After that summer Louie left for college down at Fayetteville State, where a brother was enrolled. In the summers that followed he would return for seasonal jobs; since there was no work in Lawndale, he often landed at Pittsburgh Plate Glass, down in Shelby, or at Ace Springs, up in Hickory, assembling chairs or the internal springs for mattresses. On weekends he phoned Willie to spend a day or two together. Then Louie would mention he’d like to see his girlfriend before returning to Fayetteville. “Just tell me what day you want to go, what time you want to go, and what time you want to come back,” Willie would promise, “and I’ll bring you.”
When he finished college and saw that he was about to be drafted into the Marines and sent to Vietnam, Louie chose to join the air force instead. By 1987, almost twenty years later, he’d been discharged and was working as a high-school counselor in Raleigh. In his apartment one evening that autumn, he got a phone call from Willie’s cousin, who told him Woot was in prison for rape, on a life sentence. Louie was dumbfounded. Woot? For rape? This wasn’t possible. He reached out to other friends from Douglas, every one of whom agreed the news made no sense. The Woot they knew was nothing like that. At once Louie regretted having lost touch; he arranged a visit and drove to Central Prison, to let Willie know that his friends believed him.
Thomas Hill, meanwhile, who had also enlisted in the air force, was discharged in ’69 and found work at Cleveland Mills, there in Lawndale. He had also reconnected with Willie, who by then was living up in Hickory. That same autumn, Thomas heard from Willie’s nephew about the arrest. Like Louie, Thomas felt certain Woot hadn’t raped anyone. Wrong place, wrong time, he assumed. Once police figured out who had really done it, he predicted, Woot would be released.
But they never figured it out.
When guards led him from segregation back to his block, he turned his attention to getting out entirely. If he cut short his walks around the yard, he found he could visit the prison library, which opened between breakfast and lunch, then again from one until four in the afternoon. Using the law volumes he found there, he tried appealing again to the North Carolina Supreme Court, hoping it would reconsider its earlier refusal even to read his case. When he didn’t hear back, he learned that, in addition to books, the library often held inmates who knew more about appellate procedure than he did. Some had even taken law classes offered in prison.
One inmate named Terry had studied law on the outside, at an actual law school, before he’d gotten arrested—he had been sentenced to something like six hundred years, but all on his own had reduced this sentence by two-thirds. Willie tracked him down to ask if he would read his trial transcript. Terry agreed. But Willie’s appellate deadline was only a few days away, and his case manager told him he was about to ship to another prison. Terry drafted a rapid appeal, and Willie sent it off to Ed de Torres, who agreed that Terry had actually done a pretty good job. Because de Torres was listed as the attorney of record, though, he couldn’t very well submit a brief someone else had written. Instead he drafted his own, then decided to submit them both. In March, eight months after the conviction, he filed the pair of them with the court of appeals.
A month later Willie received a letter from the attorney general, but as far as he could tell it didn’t include a ruling. “Due to administrative oversight, counsel for the State has not yet received the verbatim transcript of the trial proceedings as requested, and is therefore unable to complete the brief for the State within the time prescribed by rule,” the letter read. Willie didn’t understand what this meant. He wrote again to de Torres: “My caseworker and lawyer aid have look over all my papers and told me that the state have not got anything against me to hold me and their is some type of motion that you could be filing to help get me out of here. So I am asking you what are you going to do now and will be hoping to hear from you soon.”
Around the same time, his sister Gladys, whom Willie had told by phone how confused he was about the attorney general letter, wrote to de Torres as well. “I would like to ask you what you think is going on? Do you feel that Willie will get a new trial? If so when and can family be present? My brother says that he cannot understand why they are seeking more time, when they seemingly had no problems convicting him. Please let him know what is going on.”
Finally, in late August, three months after Willie had written, de Torres replied that he was preparing to argue Willie’s appeal the coming Thursday—a week from then. This meant a thirty-minute oral presentation, after which the court was entitled to ask questions. If it granted his appeal, the court could order either a resentencing or a new trial. De Torres expected a decision sometime in October. “I trust this will answer your questions about what is going on.”
As he had waited, meanwhile, Willie had been transferred. One Friday that spring, guards rounded up a few dozen inmates from O dorm, announced they were shipping, and loaded them onto a long, slate-colored bus. Inmates called it the Gray Goose. Because the Gray Goose visited four or five prisons each haul, and always varied its order and route, there was no predicting how long the trip might take; an inmate simply stayed in its cabin until a guard told him he was up. They were lucky to be transferred on a cool afternoon, someone mentioned. The Goose had no air conditioning, and its windows were sealed shut; come July, with fifty men on board, the cabin temperature wouldn’t rise so much as thicken, so that the bus felt like a kiln.
When the Goose arrived at a prison it backed into a fenced chute and a handful of unfamiliar guards emerged to meet it. Names were called for who ought to climb out, and however many this was trekked out the rear hatch, beyond a set of gates, and through the door of an intake room, its benches soldered to the walls. A sergeant gave orientation, which was a list of rules, while guards sifted through every scrap of property an inmate had stored in the Goose’s lower compartment, and determined what he could keep. A particular prison might or might not allow pencils, pens, books, magazines, photographs, or radios, depending on the rules and the mood of the guards, and regardless of the rules at whatever prison the inmate had arrived from. Anything else was confiscated or trashed. Then guards brought him to a nurse. Was he presently being treated for any health problems? He wasn’t, except for migraines. Was he on any medications? He wasn’t. Was he thinking of harming himself? He wasn’t. They brought him to the clothes house to collect white and brown clothes for the week. Within a few days they assigned him a new case manager, who repeated the rules the sergeant had listed in orientation.
He told his new case manager that he had worked in the kitchen back at CP, and was willing to do this at Harnett Correctional, too, if there was an opening, but that really he wanted laundry duty. He’d heard Harnett lacked its own laundry facility, despite housing nearly a thousand inmates, in medium security, in the same layout of open dorms; the nearest facilities were back at CP, or down at Sampson, or over at Chase. All those were nearly an hour’s drive, meaning an inmate on laundry duty took regular day trips. And, like other jobs, it paid. Depending on the position, Correction Enterprises, the company that operated laundry services, offered wages of forty cents, seventy cents, or a dollar a day. In prison this was a lot of money. At different locations Correction Enterprises ran different operations: over at Johnston County it managed an enormous paint plant, where inmates mixed gallon after gallon of white and yellow paint that Correction Enterprises then sold to the state, for marking roads. At Nash it managed a printing plant, where inmates copied forms for the DMV, public schools, and post offices. At other prisons it managed plants for sewing, canning, or making road signs. Harnett held soap-and meat-processing plants, but neither of those required travel. He wanted laundry.
While he waited for assignment, and for de Torres to share the outcome of his appeal, he wrote more letters. From the library he filed a motion for appropriate relief, asking for either a new trial or the dismissal of all his charges. Again he heard nothing back. Then he wrote to North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services to ask for help. Within two wee
ks he received a reply from a staff attorney, Phillip Griffin, who had read Willie’s questionnaire and felt interested in his case, but didn’t want to act until Willie’s appeal had been ruled on. He asked Willie to have de Torres forward a copy of his trial transcript and appellate briefs. Willie forwarded the request to de Torres, but it was another six weeks before de Torres replied with an update: he was still waiting for a decision from the court of appeals.
He didn’t have to wait much longer. The appeal was denied in early December. At trial, the court reasoned, de Torres had raised various objections to Carrie Elliott’s identification, and the judge had ruled on them; de Torres had also motioned to dismiss the verdict, and the judge had ruled on that, too. The court didn’t intend to overrule either decision. Once Willie had been convicted, the ruling explained, he was no longer innocent until proven guilty. Now that burden was reversed: “The evidence is to be considered in the light more favorable to the State, giving the State the benefit of every reasonable inference to be drawn therefrom. Contradictions and discrepancies are for the jury to resolve and do not warrant dismissal.” Its finding: “No error.”
Nearly a year and a half had passed since Willie’s conviction.
Because the court had forwarded its ruling only to de Torres, de Torres wrote to Willie, at Harnett, to share the news:
December 12, 1989
Dear Mr. Grimes:
I would advise you that now is the time to re-contact Mr. Griffin at N.C. Prisoner Legal Services for any additional post-conviction assistance they can offer. If he needs any copies of the transcript, briefs, etc., please let me know or have him to contact me. I will be happy to send it to him upon request.
This will officially terminate my representation of you under my appointment by the Court, as there is no court appointed counsel rights beyond the initial appeal. I sincerely wish that the outcome was different, as I am still convinced of your innocence.
Good luck to you in the future.
Sincerely,
E. X. de Torres
Attorney at Law
10
A Problem for Everyone
They pulled up to Chris Mumma’s house at a few minutes after eleven, on a cool, overcast Friday morning in late November. For days Chris had felt self-conscious about welcoming so many strangers to her home, but finally she’d been forced to admit that it made more sense than anyplace else. She and Beverly Lake had both wanted neutral ground; they couldn’t ask prosecutors to come to a liberal university campus, or defense attorneys to go to a sheriff’s department. Lake had hoped for a private home, but whose might comfortably hold fifteen? Her own, Chris offered grudgingly, where she and Mitch had moved after his breakthrough in venture capital—Mitch’s choice, she insisted, not her own. The two of them and all three kids had once lived in a modest A-frame. Now they owned a ten-thousand-square-foot Georgian Revival, with charcoal shutters and a winding, iron-railed front entrance, whose pillared balcony overlooked a golf course. Between its guesthouse and expansively landscaped lawn unspooled a stone-lined driveway large enough for the dozen-plus cars Chris and Lake expected.
Besides Rosen, Newman, Coleman, and Weitzel, from the center, and one or two colleagues of Lake’s, none of the invitees had any idea who she was, Chris knew. They’d come not because they recognized the address on Lake’s invitation but because the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court had invited them, and now here was some stranger at her porticoed mansion, welcoming the attorney general inside. Chris worried about impressions. She wondered if some of them presumed she and Lake were having an affair. She’d borne that sort of suspicion before, though it had been wrong then, too; as a young, blond executive at Northern Telecom, more than once she’d considered cutting her hair, or wearing glasses, to downplay the effect of her looks. Finally she’d decided not to. Today she was nearly forty, old enough to be taken seriously. The best way she knew to prove others wrong was to be undeniably good at her job. If for the next thirty minutes or so a handful of police chiefs and district attorneys mistook her for some restless trophy wife, with some sequined childhood, and this some hobby luncheon, they would learn quickly enough. The meeting had been her damn idea in the first place.
Not that persuading Lake had been any chore. All she’d done was bring him the idea her center colleagues had dreamed up at the Weathervane, knowing Lake harbored sympathy for their cause already. The pair of them had read identical cases during Chris’s clerkship; she suspected those had unsettled him, the same as they had her, despite their disagreeing about how empowered Lake and his court were to respond. “I know these matter to you,” she finally told him. “I know you agree we should be doing better.” Every wrongful conviction dumped an actual perpetrator back onto the streets, meaning reforms would help to catch more criminals, not fewer—this was harder on crime, not easier on it. In addition to that were the potential exonerees themselves, whose names Chris saw as a call to action. Listed on a notepad she’d begun carrying in her purse were the names of incarcerated men she believed were innocent. To help them all would require more than the center alone, and that would require someone like Lake, to bring deal-makers to the table.
And Lake no longer intended to evade the issue, which he regarded as obvious. Every exoneration dented public trust in his courts, and trust was necessary for those courts to function at all. When Chris had approached him during her clerkship years earlier, with cases she suspected were flawed, and Lake had demurred, it wasn’t because he felt indifferent toward the problem. It was because he was chief justice. He didn’t make policy. He oversaw the courts. Now Lake recognized a way he might address the issue without violating the boundaries of his chambers—not by dictating change, but by fostering its conditions.
At Chris’s urging he wrote to fifteen of his colleagues, including a pair each of judges and district attorneys, the attorney general, and the deputy chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, the largest in the state. He felt “growing concern” in the recent number of exonerations arising from wrongful convictions, Lake shared. Collectively these had forced him to consider whether anything could be done about them, to “minimize future convictions of the innocent, without jeopardizing the conviction of the guilty.” Along with his letter he enclosed a list of everyone he was inviting: “a forum of representatives of our justice system,” he explained, “including police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges.”
Now Chris welcomed the invitees into her hardwood and marble and bronze-chandeliered living room, where the previous week she’d dragged aside two embroidered couches and unfolded a rented conference table. Mitch was at work; all three kids were at school; Zeus, their hundred-pound Bernese mountain dog, she’d put in the yard. She’d also paid more than four hundred dollars to a private caterer, guessing that men might stay longer if she fed them, and that if they stayed they might as well choose to talk with one another. Then she’d looked around her house, seen her new friends Theresa Newman and Jim Coleman, and inhaled deeply. She’d gotten all these people in a room. It was impossible to predict what happened next.
As the invitees settled around the table, Lake thanked them all for coming. He wanted to begin by reiterating something many of them had heard from him before, that he was certain their criminal justice system in North Carolina ranked among the strongest in the country. Wrongful conviction was a national problem, however, and he felt it ought to concern everyone, Republican or Democrat, prosecution or defense, pro–or anti–death penalty, police or academics. Every one of those ought to be pursuing the same aim, Lake believed: to decrease the number of wrongful convictions, without decreasing, or, better, even increasing, the number of rightful convictions. The issue concerned him personally, since he oversaw the state’s courts, and he didn’t see how a democracy could function without courts its citizens trusted. Counterintuitively, an exoneration usually led to a pair of conflicting consequences, he pointed out. On the one hand, it brought justice to the exoneree.
On the other hand, it exposed the initial error, thereby undermining confidence in the system even as it actually made the system more just. The longer an innocent person’s incarceration, the more dramatic the breach in confidence, and the more harmful its backlash. Within their own state Lake had observed this phenomenon a handful of times already: after Ronald Cotton, who’d been exonerated seven years earlier, after spending more than a decade in prison. Again after Lesly Jean, Terence Garner, Charles Munsey. Technically Munsey had never been exonerated, but the verdict against him had been based largely on his confession to a cell mate at Central Prison. Records later proved this supposed cell mate had never been interned at CP at all. Munsey had died awaiting a decision from prosecutors.
More than five hundred more men and women like these had been exonerated over the previous decade, all around the country: thirty or so per year throughout the early 1990s, up to fifty in 1997. And almost ninety just last year, in 2001.
“Look,” Lake finished, “I’m a law-and-order person. I think my reputation bears that out. But we need to be sure we’re doing this the best we can. And we need to be sure we have the public’s trust.” He gestured around the table. “You’re all here because you’re respected representatives of every branch of the law. What we want to find out is whether you all are interested in participating in something like this. An honest evaluation of the issues. Some research and brainstorming of solutions, some discussion of potential changes. No one’s asking anyone to commit to any particular action just yet. But we want to know if this is a conversation we can have.”
There Lake paused to consider the room. When no one volunteered anything, he nodded toward Rosen. “Now Rich is going to say a few words,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice,” Rosen began, and leaned forward. “I think I have about twenty minutes to talk about the problem of convicting innocent people, and what we do about it.” He smiled briefly. “No easy task. There are really two major issues in front of us today. The first is whether we believe there is a problem with our justice system convicting innocent people. The second is, if we do believe there is a problem, whether there is anything we could, or should, be doing about it.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 10