by Kyle Swenson
I could see what he was thinking: If the neighborhood consensus was that they were innocent and the young eyewitness was lying, why didn’t anyone come forward? It would have been easier for Kwame if the whole neighborhood had written him off as guilty—but for all these people to know the truth, and ignore it, and let three boys go to prison was a terrible thing for him to comprehend. More so now: staying tight-lipped as a child was understandable. But as an adult?
“It just baffles me,” he said quietly. “You were young and knew the truth. And you grew old and still knew the truth.”
* * *
Ed Vernon had checked into my head and wasn’t going anywhere. Lynn Garrett was right to try to lower the heat on my feelings about him. As the details in my notebooks began stacking up into a full picture of the case, Ed’s part—as a villain—loomed large. My editor had scheduled me for a June publication date. The closer to deadline, the more desperate I was to find the witness.
Ed held the answers: you couldn’t properly fit the story into a coherent sequence without him. I knew the facts. I understood the inconsistencies. I could spotlight the errors. But something had sparked this whole situation—a choice on the part of a little boy. Was this witness misidentification a colossal fuck-up on Ed’s part? The altered documents suggested official misconduct—was this an ugly plot on the part of the cops? But why would officers go to such lengths for a relatively low-profile robbery-homicide? Did the Robinson family pressure Ed? Had the Bridgemans or Rickey done something to him? Was this revenge? The possibilities circled around the case. I had spent six months working on this story, yet the only answers I could cough up were all conjecture. Ed—the squinty-eyed, scared-shitless paperboy who couldn’t spell and didn’t know how many inches were in a foot—could tell me.
But Ed was MIA. No one in the neighborhood knew where he now lived; the best intel Kwame and I received was that he was somewhere near East Fifty-fifth and Superior, a heavy-traffic intersection surrounded by dozens of buildings. He no longer worked at the City Mission, and no one on staff would provide me with any information about the former employee. Only Valerie Abernathy volunteered an idea. “You need to get to the church,” she said, explaining that Ed regularly bowed his head with a congregation off Superior in the east eighties.
The Emmanuel Christian Center was a beige pitch-roofed building on the north bank of Superior. Despite apparently being one of the rare steady pulses of life in the surrounding gutted blocks, the church was empty when I stopped by on a weekday morning. There was, however, a phone number listed on the sign. There in the chain-link parking lot, I rang up and left a message for Pastor Anthony Singleton explaining who I was, that I was trying to get in touch with a man named Ed Vernon who might worship at the church, and if he did, could the pastor please pass along my contact information. I didn’t go into the specifics on why I was calling.
I heard nothing for days. My time was draining away, only a week from publication. I called the church again and left a second message. Within an hour, my office phone rang. The pastor was returning my call. “Yeah, I just wanted to let you know that I passed your first message on to Ed,” Singleton said. The pastor was friendly, but his tone was heavy with question marks; he left plenty of wide silences for me to fill in with the reason I was interested in his parishioner. As we volleyed around small talk, the pastor’s interest got to be too much—he just asked point-blank. “What do you want with Ed?”
“Honestly, I probably have to keep that between me and him,” I said.
“Ah,” Singleton responded. “Okay.”
“But it’s really important that I talk with him.”
As I hung up, Kwame suddenly swung into my thoughts. I realized that if I ever did confront Ed, I was as likely to ask him questions about the case as scream. Reporting edges close to obsession. Three men here had suffered an incredible injury; Kwame was a living reminder of the damage done. Ed was center stage in my imagination—the prime perpetrator of this wrong. The man to blame. I was so distracted thinking of what I’d say if we spoke, I almost didn’t realize the phone was ringing again.
The first words from his mouth melted down that anger, at least for the moment. The voice on the other end was cracked and raspy, all frayed wires and quick-trigger fear. “Hello, sir,” he began, as if he was reading from a written statement. “My name is Edward Vernon. I understand that you have been trying to get in touch with me.”
Here was the showdown I’d been thinking on for six months. Somehow I was calm; I explained I was writing an article on the 1975 Franks murder at the Fairmount Cut-Rate. “I don’t want my name in any article,” Ed snapped.
“Well, the article is coming out,” I said, trying to muffle the hot spike of emotion rising through me. “Your name is in the public record, so your name is going to be in there. But look, I really need to ask you questions about the case. You know, there are still inconsistencies in a lot of your testimony—”
Ed cut me off before I could finish. “I’m not even going to talk about it,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a done deal.” A dial tone droned in my ear.
* * *
There’s every reason to believe the number of innocent men and women sitting in American prisons is far larger than we suspect. This has everything to do not only with how our legal system has developed over the last sixty years, but how American culture itself has shifted—changes legible in Cleveland’s own story.
The biggest factor prepping the stage for wrongful convictions is—in an irony of ironies—the body of legal safeguards installed to make the system more fair and just. The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren is credited with completely rewiring the American legal system between 1953 and 1969. Responding to the dramatic, violent tug-of-war between civil rights activists and southern states, the Warren Court extended the Bill of Rights to state courts through decisions—like the famous Miranda case or the three Cleveland cases previously cited—governing due process. This meant the rights of the accused and proper evidence collection and warrant execution were, for the first time, topics fought over in the courtroom; previously, the manner by which the accused ended up in trial wasn’t even questioned much—not by lawyers, judges, or juries.
Some argue that this diverted the court’s attention away from the facts of any given case. In his 2011 book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, the late Harvard legal scholar William J. Stuntz wrote that it was a grave mistake “to tie the law of criminal procedure to the federal Bill of Rights instead of using that body of law to advance some coherent vision of fair and equal criminal justice.” The laser focus on due process created a situation where “the chief subject of criminal litigation became the definition of procedures based on the Bill of Rights,” or the “process by which the defendant was arrested, tried, and convicted”; this siphons “the time of attorneys and judges away from the question of the defendant’s guilt or innocence.” All this laid the foundation for a “less accurate system of criminal adjudication.”12
Procedure-geared litigation also was time consuming, and therefore costly. The jury trial—the purported centerpiece of fact finding—became less common. Today, around 95 percent of all felony convictions are the result of plea deals, and many legal scholars argue with that much of the court’s traffic flowing through without reaching a jury, there are likely to be a significant number of innocent defendants caught up in the daily waterworks without the means or will to fight their charges—why not just plead guilty?
These internal changes in the court system ran parallel with two major shifts in society. The first was the politicization of crime to an unprecedented degree occasioned by the War on Crime and later War on Drugs. One of the lasting effects of the federal government’s entrance into local law enforcement was a new emphasis on data—numbers tallied up, reported to Washington, D.C., shared with other departments. In local departments across the country, this opened the gates to a stats-driven culture favoring high arr
est numbers over slow, laborious investigations—a culture of speed over accuracy. Cue a rise in arrests and prosecutions: nationally, between 1976 and 1989, arrests per officer rose by one-third; between 1974 and 1990, felony prosecutions per prosecutor doubled.13 But this increase in numbers threatened quality assurance. Speed came at the expense of accuracy.
During this period a growing body of tough-on-crime politicians assisted police and prosecutors. Riding the national anxiety churned up by the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s, politicians began mouthing a political rhetoric that pushed forward a strong agenda on crime. These politicians expanded the law into new areas—for example, toughening up statutes against minors and banks and moneylenders. Later, this same momentum resulted in legislation for uniform sentencing requirements. Legislatures were deciding and defining laws, not the courts. The huffing-and-puffing discourse in state capitals and the U.S. Congress meant there was more law, and the law was tougher.
The unforgiving nature of the evolving American justice system is likely tied to the second major culture shift. Stuntz calls this nothing less than a failure of democracy itself. The professor argues that during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the criminal justice system was “lenient and modestly egalitarian.”14 This was because crime was a local issue. Judges and prosecutors depended on working-class city dwellers for votes, the same demographic that had the most direct contact with crime. Urban police forces were drawn from this same slice of the population, as were juries ruling on guilt or innocence.
This intimacy disappeared by the mid-twentieth century. White flight out of the suburbs shifted the political power away from the cities; the main actors in the criminal justice system—the judges, the prosecutors involved in daily court business, the legislatures sculpting the process—were now elected primarily by voters in suburban counties, voters with little experience or stake in the criminal justice system that most often dealt with urban crime, voters who rarely saw a courtroom that wasn’t on television. The people involved in the criminal justice system and most affected by that system were no longer the ones with the power over it.
The Cleveland I knew had been completely shaped by this second force of suburban voters. The city Kwame grew up in had been fashioned by the first force. A politicized, tough-on-crime rhetoric was what ejected Carl Stokes from office; the rhetoric, weaponized with federal dollars, was what emboldened and allowed a reactionary police force to stomp through Cleveland with little check or pushback; and it was what made significant police reform politically impossible. My Cleveland was marked by a division that had culminated in a black urban population completely isolated from the levers of power. The two moments were more than just points on a shared time line: both had molded the criminal justice process to a point where its reliability was now frighteningly suspect.
So I did eventually have an answer for my buddy Roberts’s question, the one you had to ask about every Cleveland story: What’s the story say about the town? I never told him, but by the time I was finished writing my piece on Kwame’s case, I had an answer. What’s the story say about the town? Everything you need to know.
* * *
From the moment I learned the outline of Kwame’s story, one question crowded in on me. I held off from asking; I didn’t want to come off as cynical or cold. But really, my question was about the prerogative of survival, how much a person has left to give when so much has already been taken. As we were prepping the story for publication, I asked.
Was he ever tempted, I needed to know, to make a final break from his past life? Because the horrific hand life had dealt him in some ways had been partly offset through a twist of circumstance: thanks to that typo, he didn’t have to live with a convicted felon’s Social Security number. This let Kwame build a life for himself beyond Ronnie Bridgeman. You could understand how someone in his place might be tempted to pull up the drawbridge for good. Ronnie who?
“I’ve thought about that a few times,” Kwame admitted. He seemed to have already seen the question coming. He shrugged his large shoulders, a hand slowly raking his beard. “But the reason that I can’t is because of Rickey. It’s not that I’m carrying him, but he’s carrying me.” Rickey was fingered as the triggerman, that’s why his parole was constantly rejected, Kwame explained. But Ed could just as easily have told the courtroom that Ronnie Bridgeman fired the shots. Then it would be Rickey on the outside now while Kwame was sitting in a cell. “Here’s this guy, he didn’t get the same break that I got. He’s still in that little bitty place. But he’s just as innocent as my brother.”
Kwame stopped, seemed to gather the right words. “I’ve been able to get out, get a job, buy a house, get a new life. I’ve been able to get on with my life. But I’m living a lie still.”
* * *
My story was published in the Cleveland Scene the first week of June 2011. My editor came up with the story’s headline, a slam dunk: “What the Boy Saw.”
As a journalist, I felt this was as good as I could get. The story exhaustively tackled the murder investigation and subsequent trials, spearing the state’s case against Kwame, Wiley, and Rickey with the inconsistencies of their own chief witness. The piece also outlined the new evidence of the old neighborhood friends who had been around during the crime—potential new witnesses and alibis for the wrongfully convicted men. Outside of an outright retraction from Ed himself, I didn’t think the piece could have been more sturdy or bulletproof.
More importantly, Kwame was pleased. “My man, that is a great piece of work,” Kwame wrote me in an email on the day the article went live. “I will be getting back with Mr. Gilbert in a few days and am more than hopeful of good results.” He signed off, “Thank you for believing and caring enough to help me get the ball rolling toward justice.”
But my confidence in the story quickly evaporated. The piece, I began to feel, was a belly flop. In some corner of my mind, I had laid my hopes on a best-case scenario. I don’t know if I expected gavels to slam at the courthouse or cell doors to clang open. We didn’t have an editorial board at my paper to issue a stern call for justice. But I did feel that an airtight instance of injustice would attract wider attention. The outraged fire sawing through my guts—I wanted that to light in anyone who picked up the paper. Yet outside of a few emails, hey great job, keep it up, the response was nil.
This was not vanity, like a playwright seeing his would-be smash charbroiled by critics; I also wasn’t possessed by some white-savior complex. There was real-world heft to this: two men were sitting in prison cells, a third was adrift between a past he was powerless to escape and a present he couldn’t comfortably embrace. To say I was depressed doesn’t really describe the mine shaft I spilled down. I was overloaded with a heavy sense of futility. Either I wasn’t good enough, or journalism wasn’t good enough, to right a real wrong here.
Channeling my frustration in either of those directions wouldn’t help much (and wouldn’t help me pay the bills as a reporter). Eventually, my anger swung around on the city. Cleveland: my hometown, the smokestack metropolis on the great rolling American in-between, twentieth-century whiz kid of the republic stumbling through the twenty-first like a drunk uncle, a throwback upset by its own backstory and memory-looped mistakes, a mean motherfucker. Fifty years of social upheaval and economic pain had left behind scar tissue; the resulting apathy was so thick that the story of three young black men snatched from the streets by the violent reactionary arm of unchecked government power couldn’t break through. I placed this frustration on top of all the other tragedies I saw around me: schools blowing state tests, murdered black women stinking in a serial killer’s backyard, graft powering the business of government, white suburbs sandbagging black urban citizens, the police department running wild. Good stuff, if you are a reporter; not so much if you are trying to live in the city. I recall sitting in my car one morning on my way to work, deadline approaching for a story about the police shooting an unarmed guy in Parma, my age exactly. “Fuck this,�
�� I announced to no one and everyone. For me, that said everything you needed to know.
Years later, I would be able to place a more articulate frame around the feeling. City life begs questions, but city life also expects an exchange. The big brains of the Enlightenment called this the “social contract”; we’ve all cosigned, inked our names on the dotted line of civic responsibility, whether we realize it or not, simply by living here. Cleveland wasn’t holding up its end for Kwame and Rickey and Wiley and so many others.
The legal historian James Q. Whitman has argued that murder is the core of the social contract. When the modern state emerged in Europe after the Dark Ages, law was the key binding in these new, fragile social arrangements; before the state, one murder was avenged with another, often spawning an endless back-and-forth of violence, leaving the whole region unstable. The modern state placed murder and punishment in the hands of a central authority for the sake of stability. Whitman says that when a murder is committed and the state arrests and prosecutes the perpetrator, there’s a sense of restoration of the social order.15 If that’s true, then an innocent person going down for a crime he or she didn’t commit hands us a false sense of restoration. A bad conviction lays false bedrock. There’s a bad stitch in the weave. What was more Cleveland than the justice system sitting smugly on a false sense of accomplishment?
Kwame was what really had me heartsick. Without ever quite saying it, we had both hoped this article would be the needed jump start to his exoneration. That didn’t seem to be the case. And every time my caller ID lit up with his name in the weeks and months after the story was published, I felt slugged by guilt. Could I have done more? Tried harder? What could have worked?
My frustration with Cleveland pushed me out the door. I moved away about a year and a half later for another reporting job. I picked the least Cleveland place on the map. I pulled a LeBron. I moved to Miami Beach.