. Money had never made any difference to him; he’d lived forty-one years without it, expected nothing different of his future, and didn’t see the value of money in prison anyway, except at the canteen, the prison store.
For his work in the kitchen, and how cooperative he’d been, he was promoted that first winter to medium security, allowing him more hours in the yard. A week later the promotion was nearly rescinded. After a breakfast shift that Monday, he and two other assistant cooks discovered a jug of buck the head cook had brewed, nearly a gallon and a half. Buck was a sort of homemade wine, from fruit juices and sugar yeast; Willie had never tried it, but now he and the others were alone in the kitchen, and the head cook said they were welcome to it as long as they saved him a gallon. An hour later, a guard was drawn by their voices. What was all the noise? he wanted to know, and looked Willie over. “You don’t usually talk like that.”
Willie shrugged. “I guess I’m feeling good,” he said.
“What got you feeling good?”
“I don’t know.” He considered the others. “I guess we been drinking. Whatever we been drinking, we feeling good.”
The guard hauled them to his lieutenant, who suggested all three inmates be returned to their bunks until they settled down. That afternoon a sergeant showed up to charge Willie with substance possession, worth thirty days in segregation. Entering the infraction into Willie’s file, though, he noticed Willie’s promotion to medium custody had been only ten days earlier. In the eight months Willie had been at CP, he hadn’t caused any other trouble. To keep from reversing his promotion, the sergeant decided to cut him a break. He reduced the thirty days to three.
A segregated cell was roughly the same as any other, only filthier, and located in an entirely different wing, a distance from general population. Bolted to the wall was a low steel bed and a combination toilet-and-sink joined into one dull metal skeleton. Through a slat in his door, meals appeared, along with paper and a pencil for one letter a week. For an hour each day, guards let him outdoors, not into the main yard but a solitary eight-by-ten cube where he could hardly feel a breeze. Otherwise what defined segregation was absence: no job or canteen or radio, no gambling or television or cards.
In short, segregation held nothing but his own interior, which had turned against him. In the semidarkness of his cell he could think only of his case, and of his molten anger at the fraud of his trial. The conspiracy he was now ce
rtain of tormented him. He was awfully, throbbingly lonely. Brenda was out there, somewhere, he knew, moving about in the winter chill. It’d been weeks since he’d heard from her. He missed her. He missed his family.
He missed Thomas Hill. His closest friend since childhood, Thomas had been a shy, self-conscious boy, too, with eight siblings, just like Willie, but few intimate friends. They’d taken to each other immediately. It hadn’t mattered that Thomas’s family had moved often, to sharecrop different land, so long as he kept within the same five-mile radius, since anything less than this counted as walking distance. Whenever they weren’t in the fields, Thomas and Woot had played checkers, or cards—gin rummy and spades, the only two games whose rules they understood. Often Thomas stayed the night. He graduated from Douglas High in ’64, in the same class as Woot, then after six months studying auto mechanics at Catawba Tech, up in Hickory, a U.S. Air Force recruiter promised him the same training in the military, tuition-free. In fact, the air force would pay him, the recruiter said. He enlisted six months later.
Besides Thomas, Willie’s closest friend in school had been Louie Ross—a less likely match, since Louie was extroverted and boisterous. After graduation, Willie’s income from a textile plant, and help from his sister Gladys, had allowed him to scrape together enough for a secondhand car, which he had used on Friday or Saturday nights to drive Louie the ten miles down to Shelby, where Louie’s girlfriend lived. Then at ten thirty Willie would reappear to bring Louie home. What had his friend been up to while he’d waited? Louie would ask. Didn’t Woot have plans? Did he want to see a girlfriend of his own? But Willie had only hung around a nearby pool hall—he didn’t mind. When he refused Louie’s offer of gas money, Louie would decide he was hungry, ask to pass by a fast-food joint, and buy the pair of them hamburgers.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 9