By the close of that first year, 2007, she’d received more than two hundred and fifty claims from North Carolina inmates. A portion of these she had rejected outright; another hundred and fifty she was currently screening. On three, she’d begun formal investigations. Seven others were bottlenecked. Her agency lacked the staff to probe multiple cases at once, something it would need to do, given the volume of its claims, Kendra knew. For now, with only herself and an administrative assistant, she relied on Chris and student volunteers at the center to screen the majority of IIC cases—an arrangement that had begun before Kendra was hired, and that Chris envisioned as permanent, but that Kendra wanted to change as soon as she could. For the IIC to be fully neutral, it also had to be fully independent, Kendra believed. She liked Chris, but Chris represented individual clients. Someone in that position couldn’t also be vetting cases. Obviously this was a conflict of interest.
Chris bristled at that idea. But all eight commissioners agreed with Kendra.
So Kendra requested funds from the general assembly for two additional positions, a secretary and another investigator. Meanwhile, she made do with what she had. In December 2007, her agency’s first case proceeded to a hearing; that of Hank Reeves, a former police officer up in Pitt County who’d been convicted of child abuse. Today that child was fifteen and had recanted, claiming she’d been coerced into testifying.
Rather than alienate the Pitt County authorities who’d convicted Reeves in the first place, however, Kendra went out of her way to praise them. “They were extremely helpful and cooperative with our investigation,” she announced in a press release. “The new evidence in the case was not available to them at the time of trial and this was the first they had heard of it.” At a hearing in mid-December, commissioners agreed that Reeves’s case included “sufficient evidence of factual innocence to merit judicial review,” and voted it forward to a three-judge panel. “It’s a landmark case no matter how it’s resolved,” a local defense attorney told newspapers. “It’s a unique proceeding in American jurisprudence.”
But nine months later, the three judges at Reeves’s panel determined he had not presented “clear and convincing evidence” of his innocence. Reeves remained in prison.
Still, Kendra felt proud of what had happened. She personally had never offered whether she believed Reeves innocent, and never planned to; no one at the IIC had asked her opinion, and from reporters she kept this private, knowing it irrelevant. The rest of the criminal justice system could choose one side or another, she thought. Her own job was not to. She knew that Reeves himself was unhappy with the outcome, and also that she might encounter skepticism in newspapers, since, at the end of it all, judges had simply found a convict guilty again. But the proceeding had functioned exactly as she’d hoped. Attorneys for each side had done a good job, behaved fairly. New evidence had been introduced and considered, and the judges had ruled how the judges had ruled. What else did she want? “The parties should be commended for the way they handled this case,” she wrote in a report to the general assembly. “The judges heard every piece of evidence and not a single objection was made during the entire hearing. The Commission is proud of the work they have done and this hearing has been fair and thorough.”
She felt the same about Terry Lee McNeil, she insisted, whose case the IIC heard the following January. McNeil had been convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping down in the town of Apex. Again the IIC turned up new evidence, though again it would not be enough; this evidence was insufficient to merit judicial review, commissioners ruled, and declined to forward it to a three-judge panel.
Which was fine with her, Kendra repeated. She was no attorney for McNeil, just as she had been no attorney for Reeves. Both men had gotten fair investigations.
Not everyone shared Kendra’s enthusiasm. Chris felt unhappy that McNeil in particular had proceeded to a hearing at all. “If you’re presenting a case to the commission, it should be because you believe that person is innocent,” she protested.
“No, I don’t think so,” Kendra answered. “The statute says, if there’s new evidence of innocence, and it’s credible and reliable.” The question wasn’t what she believed personally, she pointed out. Her eight appointed commissioners got to make those judgments. She and her staffers only followed statutes.
Chris, though, had good reason to be anxious. Looming in 2010 was the IIC’s sunset provision. Already it was 2009; in two years, the agency had accomplished two hearings, one three-judge panel, and zero exonerations. If all the IIC was going to do was reconfirm prior convictions, then it was hard to see the legislature keeping it alive. For the agency to endure, Chris saw, it needed a case it could point toward to justify its own existence. It needed to show what it was capable of.
Then Kendra learned of Greg Taylor.
Taylor was a goateed, bespectacled, sandy-haired man from Raleigh who, back in 1991, had gotten his Nissan Pathfinder trapped in the mud in an unlit cul-de-sac. So he’d abandoned the car and returned the next morning—to find the entire area roped off by police, who’d discovered a woman’s body in the same cul-de-sac.
By sunset, police had charged Taylor with murder. He offered his clothes, hair, saliva, and blood, and to undergo a polygraph or hypnosis. Twice he declined a plea deal. His reason for getting his car trapped wasn’t ideal, he admitted; he’d found the secluded spot to use drugs. But he’d never killed anyone.
To prove it, Taylor’s parents found a lawyer, Jim Blackburn, and took out a second mortgage on their home. Three months before trial, though, Blackburn resigned—a development Taylor learned not from Blackburn but from one of his partners, who confessed the firm had no record of how much Taylor’s parents had paid or what, if anything, Blackburn had accomplished on his case. (Within a year Blackburn would plead guilty to fraud, embezzlement, forgery, and obstruction of justice, and surrender his license.)
At trial, police testified that blood had been recovered from the fender of Taylor’s Pathfinder, and that a police dog, provided with the victim’s scent, had jumped against the car’s exterior, indicating the victim had been inside it. A local prostitute, in exchange for her own sentence being halved, testified that she’d seen Taylor that autumn night in the same neighborhood as the murder. A cell mate of Taylor’s testified that, while they’d been incarcerated together in jail, awaiting trial, Taylor had privately confessed the entire crime. This cell mate was serving time for embezzlement, though previously he’d also been convicted of forgery, writing worthless checks, and obtaining property by false pretenses. He himself had already been sentenced, he explained to jurors, so his testimony couldn’t help to reduce his own time, though he admitted that “it would look good for parole purposes.”
Taylor was convicted in April.
Since then Taylor had appealed unsuccessfully to the state supreme court and the U.S. Court of Appeals; he’d tried a federal Petition for habeas corpus and two different motions for appropriate relief. One of these had asked that evidence from his case be DNA-tested, which Taylor offered to pay for himself. All were denied. From their home in Raleigh, Taylor’s family had followed the politics of the IIC debate as closely as anyone, and his father, Ed, had even attended committee hearings as the bill foundered in the general assembly. To those hearings, Ed brought handouts of his son’s story and distributed them to legislators, hoping to persuade them to pass the bill, since his son’s case proved the need for this sort of agency. Eventually a copy of that handout made its way to someone who happened to have dinner plans with Chris Mumma and Beverly Lake.
Chris had taken the handout home with her from dinner and, intrigued, reached out to Taylor, though without any promises. “We’re going to try to prove you guilty,” she warned. “Then, if we can’t prove you guilty, we’ll try to prove you innocent.” Eventually she’d been unable to prove either. Because the center was a nonprofit, and therefore limited in what it could demand, she couldn’t get the access she needed to Taylor’s records. Instead s
he forwarded Taylor’s case to Kendra, at the IIC. “They had subpoena power,” she later explained to CNN. “They could get access to all the prosecution’s records, all the police records, everything that the defense never had access to. And we couldn’t get access to. They could order DNA testing that Greg was denied previously.”
That autumn Kendra began a full investigation. She and her staffers compiled a 438-page brief and presented this to commissioners at the IIC’s third hearing, alongside testimony by three SBI agents, a forensic biologist and pathologist, and an expert each on confessions and crime scene reconstruction. Both the state’s original witnesses, the prostitute and the jail informant, now recanted their testimony, and the police dog that had tracked the victim’s scent to Taylor’s truck turned out never to have been trained to track scents this way.
Commissioners voted Taylor’s case forward to a three-judge panel.
When that happened, IIC statute entitled the inmate to choose a lawyer. Taylor chose Chris Mumma, who agreed to represent him for free, as she represented everyone. Then, also by statute, Kendra notified the DA in the case’s original jurisdiction, so that he, too, could prepare for the three-judge panel. Greg Taylor had been convicted in Raleigh, so jurisdiction fell to the DA for Wake County.
Colon Willoughby.
Willoughby in turn asked his assistant DA, Tom Ford, to review what new evidence the IIC had uncovered. Ford had been on the job a good while—long enough, in fact, that it was he who had prosecuted Taylor in the first place, back in 1991. It was also Ford who had persuaded a judge to deny Taylor’s later motion for DNA tests. Now Willoughby wanted Ford to review the IIC’s new evidence and share what he thought.
Because the IIC had subpoenaed every record in the case, it now turned these over to both sides, and, on a single page of a single folder in a single cardboard carton, Chris and her colleagues noticed something. Among the records were personal notes from Duane Deaver, the SBI agent who’d testified about the blood on Taylor’s Pathfinder. According to his own notes, however, Deaver had told only a fraction of the truth. A preliminary test had turned up positive for blood. Because that test was inclined toward false positives, though, Deaver, per SBI policy, had conducted another, confirmatory, test. Which had turned up negative. But Deaver had never reported this second result to prosecutors, who therefore continued to believe the substance was blood, and presented it as such repeatedly to jurors.
The panel lasted six days. On the second, the News and Observer ran a profile of Beverly Lake, who was attending each session, in the front row. “Sitting quietly, a trench coat folded neatly under his feet, I. Beverly Lake Jr., former chief justice of the state supreme court, is not on one side or the other in the case,” the profile read. “But he has plenty at stake. This is the first real test of Lake’s idea for a truth-finding agency to right the wrongs of the state’s justice system.”
The blood evidence was “a red herring,” Willoughby argued, “to try to make you forget about the other information.” Greg Taylor had committed murder, then tried the next morning to retrieve his car without drawing any attention to himself. Why Taylor had left his car there overnight if he had just committed murder, Willoughby didn’t address. And he was willing to forget the whole thing, he offered privately to Chris, if they dropped the appeal. Willoughby would settle for time served; Taylor could walk away from prison.
Taylor refused.
The following week, on Wednesday, as the three judges deliberated, bailiffs led Taylor back to a holding room, where soon they realized they hadn’t any clue what to do next. “What happens if they find him innocent?” one bailiff asked the other, in front of Taylor. Neither had ever seen a proceeding like this, and no one had told them the rules.
The second bailiff considered this. “I guess we just do it like at the courthouse,” he finally answered. “And carry him back to the jail, to let him get his stuff.”
But neither bailiff felt certain, so finally they asked Chris Mumma. “If those judges vote him innocent, you release him then,” Chris ordered. If Taylor wanted his belongings from prison, he’d be retrieving them voluntarily, and on his own.
All three judges voted that afternoon that Taylor had proved his innocence by clear and convincing evidence. It was the first such verdict in United States history. Upon hearing it, Taylor half stood, disoriented, his mouth hanging open in disbelief, as his family, in the audience, started shrieking. Chris wandered the courtroom in shock, touching her hands repeatedly to her cheeks, as though checking her own temperature. Colon Willoughby stepped toward Taylor and shook his hand, a moment cameras caught on film. “I told him I’m very sorry he was convicted,” Willoughby later told the Associated Press, when asked what he had said. “I wish we had had all of this evidence back in 1991.”
A string of news articles appeared over the rest of that week in outlets from the News and Observer to the New York Times, recounting not only Taylor’s exoneration but the unusual process that had led to it.
“Gregory Taylor’s victory points to the wisdom of the state’s process of pursuing claims of innocence,” praised the News and Observer.
INNOCENCE COMMISSION IS LAKE’S LEGACY ran a headline on WRAL.
The IIC represented “a new standard of jurisprudence in America,” read a statement from the governor. “I believe in this Innocence Commission. I believe the ruling today shows bad things can happen, even in the finest of systems.”
“If I was in any other state, I would still be in prison for the rest of my life,” Taylor himself told the Boston Review.
Kendra shied away from reporters, though she admitted feeling glad the agency at last was finding broader attention. “This just shows the process the state created works,” she said.
Other state processes had stalled, however. The Raleigh Police Department reopened its investigation into the murder that Taylor had wrongly been convicted of, but by 2014 neither it nor Willoughby had found any leads. “Too many years have passed, and now we hear nothing,” Yolanda Littlejohn, the victim’s sister, told WRAL that autumn. “I don’t want my sister’s case to be forgotten, because her murder hasn’t been solved.”
Obviously it exhilarated her that they’d proven him innocent, but it was a mistake to regard Greg Taylor as her agency’s only success story, Kendra felt privately. Sometimes the IIC did the reverse, and those were successes, too. Sometimes it found and tested a DNA sample that in fact matched the inmate, proving him guilty, information that Kendra turned over to authorities. A case like this often had dragged through motion after petition after MAR, and now the IIC had provided closure, had ended the loop of meaningless, expensive appeals. Where once there had been doubt, now there wasn’t. After a finding like this, Kendra sometimes received angry letters from the inmate, but that was fine—it was what she’d signed up for, she’d done her job well, justice had been served. This portion of her work never made headlines, and usually Kendra was prohibited even from talking about it, for confidentiality reasons. Still, she cared about those cases, they satisfied her. A question had been answered; the truth had been shown; the correct person was incarcerated.
Or, other times, inexplicable things happened. An inmate wrote to the IIC that he honestly didn’t know whether he’d committed the crime he’d been convicted of. That wasn’t glamorous, either. “If you’re in this because you want your name attached to cases, or you want personal credit, or you want to make money off lawsuits, this is not where you’re going to be,” she’d gotten in the habit of telling candidates for jobs on the IIC staff. She knew some of these applicants had seen photographs of a lawyer clasping his exonerated client’s hand, raising it triumphantly overhead like a boxer’s, accompanying national headlines. Nonprofits, or private attorneys, could do that—it was exciting, Kendra didn’t have anything against it—but the IIC was different, was a state agency, didn’t choose sides, didn’t boast. “We’re never going to represent an inmate in a civil lawsuit,” she reminded her staffers periodi
cally. “We’re never going to go around and do press junkets with them to say, ‘I found this case, I did it.’ The Commission found it, the Commission did it.”
In July 2010, five months after Taylor’s exoneration and five months before the IIC was set to expire, a bill was proposed to the general assembly that would remove the sunset provision, installing the IIC as a permanent agency rather than a temporary experiment. Three state senators and one representative voted no. The other hundred and fifty-two voted yes.
27
They Will Try to Get Me to Sign Papers
Guards chose his cell for another shakedown and found a handheld radio Willie had painted; when its plastic cover had chipped, for a dollar Willie had asked an inmate who worked in maintenance to gloss it black again. This turned out to be a violation. They also found two handmade wallets Willie had sewn from discarded leather—a hobby he’d picked up during idle afternoons, and a way to recycle old boots. “These items have been bagged and tagged and placed in the evidence locker,” a guard reported. “The inmate is being charged with a D03 for nonthreatening contraband.” He sentenced Willie to ten days in segregation and suspended his visitation privileges for four weeks.
He was sent to an unfamiliar clinic for a prostate checkup. For the first time since his surgery, the news wasn’t good. His physical exam was normal, but Willie’s PSA, the protein marker, had risen, a clue his cancer might be returning. If they waited too long to address it, they might miss their chance entirely, a new urologist told him. He referred Willie to a radiation oncologist, who agreed and prescribed a course of radiation: five times a week until he’d completed thirty-eight treatments. A staffer abbreviated this prescription to “38 daily radiation treatments (5 weeks)” for his own shorthand notes, which a prison nurse further garbled, adding it to Willie’s medical chart as “5 x wk x 38 weeks,” or fully five times the radiation his doctor intended. Fortunately the error was caught before Willie left in early spring for Alexander Correctional. This sat only fifteen minutes from Catawba Valley Medical Center, where for the next seven weeks guards shuttled him each morning in the rear of a police cruiser. There the radiation machine was a huge white plastic-and-metal arm, like a massively oversize faucet. Doctors laid him on a cot, wheeled him under the spout, and told him to lie still. Two or three hours later, guards put him in their cruiser again and drove him back to Alexander.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 26