Then we lost another trial. A young businessman from Columbus, after drinking several shots of foul-tasting Jaegermeister in a local dance club, staggered next door and kicked in the plate glass window of a department store. When police arrived, the drunk tried to resist, and officers beat the stew out of him, breaking several ribs and collapsing a lung. One officer repeatedly practiced his karate on the victim, kicking him numerous times all the way across the large showroom. The whole incident was captured on the store’s video surveillance tape. Our victim made a poor witness, however, and the defense experts on use of force and radiology were better than ours and the jury acquitted.1 John Mott, my Ivy League–educated partner from the Civil Rights Division in the trial, now a D.C. judge, was a dead ringer for actor Pierce Brosnan, only several inches taller. Perhaps we were distracted because every night when we went out to dinner, good-looking women would stop by our table, chat for a moment, then slip John a piece of paper with their name and telephone number. A man of steel, he never followed up on any of the offers.
Not long after the karate kick case, John and I were assigned another beating case together. A minor local crack dealer, the grandson of a respected local civil rights leader, was caught after a hundred-mile-an-hour chase and beaten unmercifully by the chief deputy sheriff of DeSoto County.2 The case had a problem or two. First, the victim was a drug dealer. Second, his grandmother was not a favorite of local whites. Third, the officer had an excellent reputation and had never before been accused of such an act. Fourth, which should have been (and was in the end) irrelevant, the defendant’s best friend was my daughter’s favorite teacher at Oxford High School.
Our case, however, was strong. An officer at the scene of the beating made a complaint to the FBI, saying it was the most sickening thing she ever saw. We subpoenaed every officer from the scene, most of them police officers from nearby towns serving on the county drug task force. Every officer testified that the chief, whom they all liked, had used grossly excessive force. He had just “lost it.” But there was also a wild card in the case. Riding with the drug dealer during the incident was his sixteen-year-old date, a good student and star basketball player at nearby Byhalia High School. She had been asleep while he made a drug sale away from the car, which led to the chase and beating. When the officers forced his car off the road, they handcuffed the innocent girl, scared and unresisting, who calmly stretched out on the ground and went to sleep. After savagely beating the boyfriend, the deputy was walking around his car when he saw the girl handcuffed on the ground. As he walked by, he kicked her hard in the head and called her a vile name.
We argued the case passionately, knowing it would be tough to convict. We figured the jury might decide he got what he deserved and pardon the deputy with what they call a jury nullification. It had also come out in the evidence that the local DA had not prosecuted the drug case because of the beating. After several hours of debate, the jury came back with two verdicts: Not guilty of stomping the drug dealer but guilty of kicking the girl in the head. It was to us a reasonable, practical piece of frontier justice.
Then I saw Toni Everett, Judge Biggers’s secretary, crooking her finger at me to come talk to her. “The judge wants to see you in chambers. And so do I.” Following her in, I saw the judge smiling slyly: “That was a pretty slick move you made in your argument there, John.” I asked what he meant. Toni answered, “Don’t pretend you don’t know what he means. You saw that movie last night, and you know some of those jurors must have seen it, too.” I had no idea what she was talking about and protested, “I was at the office all evening, working on my argument and jury instructions. I didn’t have time to be watching movies.” Toni shot back, “We know you were working on your argument; it was certainly effective.”
When I finally convinced them I had no idea what they were talking about, Toni explained it. “You know that tear-jerking argument you made about how that innocent little girl who got kicked in the head could have been your own daughter, who is a good student and plays basketball? You know how you said it could even have been the defense attorney’s daughter and how everybody knows how hard it is to control who your children go out with?” Toni was right of course. I admitted I was proud of my argument, and that it was sincere.
“But not exactly original,” the judge added. Again I was baffled. “John, are you telling us you did not know that last night on TV they ran that John Grisham movie A Time to Kill where the black father shoots and kills the white man who raped his daughter?” They had me. I had not seen the movie the night before but had read the book and seen the movie before and knew right away how seeing that movie could have affected jurors during my highly emotional argument. I needed an exit line to leave chambers gracefully. “Just shows why you shouldn’t watch so much TV. If I’d seen Matthew McConaughey make that argument in the movie, my keen sense of ethics might have deterred me from making it.” Toni said “Get out of here.” It made the victory even sweeter.
After that case we went on to solve the highly charged national scandal of the arsons of black churches across the South, which turned out not to have a racial motive at all but an anti-Christian one. Then we reopened the fifty-year-old Emmett Till murder case. State Attorney General Jim Hood appointed me a special assistant DA for Leflore County for that case. The eighteen-month FBI investigation was well worth it because we exploded a lot of myths and answered a lot of questions about the case that started the civil rights revolution. I detail here some of lead FBI agent Dale Killinger’s key findings, which were never adequately explained to the American public by the Justice Department, which seemed embarrassed because we found no one to prosecute. With the Till case over, it was beginning to sound like a good time to retire.
A High Sheriff Goes Wild3
Jack Harrison of Marks was the longtime sheriff of Quitman County. In the heat of the civil rights years, whites looked to him to keep black folks “in line.” He cultivated a fairly ferocious image among both whites and blacks for doing what whites expected of him. In one case, he outdid even his own fearsome reputation.
A short, slight young black man was involved in stealing equipment from a wealthy plantation owner’s shop. He was caught red-handed with some of the stolen goods and locked up in Harrison’s jail. Harrison brought him to his office the next morning for questioning. Hoping to solve the case quickly and get the goods back and satisfy his powerful Delta constituent, Harrison tried without success all the normal techniques to get the young man to cooperate.
That night after dinner, Harrison returned to the jail liquored up and accompanied by a friend and a full bottle of whiskey. After several whiskies, Harrison went up and got the young man from the bullpen and brought him out in the hall. To soften him up and impress the other inmates, Harrison pulled out his revolver and said, “You lying SOB, I’m going to see if I can squeeze one in between your ear and your head,” firing a bullet right past the inmate’s ear. In his haste, the sheriff had forgotten where he was. The bullet ricocheted wildly off the brick walls before flying out the window. As the other inmates hid under their bunks, Harrison dragged the young man downstairs to his office for more questioning. According to the inmate, Harrison slapped, punched, and kicked him several times, but the inmate wouldn’t talk, not wanting to implicate friends.
The intoxicated Harrison threw the inmate on the floor. In leg irons and handcuffed behind, the inmate was helpless as Harrison pulled out a sharp-bladed carpet knife and demanded the inmate tell him about the burglary or Harrison would castrate him. Harrison sliced away the crotch of the jeans but at the insistence of his friend gave up and had a jailer carry the inmate back to the bullpen where other inmates saw the blood on his face and the cutaway crotch of his jeans.
Word of the assault soon leaked out, and James Figgs, the head of the local NAACP, came to see us. FBI agent Wayne Tichenor was assigned to the case. He spent days trying to persuade fearful inmates to testify. The NAACP leader later told me how he admired Tichenor�
�s investigation, saying he was “steady about his business.” Having seen what happened to their fellow inmate, at first other inmates were not about to cross Harrison. They had pretty rough criminal records themselves, and convicted murderers and drug dealers would not make the best witnesses. In this case, however, racial solidarity began to come into play. Whatever the risks, several of them said they would not tolerate such vile abuse of a brother, and that if we would protect them, they would testify.
As luck would have it, one of our best friends in law enforcement, David Bryan, sheriff of the next county over, Panola, was a friend of Sheriff Harrison and agreed to keep inmate witnesses in the Panola County jail, as was customary in sensitive situations where certain inmates had to be separated from others. We later asked for about a half-dozen cooperating witnesses to be moved, along with a half-dozen non-cooperators, hoping to camouflage who was cooperating and that once out of Harrison’s control they might all cooperate. As it happened, every inmate who agreed to cooperate was black. In the racially charged atmosphere of the time, we knew we would need at least one credible white witness to make the white members of what we knew would be a mostly white jury feel safe confronting the white community after convicting a white sheriff of abusing a black inmate.
The sheriff’s friend, an insurance salesman, was at first the only white witness, and he of course sided totally with the Sheriff, saying absolutely nothing had happened. The other potential white witness was a skinny, long-haired, scared-to-death nineteen-year-old in jail on some minor charge. He was the only white person in the jail. When Wayne Tichenor interviewed him, he claimed he was asleep when the incident started and stayed in the back of the cell because he was afraid. Tichenor said the boy’s mouth said he saw nothing, but his eyes said he had seen everything but was too scared to talk. Several black inmates said the white boy had seen it all, but they didn’t blame him for looking out for himself.
One of my rules in trying cases was always to go to the scene of the crime to get a feel for it and to be able to question witnesses about where things were and how they happened, visually. When Tichenor and I got to the jail that day, there were no guards, just one radio dispatcher on duty. She was young, had no weapon, and weighed nearly 300 pounds. Wayne told her we were both “with” the FBI. He explained later that I was technically “with” him, and if he’d said I was with the Justice Department she probably would not have let us in. The girl waved her hand at the stairway and told us “help yourselves.”
We immediately heard shouting from upstairs, where some twenty inmates were all in one mass bullpen lined with multiple bunk beds. We climbed the stairs, which were strewn with sharp pieces of broken glass from broken beer bottles. As we approached the cell, we saw the white inmate, standing alone facing us with his back to the others and a look of despair on his face. Four or five of the black inmates were trading punches and others were cheering. A couple of beer bottles hit the cell’s bars. At first they didn’t even notice us. When they saw our suits and ties, they abruptly stopped fighting.
Wayne asked where the sheriff was. “He and the deputies are at a trial at the courthouse across the street,” one said. “Who are you?” They knew we were not there to sell them insurance. “FBI,” Wayne said simply. “Hey, can you get us to Panola County?” Some were standing, some sitting on the floor, some on bunks. I thought how totally scary it would be to be locked in there. The white boy still stood alone at the front of the cell. Suddenly I noticed his lips moving. “Get me out,” he mouthed silently. I tried not to signal a response to him in front of the others, but nodded.
Wayne chatted with them and asked who could pass a polygraph on his story. “Anyone who flunks it has to come back to Jack Harrison’s hotel here.” Several hands went down, but a few stayed up and Wayne took down their names. The white boy said nothing. Later we went across the street and talked to Larry Lewis, the straight, stand-up lawyer who was county prosecutor. He said he could help us by plea-bargaining the white boy’s case so he would be released from jail without appearing to have cooperated. I thanked God for people like Larry Lewis.
At trial we picked what looked like a fair jury. New judge L. T. Senter, in his first federal trial, was calm and judicious and appeared totally in control of the case, a real relief given all the heat and threats of violence on both sides of the community. Our proof went well. The inmates’ testimony was surprisingly believable, and the victim looked tiny and really vulnerable. Defense counsel Bill Liston did his best but never really laid a glove on any of our witnesses. Harrison, a real hothead, made a terrible witness. On cross I got him angry, his face turned bright red, and he talked and acted in court exactly as our witnesses had described him at the jail.
But we still had one big hill to climb: No white man had ever been convicted by a jury in the Northern District of Mississippi of abusing a black man, not in the entire twentieth century. So we waited. The jury stayed out for hours. Judge Senter recessed till morning, gave the jury an Allen instruction, the so-called “dynamite charge,” which in those happier days basically told the minority of the jurors they should listen more closely to the majority. Nowadays the Allen charge is so diluted and politically correct that it often encourages jurors to think their difficulty in agreeing means they should give up and acquit if they don’t reach unanimity quickly, defeating the whole purpose of having jury trials at all in difficult cases.
After many hours the jury finally came back and reported they were hopelessly deadlocked six-to-six. Judge Senter had no choice but to declare a mistrial based on a hung jury. U.S. Attorney H. M. Ray, who had lost several such cases in his twenty years as prosecutor, reassured me, “John, that’s the most votes for guilty we’ve ever gotten. And this is the only hung jury we’ve ever gotten. All the others cases were acquittals.” Mr. Ray got right up and announced we would retry the case as soon as the court and the defendant were ready.
Six months passed before we could go to bat again. By that time several things had changed. Our witnesses were much more fearful since we had failed to win the first time. Worst of all, our skinny, scared little victim had been sent to a rough camp at Parchman Prison where he got the usual education. Next time we saw him he had put on forty pounds lifting weights. He had corn-rowed his hair and adopted an inmate attitude. All was not perfect on the defense side either, however. Harrison, allegedly hearing his attractive wife was seeing another man, had gone home drunk one night from the jail and shot out every window in his own house. Word on the street was that his wife’s secret boyfriend was none other than his star defense eyewitness. Following long tradition, we decided not to stir up domestic disputes. Whatever the truth was and whatever the defendant believed it was, his star witness testified, told the same story, and they still seemed to be friends. We didn’t tell them any different. Besides, the story might well have been false and we wondered whether someone was just goading us into disrupting the defense. Still, I’ve always wondered what would have happened if we’d gotten word to Harrison that his wife’s lover was his star witness.
My cross-examination of Harrison this time was quite a bit more aggressive. He finally admitted that he struck the inmate once but only to subdue him after the inmate assaulted Harrison first. “How,” I asked, “could an inmate in leg irons and handcuffed behind his back have assaulted you?” Harrison demonstrated how the inmate had first tried to head butt him, then said the inmate barely missed him with a vicious kick. Excited and overconfident, I made the mistake of daring Harrison to show the jury how the inmate did it with handcuffs and leg irons on. Harrison agreed to reenact the scene. We had one of the U.S. Marshals in attendance handcuff the sheriff behind with his own handcuffs. Then they put the marshal’s leg irons on him.
I asked the sheriff to stand with me in front of the jury in that pose and dared him to assault me. He did. I easily avoided his head butt, except that while his head was down, he suddenly swung around with his back to me and kicked up and back with his feet together
like a mule would kick. I just barely backed out of his range, but I saw by the look on the jurors’ faces that they thought it could well have happened just that way.
Then a funny thing happened. After the marshals took his leg irons off, the sheriff could not find his handcuff keys. Supposed to be on his belt, they were not there. I chuckled, but saw the jury staring at me in an unfriendly way. The marshals called his jail, but no one could find the keys. Harrison had to spend the rest of that day of the trial handcuffed behind his back at the defense table. I didn’t think the jurors liked it. They looked hostile.
When we finally got to closing arguments, the feeling I got in front of the jury box was like a cold wind blowing in my face. They nodded with the defense and stared sullenly at me. My inmate witnesses were much weaker than the first time, my victim looked like a thug, and my supposedly clever experiment had backfired, making it look like maybe the victim did assault the sheriff. Nevertheless, we did have one of those unsatisfying moral victories. Apparently at least a few jurors believed in us, and the jury stayed out for several hours. In the end, however, they returned with a unanimous “not guilty” verdict. Our office had still never won a civil rights case. FBI agent George Barber, a retired Marine Corps colonel who really had his heart in the case and thought we would win, took our loss harder than anyone. Wayne Tichenor and I just chalked it up to experience.
From Midnight to Guntown Page 24