From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  We compromised on getting Mr. Gibbs to court. Kevin visited him at his trailer a few days before trial and told him we would interview him the night before the trial, just like all witnesses, and because the trial was out of town at Oxford, he would stay at government expense at the Holiday Inn in his own room and agents would have rooms on either side of him. But when they knocked at his door there was no answer. His car was beside his trailer, but there were no lights on and the trailer was dark. Had some friends of Butler or white vigilantes gotten him? “No,” Kevin said. “I was born and raised in McComb and I know that did not happen. He might have run off, though. He grew up in a different Mississippi than I did.”

  Kevin yelled: “Mr. Gibbs, Mr. Gibbs, it’s Kevin with the FBI.” No answer. Mr. Gibbs’s hearing, after years on the railroads with their loud noises, was none too keen. Kevin thought of Gibbs’s double-barreled shotgun and how he kept it loaded beside his bed. He decided to break the door, doing as little damage as possible, and knew the FBI would pay to repair it. Just in case, he hung a raid jacket over a rifle barrel in front of the window in the trailer door while he used a hammer to break the lock. No use getting shot in the gut by your own witness trying to get him to court. Once inside, Kevin went carefully to the bedroom where Mr. Gibbs’s shoes were all neatly lined up under his bed. Slowly, carefully, he opened the closet door. Huddled on the floor and shivering with fright was Jake Gibbs.

  That evening at my office Mr. Gibbs was calm and composed. I didn’t ask him much. You can easily overprepare a witness, and I felt he was ready. The trial went really well. Although the jury was mostly white, I liked their looks. From their appearance they knew life. Whatever Gibbs’s race and private proclivities, I didn’t think they would tolerate what Butler did to him. The dispatcher and police officer both made absolutely untouchable witnesses. Mr. Gibbs was scared to death, totally unlike the night before. He was terrified to the point the judge allowed me to lead him a little. He admitted being drunk and even used some pretty salty language in describing what he wanted from the young women. When he came to the beating, he began to shake. The judge asked if he needed a glass of water, what you always do when a witness starts to break down. But this time the judge went further. “What about a couple of big aspirins?” Mr. Gibbs said he would appreciate that because his head hurt “pretty bad.” He said he hadn’t slept in a motel since he retired and didn’t sleep much the night before.

  The courtroom clerk handed Gibbs a big bottle of aspirins. As he held it, the jury saw for the first time that his left hand was crippled, the fingers curled up and stiff. He could not open the bottle. I went forward and took off the top for him and laid two big round white aspirins on the witness stand in front of him. He put one in his mouth with his right hand, then took up the glass in the same hand. His left hand lay shriveled and curled up in front of the jury. As he lifted the second large white pill to his mouth, it slipped from his fingers and rolled slowly across the carpet. We all watched as the round pill rolled some twenty feet, all the way to the end of the jury box. It was a dramatic moment, like in a movie. We all were mesmerized by how long it took to finally come to a stop. He relaxed and finished his testimony with no further problems.

  On cross the able defense attorney was cautious and respectful, especially praising the victim’s long years of hard work on the railroad. Then he surprised me. “Your Honor, may the witness approach the jury?” The judge wanted to know why. “It will soon be apparent during my case that our defense is self-defense and that Mr. Gibbs is a much stronger man than he looks despite his age.” The judge let the attorney have Mr. Gibbs walk to the end of the jury box. He then asked if the jurors could feel the muscles in Mr. Gibbs’s upper arms and shoulders. The judge denied the request, calling it “theatrics.”

  Virtually the only defense witness other than some character witnesses was the defendant Butler himself. He first told what we’d already heard, that he’d gotten a drunk call and put Mr. Gibbs in his backseat where he passed out. Then his version changed dramatically. According to Butler, at some point during an otherwise quiet drive to jail, Gibbs suddenly raised up on the backseat and put a knife to the front of Butler’s throat from behind, and said, “I’ll kill you, you sorry son of a bitch. I’ll cut your damn head off.” Butler said Gibbs was crazed and seemed to think he was being kidnapped. Butler testified he managed to hold Gibbs’s arm with one hand and steer his patrol car to a quick stop with the other. “The man looks old, but his arms are like steel.” Looking at the jury he said, “I wish you could feel them for yourselves.”

  Defense counsel then produced an old, rusty case knife with about a two-inch blade with the tip broken off. It had not been furnished to us in discovery, and we’d had no chance to show it to Mr. Gibbs. “Do you recognize that knife?” defense counsel asked. “That’s the one he said he’d cut my head off with. I found it later under the seat of my car.” Butler admitted he had “roughed up” Gibbs a little bit, but said not enough to break his ribs. “That must have happened when he ran his car in the ditch. He probably hit the steering wheel.”

  I had an easy time with Butler on cross. He was a tall man, easily a head taller than Mr. Gibbs and although sixty years old looked much younger. I led him fairly easily into boasting of his strength. The killer was when I asked him why he hadn’t told us or the FBI or other officers about the alleged assault with the knife before. “Well, I couldn’t find it till late, and I wasn’t sure they’d believe me.” I passed up the chance to say what they would say on TV, like, “I’m sure the jury won’t either.” The jury wasn’t out long and came back with a guilty verdict. The judge gave Butler six months in federal prison. After his release, he was rehired at the sheriff’s department and applied to go to the Mississippi Law Enforcement Training Academy, a new professionalism requirement to serve as a deputy. I wrote a letter objecting based on his conviction, and the academy expelled Butler, effectively ending his career in law enforcement.

  As I thought about the case, one thing made me wonder. After the trial, out of curiosity, I tried an experiment I had thought about trying in court, but did not. I had thought about recalling Mr. Gibbs as a rebuttal witness and handing him the knife in a closed position and asking him to open it. But I knew from long experience never to try experiments in front of the jury for the first time. Always test them out of court first. You never know how they will turn out. Such dramatic experiments can win a case for you, but can also lose it, and I felt we had this one won. After the jury came back, however, I wanted to know.

  Kevin Rust borrowed the knife from the court clerk and brought it to our witness room. I asked Mr. Gibbs if he’d ever had such a knife. “Yes, sir, something like it, but not all rusty like that and the tip was not broken.” Wondering how a basically one-handed man could use such a knife, I handed it to him and said, “Take a closer look at the blade.” Mr. Gibbs looked briefly at the pearl-colored handle, quickly put the knife to his mouth with his right hand, and deftly flicked open the blade with his teeth. He briefly held the knife, blade open, in my direction. “Not mine,” he said. I wondered. I still wonder.

  Lanny “Junior” Cummings, Mesomorph11

  Strange things used to happen in Marshall County, especially when law enforcement was involved. With the election of Sheriff Kenny Dickerson, all that has changed. But its land is rich cotton country and has a majority of black citizens, as it has since before the Civil War. Its county seat, Holly Springs, has beautiful antebellum homes, spared, unlike Oxford, from being burned because Holly Springs was less hostile to Yankee troops during the War. Ulysses S. Grant had headquarters there during the Vicksburg campaign. Later, when L. Q. C. Lamar, the only Mississippi lawyer ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, struck a U.S. Marshal and put his eye out in open court at Oxford in the course of a KKK trial during Reconstruction, the federal court itself was actually moved temporarily to Holly Springs, where the Ku Klux Klan had less sway.

  Racial tensions and violence contin
ued off and on well into the 1970s, when a black boycott of white businesses nearly closed Holly Springs. Slowly, things got better. Holly Springs became one of the first cities in the state to have a black mayor. Marshall County, notorious for corruption in law enforcement ever since the reign of sheriff and classic political boss J. M. “Flick” Ash, suddenly had two black sheriffs elected in a row. It sounds ironic to say now, but when we first heard a black inmate was complaining of abuse by a black deputy sheriff, and claimed white officers would support his claim, it was almost a relief, reflecting a surprising new harmony across racial lines.

  The incident began harmlessly enough. Most inmates in the jail at Holly Springs were nonviolent, locked up for being drunk or awaiting trial. The hard-core, violent types were mostly sent straight to the state pen at Parchman. The jail was full of trusties, who were often let out to help work off short sentences on public improvement projects. There was also a tradition of inmates washing and polishing police and sheriff’s patrol cars. Supervision was lax and the weather was hot, so the inmates got in the habit of going across the town square and buying beer or whiskey to cool them off. The system went along fine until one day a huge black inmate, a former athlete who weighed a good 300 pounds, had a couple of drinks too many. He was said to be a hard worker and strong as an ox and was nicknamed “Leadbelly” for his resemblance to the famous inmate blues singer Huddie Ledbetter.

  One afternoon, after a particularly vigorous day of car-washing, Lead-belly decided it was too hot in the un-air-conditioned jail and refused to go back in. “I’ll just sit here in the shade. I ain’t going nowhere.” He was well liked and none of the officers or jailers wanted to take him on because of his size and appearance. When chief deputy sheriff Lanny “Junior” Cummings came on duty, however, he asked, “What is he doing out there? He looks drunk.” The officers explained the situation. Cummings, puffed up with the dignity of his position and concerned that the law was being flouted and the big man being given special treatment, ordered the other officers to help him bring the man back into the jail. Four officers stepped forward, two black and two white. Aroused, the big man got to his feet, less drunk than he appeared earlier and considerably less docile. He spread his legs, bent his knees, and raised both fists in a karate stance. One officer said “I heard he knew karate, but I didn’t believe it.” The four officers struggled to subdue the huge inmate. He pummeled them with kicks and punches. They finally got him to the ground but could not get their handcuffs around his huge wrists.

  As they struggled, deputy Junior Cummings suddenly showed back up, this time with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun in his hands. “Get that son of a bitch up,” he yelled. “We ain’t putting up with this.” The other officers went on wrestling with the man to little effect. Cummings then stepped into the fray and tried to hit the inmate in the head with the butt of the shotgun, but instead hit the back of the hand of one of his fellow officers. “God dammit, Junior, you’ve broken my hand,” he said. Later medical examination proved he was correct. The officer had three distal bones cracked in his hand. Cummings then changed tactics, for reasons he later admitted he did not really recall. He began hitting the man with the barrels of the gun instead. He later said he didn’t know whether it was because he didn’t want to hit the other officers again or, more likely, because the barrels were too oily to get a good grip on, so he held it by the stock.

  Either way he hit the inmate ineffectually several times in the stomach with the barrels, then both barrels suddenly went off. The shotgun, kept in plain view at the jail allegedly for riot control, was loaded with buckshot. By some miracle, not one officer was hit. The inmate was not so lucky. In local terminology, he looked like he was “gut-shot,” usually a fatal wound. Bleeding profusely, he was taken by the officers to the local hospital. The surgeon who operated on him later told the FBI with some amazement that “the whole load of buckshot seems to have gotten him at a sharp angle from the side. It shot the front of his stomach area off but missed his vital organs.” Shaking his head, the doctor said, “Being fat saved him. His big stomach saved his life.”

  I prepared the case and presented it to the federal grand jury and got a two-count indictment, one for civil rights/police brutality and one for possessing an unlawful sawed-off shotgun. Shortly I received a visit from Jack Dunbar, president of the state bar and perhaps the finest lawyer in the state. “John boy, I’d love to have another joust with you in court, but this would not be a fair fight. I’ve talked to all the eyewitnesses, and there are just too many of them. You would kill us.” The brutality count carried five years and the sawed-off count ten years, but that was before mandatory sentencing guidelines, so the judge did not have to give him any time at all, or could have given him fifteen years. Jack said, “To make you look tough, we’ll plead to the ten-year count. Junior as a black man just doesn’t want to admit he violated someone’s civil rights.” I knew where Jack was really going: “And you think the judge will be easier on him if he pleads guilty to doing something every law officer in the county was also responsible for, having an illegal sawed-off shotgun in plain view in the sheriff’s office gun case.” We didn’t debate long, however. Even the Washington-based Civil Rights Division was so happy to get a conviction of a Mississippi law officer that they went along with the deal. They were usually hard-bargainers, but this time they weren’t so sure what a jury, especially a predominantly black jury of Mississippians, might decide. The inmate had recovered quickly despite some bad-looking scars, and most of the community, black and white, favored Junior Cummings.

  Judge Keady got the case. At that time he had a new local rule he was testing where the probation officers prepared the pre-sentence report before the guilty plea was entered. We hated the idea. For one thing, we weren’t sure it was all that constitutional, but even worse, when the defendants read their pre-sentence reports, it sometimes persuaded them not to plead guilty after all and just go to trial. Better to take the risk than accept a harsh sentence without even fighting it. So instead of the standard two-step process in federal court where the defendant pleads guilty one day, then waits a couple of months till a thorough pre-sentence report is ready, in Cummings’s case we did it all in one proceeding.

  The day we showed up for the plea and sentence was a warm, humid one, not unusual for Oxford. Jack Dunbar and I and the two attorneys with us had all dressed, accidentally, in what we thought was appropriate attire for the weather. We had all four unknowingly chosen to wear identical bright-blue, lightweight “cord” suits, the next thing to seersucker but even brighter to the eye. Between us stood Junior Cummings, dressed like a normal person. Judge Keady ascended the bench and called us all forward. As we approached, I saw a bigger than customary twinkle in his eye. He addressed the defendant first, “Are you Lanny Cummings Jr.?” Cummings answered respectfully, “Yes, sir, Your Honor.” Then Judge Keady unexpectedly diverged from the script, the litany of ritual questions about knowing the punishment, whether his lawyer did a good job, etc. Instead, Judge Keady asked him point-blank, “Mr. Cummings, from your attire I presume you do not plan to join in the singing with these other gentlemen, who all seem dressed for the occasion like a barbershop quartet?”

  The judge enjoyed his little joke much more than we did, but somehow it told me that, knowing him as I did, and knowing his mindset and feelings, he was going to give Junior some prison time. Judge Keady always hated sentencing. Whenever he was going to give them probation, he always gave them a furious tongue-lashing first. If he was sending them off to prison, he always just asked them and their lawyer what they had to say and then with no further comment, said, “I hereby sentence you to the custody of the attorney general for imprisonment in a federal facility for umpty-ump years.”

  This time I had little idea before that moment what he might do. Black and white citizens alike had written strong, sincere letters recommending probation. These were not form letters, the usual seventy-five letters obviously written in identical wor
ds by the same lawyer but signed with seventy-five different names. The letters for Junior were all different. They spoke of the important role he’d played in restoring racial harmony in Marshall County and how he’d never been in trouble or been accused of abusing any other inmate, black or white. Junior Cummings also held a sort of unique position in law enforcement. For more than thirty years while I was a federal prosecutor, the highlight of our federal-state-local get-togethers was always a fish fry or a barbecue, two styles of public banquet that I discovered from reading the letters of Thomas Jefferson go back at least to the early eighteenth century. The cook for these affairs was always an officer. Being the cook was not only a sort of special service, but an honored position if that’s not saying too much. And Junior Cummings held both positions. He not only made the best pork barbecue around but could fry fish and make great hush puppies. I’ll never forget one letter to the probation officer from a black elected official who said, “I have often partaken of his cuisine, and to lose his services would be most unfortunate for law enforcement.” That letter, I felt, explained the sentiments of many.

  There was another letter, however, that gave a whole new level of meaning to the term sui generis. DOJ over the years sent me to many management conferences, at most of which we suffered through the latest fads in pop psychology. One year it was the four axes of personality structure: concrete, abstract, sequential, and random. Accountants are said to be both concrete and sequential. Artists and professors are said to be abstract and random. Another seminar tested our personalities on what was called the Graves Value Map, probing us with dozens of questions on how we would handle tricky situations. I recall one guy in our office, Al Moreton, scored as the most traditional person ever tested by Graves. He was the one who wore a black suit, black tie, black socks, and black wingtips every day of his life except for a gray sweater on special holidays. A prosecutor from another office once made an almost perfect score for the personality profile of a career criminal. I never heard what happened to him.