Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  The radiation exhausted him, and several times a week he felt nauseated, but now blood tests showed his PSA dropping. When his treatments were through he expected another transfer, since he’d been told he would stay at Alexander only as long as his health required, but now a case manager told him the opposite: he wasn’t listed on any backlog. In that case, Willie decided, he might as well enroll in a behavior course. He found one in character education and signed up. Before it began, though, he was transferred back to Mountain View.

  “Inmate stated that he was not willing to admit guilt in his crime,” a case manager wrote in his file. “Stated that he did not do the crime that he was incarcerated for. No other issues were addressed.”

  February 4, 2008

  Dear Mr. Grimes,

  Once again, I apologize for taking so long to respond to your letter. I always hope that if I wait a little longer to write, I might have something hopeful to share with you. I’m sorry that I don’t. I know it probably is not much comfort, but I want you to know that I, and others at the Center, think about your case constantly. It is one of our most heartbreaking cases. We believe in you. Edwin Moose believes in you too. I spoke with him the other day about the steps we are taking in your case.

  First, I want to answer some questions you asked. I know it is very difficult to understand how it can be proper for departments to destroy evidence in a case. The importance of preserving evidence didn’t really catch on with law enforcement until the mid to late 90’s when more was learned about the power of DNA. In North Carolina, the law requiring the preservation of evidence was not passed until 2001. Even now, few departments follow that law because there is no funding for storage space/proper conditions and the law does not provide for consequences if evidence is destroyed contrary to the law. We are working on changing the law, but it is not easy.

  As I mentioned in my last letter, we are working on a clemency petition in your case. Our hope is to submit the petition to Governor Easley before he leaves office and, if he does not grant clemency, to resubmit it to the next governor who comes into office January 2009.

  I wish I could somehow provide you with better news/any news, Willie. I really wish I could. I hope knowing that there are people who believe in you provides you with some comfort.

  Take good care.

  Chris Mumma

  Every few weeks that summer he rode in a police cruiser down to Wake Medical Center, in Raleigh, then over to Catawba Valley or Frye Regional Medical Center for checkups, and each time the news was a little better. “Mr. Grimes is doing well and has had a good response to his PSA thus far,” a doctor noted in July. “We expect this to continue to drop over the next six to twelve months.”

  Since he apparently had survived, he resolved not to waste any more time. He told his newest case manager he wanted any behavioral course at all that Mountain View would let him into, as long as it didn’t require him to admit to a crime, so that finally he could qualify for something called a MAPP contract—the Mutual Agreement Parole Program, a stepladder of privileges leading eventually to parole. When he learned the parole commission planned to consider him in October, he wrote to Chris Mumma: “I think they will try to get me to sign papers saying I’m guilty but I’m not. I don’t think they want to let me out.”

  Chris, in reply, offered to write a letter to the parole board on Willie’s behalf, in case it would help him in October. “We believe in your innocence, Willie,” she wrote. “I’m sorry we are unable to do more in your case. I would do anything to have been able to find the evidence for testing.”

  He enrolled in Napoleon Hill, an eight-week course designed to teach “positive mental attitudes.” Then he asked to enroll in Anger Management. In early October he wrote impatiently to the parole commission, to learn the outcome of his review, but two more months passed without news. When in early December prison loudspeakers summoned him to the sergeant’s office, he guessed it had to do with his custody. Instead, it was because another sibling had died. This time it was Robert Lee, his last remaining brother.

  The same law that had prohibited armed guards at Cliff Jr.’s funeral kept him from this one, also. Out there at the ceremony he imagined nieces and nephews whom he knew only barely, since they’d been toddlers when he was convicted. Besides those young strangers, now he was the only man he knew who remained a Vinson or Grimes. Just he and Gladys were left.

  Four days later he learned he’d been denied a custody promotion. “This decision is based on severe nature of crime,” read his file, and on “inmate’s need to address crime related issues.”

  “Needs to participate in self-enrichment programs,” read an additional note. “Poor judgment and influence of substance led to commission of crime.”

  After Anger Management, he enrolled in Thinking for a Change, a class designed to foster social skills, self-awareness, and problem solving. (“Lesson 15,” read the syllabus: “Dealing with an Accusation.”)

  “He was very upset he didn’t get minimum custody,” his case manager noted. Still, he didn’t intend to give up. He’d waited twenty years to become eligible for parole, and, unless Chris Mumma somehow achieved a miracle, he didn’t see what else there was for him. He wrote her again to ask whether any state law required physical evidence be preserved for some period following crimes; it seemed logical that such a law would exist, and, if it did, he realized, clerks or police had almost certainly violated it. Was he right?

  Partly, Chris replied a few days later. Such a statute existed, but it hadn’t become law until 2001, a decade too late to help him, and it wasn’t retroactive. “I’m sorry.”

  Blood tests showed his PSA had declined to zero, where it stayed. He wrote again to the parole commission, insisting he had enrolled in every course the prison staff had suggested, and had even tried to enroll in SOAR, “but they wouldn’t let me because I am innocence.” When he didn’t hear back he wrote again. He asked for a transfer to Lincoln. He took up sudoku to occupy his afternoons and distract him, in addition to walking his loops around the camp perimeter.

  Four months after he’d asked, his case manager told him he couldn’t be transferred to Lincoln—since the last time he’d been there, Lincoln had been redesignated minimum security, so Willie was no longer allowed. He asked instead for Piedmont. It wasn’t as near to Lawndale, but he’d heard that today an inmate at Piedmont got his own cell, and imagined some privacy there.

  Regardless of where he shipped next, and even if he was granted parole, his case manager warned, things wouldn’t suddenly become easier for him. Parole would mean finding a place to live on the outside, which was difficult enough for most inmates. It would be worse for a registered sex offender. She handed him a list of homeless shelters and halfway houses to begin looking into.

  28

  The Last Avenue I Can Think Of to Pursue

  When nothing came of the Denver Post series, Chris instructed a staffer at the center to compile a list of every person who’d been convicted of first-degree rape in Catawba County between 1984 and 1990, a period that included three years on either side of Carrie Elliott’s assault, to see whether any clue would emerge suggesting that one of those men was also Elliott’s real rapist, rather than Willie. The staffer phoned the Department of Correction to ask for a search matching this criteria. Unfortunately, a search like this wasn’t possible, the DOC answered. The best it could do was refer the staffer to the DOC website, where anyone could try an online search. So the staffer hung up and tried the DOC website, where, sure enough, she found a search function. But access was reserved for state agencies, which the center wasn’t. She phoned the DOC again. This time someone referred her to an analyst in the research department, who told her a search like this was possible; he didn’t know why anyone had said differently. Only two convictions matched the criteria Chris had asked for. One was Willie’s. The other belonged to a man named Bernard Degree, who’d been convicted in July 1987—meaning Degree had been in prison the following October,
on the night of Carrie Elliott’s rape, so couldn’t possibly have assaulted her. Next the DOC analyst offered the staffer names from every Catawba County rape conviction, not just first degree, in the period the center had asked for. This turned out to include two additional inmates, neither of whose crimes shared anything conspicuous with Carrie Elliott’s. If the DOC analyst expanded his search to include nearby Mecklenberg County, another twelve names popped up, but none of those offered any clues, either.

  Aware that it was a long shot, since she or her staffers had already phoned both places and sent letters, Chris drove the two and a half hours out to Hickory to visit the clerk’s office and sheriff’s department personally. No one in either building would let her physically inside their evidence rooms, she knew, but she guessed that standing in the lobby would persuade them to search a little more rigorously. She waited with her arms crossed while they did this. Then she drove back to Durham and phoned Steve Hunt. Since his investigation—if Chris was going to call it that—into the Elliott assault, back in 1987, Hunt had left the Hickory force for a job at nearby Catawba Valley Community College, teaching basic law enforcement training. He had no recollection at all of collecting any apple core, he told Chris, but he was sure that Carrie Elliott’s rape kit had been entered properly into evidence. There had been other supporting evidence, too, he was nearly certain, but he couldn’t recall what it was.

  Early the following week, Chris e-mailed Hunt to follow up:

  Dear Mr. Hunt,

  I spoke with you last week regarding the Willie Grimes case. As I mentioned, Mr. Grimes has maintained his innocence of the charges he was convicted of in 1988. Physical evidence collected in the case, specifically the rape kit, hair evidence collected from the bed sheets, fingerprints, and discarded fruit consumed by the perpetrator, could be DNA tested to answer questions in this case. The Catawba County clerk’s office has indicated that the evidence has been destroyed. The North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence is following up with all other possible custodians of the evidence to ensure there is no evidence left.

  Please let me know if you have any recollections regarding the evidence in the case or if your review of your files provides any insights regarding the disposition of the evidence.

  Thank you very much for your assistance.

  Chris Mumma

  Hunt replied the next morning.

  I have know evidence in this case, nor do I know where it is today. The last I saw any of the evidence was in court. Gene walker is the evidence person with the Hickory Police Dept. he might be able to assist your further.

  At the bottom of Hunt’s reply he had listed his current title at CVCC, “Director of Public Safety Training,” as well as a strange e-mail signature: “Always be aware of your surroundings.”

  She drafted a clemency petition, twenty-six pages explaining the facts of Willie’s case, including that he had maintained his innocence for twenty-one years now, despite the cost of earlier release and potentially even his chance at parole. Then she decided not to submit it. The current governor had never once granted clemency in a case where there hadn’t already been a DNA exoneration. Chris was skeptical he’d suddenly begin now.

  Instead she wrote to the state parole commission to support Willie’s application for a MAPP contract. She’d been working on his case since 2003, she explained, and, of the more than one thousand claims that she and her center received annually from inmates, “Willie Grimes’s case is one of the few where we are convinced of his innocence and the first for which I have ever written a letter in support of MAPP… The Center intends to file a clemency petition on Mr. Grimes’s behalf. Whether through clemency, or through a MAPP contract and parole, Mr. Grimes should have his freedom.”

  She received an e-mail from a case manager on staff at Mountain View Correctional, who hoped to confirm that she was the same Christine Mumma who’d been corresponding with Willie Grimes. The case manager was e-mailing as a courtesy; she wanted Chris to know about Willie’s upcoming parole review. Chris wrote back that, yes, she was the same Christine Mumma, and yes, she did know about the parole review. “I do want you to know that I have received thousands of claims of innocence from inmates, and I have rejected the majority of those claims,” she added. “There are very few inmates I would put my reputation on the line for, but Willie Grimes is one of them. I completely believe in his innocence and if the evidence in his case had been preserved, I am confident his innocence would be scientifically proven.”

  She received another letter from Willie, insisting what he’d tried to tell her before: there had to have been some law, back when he was arrested, forbidding the destruction of evidence. He understood what she’d told him in a previous letter, that the current law hadn’t been passed until 2001. But what about an earlier law, to the same effect? There had to be one. It made no sense for there not to be a law about something so obvious. Chris simply needed to look harder.

  She had looked harder, Chris replied sadly. She knew it didn’t make sense to him; it didn’t make sense to her, either. Still, it was the truth.

  She had more bad news, too. She knew Willie had been writing to innocence projects at law schools around the state, hoping someone else could help him. But all those projects—at Duke, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Campbell, Elon, Wake Forest, and Central—were coordinated by the same center, meaning the various letters he’d written had all been forwarded to Chris. “I am sorry that those projects will all run into the same dead ends I have run into with regards to investigation of your case,” she wrote.

  “Willie just wants his name cleared,” Chris scribbled in her notes. “He doesn’t care about compensation, but thinks others might. He is willing to waive his right to compensation.”

  There was only one other option she could think of. She knew the IIC had recently won a federal grant, and she was considering forwarding Willie’s case to the agency, so Kendra could conduct the same evidence search that she and others had, but with the authority of a court order. This could provide a final guarantee that the evidence in Willie’s case was truly, fully gone. “This is the last avenue I can think of to pursue, although I will never stop trying to identify additional avenues to prove your innocence,” she wrote him.

  29

  He Spoke About Going Through Changes

  Chris Mumma wrote him again, to share that she’d spoken to the parole commission and learned his next review was scheduled for the end of November 2010. She’d also readied a clemency petition, though now she was concerned it might not matter; the new governor wasn’t considering them, not even for inmates who were parole-eligible. “This Governor is clearly not going to be more inclined to consider clemency petitions than our last governor, regardless of how just the claims may be. I’m sorry the petition for clemency cannot help you, Willie, and we will have to put all our hopes and prayers into the Parole Commission. Please ask your case manager if there is anything else I can do to help with that process.”

  He was transferred briefly to Johnston Correctional, then in the same week back to Mountain View, where a psychiatrist conducted another community-risk assessment, identical to the one Willie had failed four years earlier.

  CONFIDENTIAL

  DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION COMMUNITY RISK ASSESSMENT

  TO: Mike Slagle, Assistant Superintendent for Programs

  DATE: 3/30/2010

  FROM: Ken Yearick, PhD. Psychological Program Manager

  RE: Willie Grimes

  OPUS #: 0158046

  LOCATION: 4855

  *** This report is not to be shared with inmate ***

  REFERRAL RATIONALE:

  Willie Grimes is a 63 year old (DOB: 8/23/46) Black male serving a Life sentence for Rape First Degree (principal). This individual was referred for a Community Risk Assessment to aid in the determination of suitability for access to the community. The purpose of the assessment and the limits of confidentiality were explained to the inmate.

  ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES:


  Record Review included BETA score, MMPI-2, Community Risk Worksheet, Static-99 and Official Crime Version.

  HISTORY:

  Willie Grimes was admitted to the prison system on 07/15/88 and has a maximum release date of Life. He was first arrested at age [41] by self-report. Prior to the current sentence this individual has been arrested [twice] and has served zero incarcerations for assaultive crimes. Also, on this sentence, this inmate has incurred zero infractions for serious institutional misconduct.

  An inspection of this individual’s background reveals a 12th grade education. Since leaving school, this inmate’s work record has been fairly stable with employment in the Army and construction labor. The mental health history reveals past NC-DOC treatment and no treatment for a significant mental health disorder in respect to risk assessment parameters. Regarding substance abuse, the record shows frequent daily use of alcohol.