Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  In reporting Graham’s trip to Tallahassee to argue before the court in early July 1970, Mabel dared to wonder, “After 12 long years in a mental institution, is justice finally on the horizon for mentally retarded Jesse Daniels?” But as soon as Graham stood before the bench to present his oral argument, he encountered the judicial resistance that Tom Champion had met with eight years earlier. When Graham attempted to make the point that the only treatment Jesse had received at the hospital was his daily vitamins, Justice B. K. Roberts—the same judge who had bridled at Virgil Hawkins’s admission to the University of Florida College of Law—cut him off. He seemed to take umbrage at the suggestion that his friend O’Connor had done anything wrong.

  “He hasn’t done anything wrong,” Graham responded. “He just hasn’t done anything.”

  By the time he’d finished his argument, Graham sensed that he’d not be winning the day in Tallahassee. Still, there was reason for hope. Richard Ervin, who as the Florida attorney general had filed with the U.S. Supreme Court the famous amicus curiae brief supporting gradual integration in schools (“by all deliberate speed”), had been appointed to the Florida Supreme Court in 1964 by Governor Bryant, and in 1969 he’d been named chief justice. Unbeknownst to Richard Graham, this was the same Richard Ervin whom Leesburg police chief Bill Fisher had met with a decade before, to brief him about the Daniels case and to convey his suspicion that it was the soon-to-be-executed Sam Wiley Odom, not Daniels, who had been responsible for the rape of Blanche Bosanquet Knowles. It was that conversation that had prompted Gordon Oldham’s call warning Fisher to “stay out of the case,” and while Richard Graham had no way of being aware of this history, it was unlikely that Ervin had forgotten it.

  Still, a decision was slow in coming, and as Christmas drew near, Pearl urged Graham to call the court to see if there was any news. To his great surprise, he found himself on the phone with Ervin himself.

  “Sorry to tell you this,” Ervin said, “but we ruled against you.” By a 4–1 vote, the court had ruled not to review the case evidence against Daniels and, in effect, not to overturn the state’s insanity law. However, Ervin said, he himself had written the sole dissenting opinion, arguing for an evidentiary hearing and proceedings “to determine the merits both as to law and facts.” He buoyed the young lawyer’s hopes with a few words of encouragement. “You’re right and we’re wrong,” he told Graham. “Don’t let this stop you.” Even the majority opinion reflected O’Connor’s concession that Jesse Daniels was “entitled to a hearing on the question of whether his sanity has now been restored before the court under whose order he was committed and is being detained.”

  Mabel Chesley, too, sounded an optimistic note in her coverage of the court’s decision, remarking that Graham was planning to ask for a hearing in Lake County’s Circuit Court in order to present new psychiatric evidence and ask for a trial. Graham, in fact, had other plans. Having challenged a state statute in Florida’s highest court and lost, he could now file a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court; a hearing in Lake County was his backup plan if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

  Unfortunately, the future of Volusia County Legal Services by this point had become uncertain. Funding was being withheld by the OEO because the organization’s board had not yet agreed to follow the OEO’s Legal Services Division guidelines, which prohibited the office from participating in criminal cases. So Graham returned to his father’s law firm, on the condition that he’d be able to continue working on the Daniels case. He estimated the cost of moving forward with the hearing, which would require hiring expert witnesses such as doctors, psychiatrists, and criminologists, at ten thousand dollars, and he won the support of a partner, Ted Husfeld—and, in turn, of the firm itself—to take the case on a pro bono basis.

  Husfeld did not want for experience or expertise; his work on major corporate and medical cases had won him a reputation for aggressiveness and persistence. As soon as they began working on the case, Graham realized that he would have been at a loss without the older man. “Ted became a mentor,” Graham said. “He was a bulldog, and he had a better understanding of the politics in Lake County than I did.”

  While waiting to hear from the U.S. Supreme Court, they tried to subpoena McCall’s files on the case, but the sheriff claimed they couldn’t be located, due to the “moving of offices.” Next, Graham and Husfeld drove to Tavares to meet with circuit judge E. R. Mills Jr. in order to arrange for the sanity hearing Jesse had been promised. As soon as they’d agreed on a date in late February, the lawyers presented Mills with an order that would allow them access to Jesse’s records at Florida State Hospital. Mills signed the document, the clerk’s office certified it, and Husfeld told Graham to get in the car.

  “Where are we going?” Graham asked.

  “We’re going to Chattahoochee,” Husfeld told him.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, now,” Husfeld said. “Those records won’t be there tomorrow.”

  Chattahoochee was “a hellhole,” Graham recalled, and Jesse, now twelve years into his time there, was treated like “a convicted rapist” as he was brought from lockdown to see his visitors. Graham waited until just before the administrative office closed for the day to present the signed order allowing them access to Jesse’s records.

  “Well, we’ll have to talk to our attorneys,” an official told him.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Graham replied. “This is a certified copy of a court order telling you to immediately make those records available to us.”

  Reluctantly, the hospital officials complied, and the two lawyers retreated to a nearby hotel, where they made copies of every note, letter, report, and evaluation in Jesse’s file.

  Graham continued to consult with Mabel on the case, and the attention that she paid to it in print caused his friends and associates some puzzlement. “Everybody was asking me, ‘What are you doing hanging around with Mabel Norris Chesley?’ You know, because I’m a Republican,” Graham recalled. “I’d say, ‘I’m not hanging around with her! I’m trying to get an innocent guy out of the nuthouse.’” Graham’s wife, Bunnie, was more worried than puzzled. She had been hearing stories about Lake County, and with her husband involved in a case that questioned the actions of authorities there, she feared for his safety, especially since they would soon have a child to care for; she was eight months pregnant. “These guys are rough,” Bunnie told him. “How do you know they’re not going to come after you?”

  Jesse learned about the hearing and his new lawyer in a letter he received from Pearl. He wrote back immediately, expressing his excitement at getting out of his dreary ward at last, even if it was for a drive to a jail cell in DeLand, and his hope that Pearl might be able to visit him there. The straight-shooting Volusia County sheriff, Ed Duff, urged Graham to be careful in Lake County and volunteered to drive Jesse from Chattahoochee to Tavares for his court date. Mindful of the fate of the Groveland Boys and others while in transit with McCall, Graham requested a court order allowing Duff to transport Jesse to the Volusia County jail, where Graham and Husfeld could have psychiatric experts evaluate their client before the hearing. Duff had a gift for Graham as well—a card certifying the lawyer as a Volusia County special deputy. “Now don’t go arrest anybody with it,” Duff told him, “but if you’re pulled over in Lake County, you put that right next to your driver’s license. Just hand them both over.”

  Two days before the hearing was scheduled to begin, Mabel discovered that she would not be allowed to attend it, let alone write about it: Oldham intended to subpoena her as a witness for the state. It was not only a profound disappointment for the reporter, who had followed the case from the beginning and “written a virtual book in news stories and editorials on the injustice it represents,” but also a clever move on Oldham’s part, ensuring that Jesse Daniels’s most committed partisan in the press would be denied her voice. Mabel made sure that the two r
eporters from the Daytona Beach News-Journal who were assigned to cover the hearing in Tavares in her stead were thoroughly briefed on the case—by her.

  The hearing was held on February 24, 1971, in an ordinary conference room at the Lake County Courthouse, with Jesse and Pearl in attendance along with Graham and Husfeld, and Oldham representing the state. Richard Graham was new to Lake County, but not to Judge Mills. He and Graham’s father had worked together representing Greyhound bus lines, “and maybe a railroad or two,” and initially Mills was friendly enough. Graham found Oldham arrogant and uncooperative, brushing the young attorney aside “like I didn’t know what I was talking about.” The session brought him his first taste of McCall as well. Graham was standing by the stairs in the courthouse when the sheriff walked straight toward him, glaring and “trying to intimidate me” before he abruptly turned and mounted the stairs.

  Graham could tell that Mills was intimidated by Oldham and McCall. As a native not of Lake but of nearby Marion County, and a new judge in the Fifth Circuit Court who was coming up for reelection, perhaps Mills had reason to be concerned.

  Husfeld began by calling as a witness Dr. Ray Mulry, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas. Mulry testified that he had examined Jesse at the Volusia County jail a few days earlier and found him to be “extremely cooperative, considerate, appropriate in every way.” He noted, too, that Jesse had responded to all his questions “clearly and intelligently.”

  “Do you feel that he needs hospitalization in the State insane asylum?” Husfeld asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Mulry said.

  On cross-examination, Oldham established that Mulry was not licensed in the State of Florida and then introduced a theme he’d repeat in his questioning of all the defendant’s witnesses. “Do you believe if you had the benefit of all of the other doctors over a period of thirteen years . . . you would be in a better position to give an opinion in this case than you would just talking to this man for an hour without all the benefit of the other psychiatrists, psychologists and all of the test results?”

  “No,” Mulry replied. “I’m in equally good, if not better position because I’m unbiased.”

  Next, Graham called Reverend Robert Jenkins, a Methodist minister in DeLand who had done graduate work in clinical psychology at Emory and at a mental hospital near Cleveland. Jenkins testified that he had questioned Jesse at the Volusia County jail about presidents, geography, counting, and math. Jesse “didn’t miss a question,” Jenkins said, and in his opinion, the defendant sufficiently understood the nature of the charges against him to assist counsel during trial.

  A third witness, Robert T. Miller, a public defender who claimed to have represented thousands of indigent defendants, had found Jesse to be “slow but cooperative” and “very anxious to stand trial.”

  “Now in your years of practice as a criminal lawyer,” Husfeld asked, “how many times have you seen the State of Florida attempt to keep a defendant from standing trial over the objections of the defendant?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the problem arise,” Miller said.

  “Have you ever heard of a defendant wanting to stand trial and the State attempt to prevent a trial by saying the defendant was insane when the defendant claimed to be sane?”

  “Not that I can remember offhand,” Miller said.

  Oldham then set forth a series of hypotheticals in which “insanity” might be used as a defense in the Jesse Daniels case—to which Miller replied that he was unqualified to answer because he had not evaluated the defendant’s case history.

  On redirect, Graham kept being stalled by Oldham’s objections, but finally he broke through.

  “Mr. Oldham has been posing hypotheticals,” he said to the witness. “Let me give you one: Assuming this was your case, you had an independent investigation, and [you] convinced yourself that there was no evidence against your client. [You] hired two licensed psychiatrists and had a Ph.D. psychologist to examine the defendant and were told that he is ready to go to trial, he can understand the charge, he can help you defend himself. Would you go ahead with this defense?”

  “If it was his desire to go to trial,” Miller said, “yes.”

  Graham next called Warren Cobb, the former director of Volusia County Legal Services, who had also interviewed Jesse in the county jail. Graham inquired, “Did you ask him questions about his arrest and the events surrounding his first being taken into custody?”

  “Yes,” Cobb replied. “He was able to give me an account of his arrest, [and] the conditions under which he signed the statement. He was even able to describe the gun that he stated was held on him by Sheriff Willis McCall. I asked him what caliber it was. He felt it was a .32 or .38 . . . He described it as being a revolver as opposed to an automatic. He described the way he was held from behind, and his neck vised by the deputy.”

  “Did he advise you that he had signed a statement?” Graham asked.

  “Yes, he expressed great apprehension and concern,” Cobb said. “He seemed to think that would be very damaging to him, the fact that he had signed a statement that McCall had asked him to sign.”

  “Did you discuss any other evidence, or potential evidence with him, or any evidence of this case?”

  “Yes,” Cobb said. “We discussed the question of whether or not . . . the victim would identify him, and he seemed to feel very strongly that she would not, in open court.”

  “And why did he feel this?” Graham asked. “Did he explain that?”

  “He felt that he was innocent and that when it came to open court,” Cobb said, “he did not feel Mrs. Knowles would be untruthful in that respect, and would not falsely identify him in court.”

  Gordon Oldham, who had been objecting avidly throughout the hearing, now stared at his notes in silence. He chose not to “correct the record” regarding a confession allegedly made at gunpoint, nor did he address Jesse’s speculation that Blanche Knowles would not testify against him at trial. He confined himself to trying to establish that the doctors at Chattahoochee, having observed the defendant for more than thirteen years, were more qualified to evaluate his psychiatric condition than the witnesses called by the defense attorneys. Oldham pointed out, too, that it was the defendant’s own court-appointed attorney, Sam Buie, who had requested the psychiatric evaluation of Jesse Daniels, not the state.

  At that point, Judge Mills closed testimony for the day. As the lawyers filed out with the witnesses, Pearl “rested her arm gently on her son’s shoulder and spoke to him quietly.” The two remained seated until a deputy approached to return Jesse to the Volusia County jail for the night.

  On the second day of the hearing, Richard Graham presented to the court a copy of a recent opinion from the Florida Supreme Court upholding the conviction of a man with an IQ of 35—roughly half that attributed to Jesse Daniels—who had been deemed fit to stand trial. Judge Mills agreed to enter the document into the record.

  Ted Husfeld called the day’s first witness, Dr. Merton L. Ekwald, a physician and surgeon in Tallahassee who was board-certified in psychiatry and who had testified in court more than three hundred times, for both the prosecution and the defense. He had evaluated Jesse twice at Chattahoochee and found the patient to be “an intensely ingratiating person,” who “stammers occasionally when he’s under emotional pressure.” Dr. Ekwald stated, too, that he’d been under the impression that Jesse was “mentally retarded” until he’d actually met with him. “I was rather surprised when I talked with him, about how well he could communicate, how good his vocabulary was,” Ekwald said.

  Over the years of his incarceration, Jesse’s reading and writing skills had improved dramatically. Although his intellectual development had mostly stagnated and he still struggled with the concept of numbers and dates, he was able to memorize objects and events that appealed to him, such as the year, make, and model of automobiles, the Apollo
missions to space, the names of presidents, and an impressive collection of lyrics to what he called “antique country” music songs.

  “He gave me the names of all the past presidents in rotation,” Ekwald said. “I thought he was wrong and I checked later and found he was right, and I’d forgotten about Mr. Truman.”

  Ekwald addressed the issue that had bedeviled nearly every evaluation of Jesse’s mental condition over his thirteen years of institutionalization at Chattahoochee. Despite all the notations in Jesse’s files about his being cooperative, nonaggressive, compliant, and in no need of any psychiatric medications or shock-treatment therapy, doctors had unfailingly pointed to his “delusional” insistence that he was being framed for a crime he did not commit. The proof of delusion lay, for the doctors, in the signed confession taken by Willis McCall and in the letter from Buie stating, “There is no question in my mind . . . he is the man.” The patient’s “proven” delusion and paranoia in turn became grounds for determining that Jesse was not capable of assisting counsel at trial. But at one point, Ekwald said, he’d just been talking with Jesse generally “about why he was there; he felt he sort of had been railroaded into being there, and I had to wonder, is this a delusion or not?”

  On cross-examination, Oldham elicited an answer he was not expecting. Had O’Connor told Ekwald, he asked, the results of his own initial evaluation of Jesse?

  Yes, he had, Ekwald replied. O’Connor had used just a single word: “Hold.” He spelled it out, “H-O-L-D.” Oldham did not explore the response. He simply reprised his theme that the doctors at Chattahoochee had had the benefit of observing Jesse Daniels over thirteen years. But Richard Graham knew what “H-O-L-D” meant. It spelled out the acquiescence of the medical evaluators to the favor asked of them by the powerful men of Lake County.