From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  When I rose to cross-examine Ronald Glen Shaw, I was as nervous with pent up adrenaline as I’d ever been in my life. I took him back through his various “revisions” to his story. Then I surprised him when I asked if he’d stopped by a dumpster at the Mt. Pisgah church that same evening. The key to a good cross-examination is the element of surprise, coming at a witness from an oblique angle he doesn’t expect. Shaw looked worried, as if he was wondering how we knew about Mt. Pisgah, since no witness had mentioned it. He looked over to Doyel for help, but there was none coming. We had kept Doyel as in the dark as his client. Finally he said, “Yeah, I stopped there to take a leak,” smirking as he said it, showing the jury for the first and only time his sinister smile.

  As Al had feared, I got pretty vigorous during cross, treating Shaw with the contempt I thought he deserved and the jury expected, bringing up numerous times—just to question his credibility of course—his two prior rape convictions. I was actually afraid I’d screw up the potentially deadly cross-exam question about the number of shells and was hesitating before starting into it. I looked back at Dawson, who was sitting inside the bar right behind counsel table. He nodded encouragingly and I started in.

  Glancing repeatedly at the jurors that we knew from voir dire were deer hunters, I asked Shaw about the rifle. He said it was his father’s, but he used it all the time and knew it well. I asked him how many times he’d fired it that night at the deer. “Once,” he said. “Can you give the jury a reason why the officers never found an empty shell casing at the scene?” He could not. “Do you know how many rounds you jacked out of the rifle when you saw the officers chasing you?” I asked. “They said it was five,” he replied. “No reason to doubt their word on that, is there?” He agreed. “Did you know they found one round jammed in the feeder tube to the chamber?” I was afraid by now he’d start counting, but he didn’t. “Yeah, I had one jammed in there and hadn’t had time to get it out.” Shaw was had. He just didn’t know it yet. I proceeded to show him, bullet by bullet.

  “All right,” I continued a little nervously. “Now, Mr. Shaw, I don’t have a gun like yours. Can you tell us how many rounds it holds?” He suddenly looked confident. This was his turf. “It holds seven.” He still didn’t see it coming, even as I began counting it out for him. “So, let’s see now. Five on the floor, one jammed in the gun, and one to shoot Terrell Johnson.” I held up seven fingers. “That makes the seven. But you said you shot a deer first. That would make eight. But you know your rifle only holds seven.” There were gasps from the jury box. Shaw looked blank. From somewhere in my subconscious came the old English phrase for confronting a witness: “I put it up to you, Mr. Shaw, that there was no eighth shot because there was no deer. You made that story up to cover your tracks. This was not a shooting accident. The only thing you shot was those children.” Shaw was speechless. The jurors were muttering audibly. It was not my best cross-examination ever, but it is still my favorite. At least I didn’t get the numbers confused and screw it up.

  After a devastating rebuttal by the Averys about seeing Shaw pointing and sighting the same rifle at them, total strangers, the same night, we rested. I argued first and went about as crazy as Al had feared, vilifying Shaw as a serial liar and “double-convicted rapist.” The defense’s closing was as weak as their opening. Doyel was well prepared and articulate, but the proof had just broken totally against him. I was curious to see how Al, known for his devastatingly calm and logical arguments, would handle this one.

  Al walked to the podium and began, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury . . . “Then his voice broke. The manliest of men first teared up, then quietly sobbed for several seconds. After a marshal brought him a glass of water, Al made a low-key, pro forma argument totally devoid of emotion. Tears come to my eyes today as I recall it thirty years later. Al wrapped up quickly, and the jury got the case. We agreed that the verdict would be swift. After two hours, however, we knew it would not. After three hours, we were worried. Perhaps our initial fears were right. Finally, a note arrived from the jury foreman, a hunter from the Delta.

  Amazingly, the jurors had found Shaw guilty of both murders and using the gun in both murders almost immediately. They were hung up only on count one, the firearm possession count, which we had never mentioned because Doyel had told them in opening to find him guilty on that count. For that reason we’d never mentioned it and the jury apparently had forgotten it or perhaps never even heard it. Judge Smith repeated to them his instructions on that count and that the defense had stipulated Shaw was guilty of it. They went back out and returned in five minutes with a guilty verdict on that count as well. It was the strangest of my many experiences with the reasoning of American juries. Later we heard from a spectator who was out in the hall that some jurors didn’t much like some of the federal firearm laws. They also said they weren’t sure what “stipulate” meant.

  But their hesitation to convict actually helped us on appeal. It showed they were not carried away by emotion and hell-bent to hang Shaw but were carefully considering all evidence on every charge. As in most cases, jury disagreements, especially acquittals on some counts, tend to show the court of appeals that the jury was fair and unbiased and their verdicts were based on reason and evidence and not on emotion or prejudice. And on this appeal, we felt we would need that support.

  While the pre-sentence report was being prepared, great sadness came to the court. Judge Orma Smith, after undergoing multiple bypass surgery, suffered a series of strokes, leading to his retirement and death. After more than a year in limbo, new district judge L. T. Senter, a veteran state trial judge, succeeded Judge Smith and took over the Shaw case. He got off to a strong start, sentencing Shaw in March 1982 to life imprisonment for the murder of Terrell, five years’ imprisonment for shooting Lachelle, two more mandatory ten-year sentences for using the rifle in the shootings and another three years just for possessing the weapon, all consecutive, none concurrent, meaning a total sentence of life plus twenty-eight years. Shaw was ordered confined to the rough maximum security prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, which I’ve visited and would not want to see again.

  On appeal, Professor Doyel and his law students outdid themselves, accusing me of committing no fewer than sixty-nine reversible errors. In response I managed to lump them under seven broad categories in a seventy-one-page brief. We were disappointed when Chief Judge Charles Clark set the case for argument in his home courthouse in Jackson rather than New Orleans. Traveling to that wonderful city and its great restaurants was one of our most prized perks as prosecutors. It was probably just as well in this case, however, because the week before the argument I ruptured another disk in my lower back and could barely manage to walk the block up Capitol Street from the old Walthall Hotel to the elegant old courthouse. I’d called ahead and gotten permission to argue the case sitting down. When he learned of it, Doyel objected, implying I was faking and seeking sympathy, which the judges rejected out of hand. Doyel began his argument with a rehearsed, melodramatic, and amateurish statement. Referring to the trial date, he said, “From April 20 to April 23, 1981, justice in the Northern District of Mississippi took a vacation.” Before he could continue, Judge Clark cut him off sharply: “Please spare us the theatrics, Mr. Doyel. I drive the Trace every month to visit my grandchildren. Just stick to the legal issues.”

  It was surprising how personal this case was to everyone who came in contact with it. The arguments were spirited, with abundant questions from all three judges on the panel, which included veteran wisemen Alvin Rubin of Louisiana and Jerre Williams of Texas. In their unanimous opinion, written by Judge Williams and delivered March 15, 1983, the court rejected every last defense contention in an opinion that occupied over thirty printed pages. When I got to work on March 18, my birthday, I found a copy of the court’s opinion in a big gold frame, with a congratulatory note from Glen Davidson, which meant a lot. He was going to be a fine man to work for.

  Doyel, undeterred, moved for a reheari
ng, which was denied in another published opinion on September 15. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The Shaw case was finally over. In the years since that trial, one thing has always stood out in my mind. Unlike almost every other inmate, Ronald Glen Shaw has never made one complaint to us or the courts—not one motion, not one letter. Looking back at his demeanor at trial, I now feel I know how Shaw felt at trial. At the time he fired the fatal bullet, he was mad at the world and drunk and didn’t care who he killed, but since then I’ve always felt that he had remorse that an innocent little boy was killed by his action. And he’s had the rest of his life to regret it from a prison cell. His release is now scheduled for the year 2024.

  5

  FARAWAY PLACES WITH STRANGE-SOUNDING NAMES

  The Age of Terror

  Introduction

  We have entered your country for years living quietly, becoming employed in your auto plants, your business, your stores, your gas station your motels. All the while we prepare for the jihad. You think this not so. You will be destroyed from within. You will see. The 911 attack came from outside but the true jihad will come from within your own borders. You will see, stupid amerikkan.

  —Islamist Internet Posting

  When I joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 1974, it never occurred to me that I would ever know a terrorist beyond the Ku Klux Klan nor have any use for the fluent French I acquired during my two years as an undergraduate at the Sorbonne in Paris. Oxford did not sound like a launching pad for terrorism or for using my French to get free trips to exotic foreign cities. For five years, the only time I used my French at all was for a couple of interesting interviews with the French-Canadian wife of a Montreal drug dealer passing through our district. Then the ever-inventive Thomas W. Dawson, the sage of Lauderdale County, got hold of a fraud case in which an American con man based in Tupelo bilked several businesses and a Swiss bank out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Swiss bankers, having heard our judicial system was hard on bankers, refused to testify in the United States, insisting we go there under a brand-new U.S.-Swiss treaty and take their depositions instead. Dawson was tied up in another trial, so U.S. Attorney H. M. Ray dispatched me to Geneva in his place. The details of that trip will be included in the follow-up to this volume.

  Another decade passed before Washington, checking its computers, found in 1989 that its “special skills” section listed only two fluent French-speakers in the entire Justice Department nationwide who could handle a French-speaking case, and the other French speaker had already declined. She claimed she did not want to meet Yasser Arafat or his PLO, then headquartered in Tunis, formerly Carthage, on the north African coast facing Italy. Tunisians speak French as well as Arabic from decades of occupation by France. That mission to Tunis and the trials I observed there resulted in reciprocal visits to Oxford by Tunisian prosecutors and kick-started a series of twelve more foreign missions from Russia to Indonesia before and after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

  In the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union broke up, DOJ needed to lend someone to the American Bar Association to do training and reconnaissance in Chişinău, capital of the former Soviet Republic of Moldavia. I told them I didn’t feel qualified. The DOJ international people said, “Oh, they all speak French there as well as Romanian. It’s an old tradition.” The tradition turned out to have been true but had ended back in the 1920s when the Russians occupied Moldova and renamed it Moldavia. Since then Moldovans had been required to speak Russian.

  The Moldovan mission got me firmly on the DOJ foreign circuit. Attorney general Richard Thornburgh formed a special new training unit called OPDAT (Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development and Training) to work with foreign prosecutors on international criminal networks using all the new treaties we had signed with emerging countries around the world. Before I knew it, I was part of the first group of U.S. prosecutors ever to attend the annual Russian National Prosecutors Conference in Moscow. There I witnessed three Russian murder trials where they used their new American-inspired jury system. The Russians then made return visits to Oxford.

  DOJ sent me to magistrate school in Paris, back to Tunis and onward multiple times to Rabat in the Kingdom of Morocco, Tbilisi in the new Republic of Georgia, to Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, to Muscat, the beautiful capital of the Sultanate of Oman, next door to volatile Yemen, and which guards the entrance to the Persian Gulf across from Iran (into which you could shoot a rifle if so inclined). From there it was on to Jakarta and Bali in exotic Indonesia. Those missions will be the backbone of what my editors see as the third in a trilogy of books on my criminal trials.

  A few foreign terrorism stories made the cut for this first volume. The first began in Oxford when an Ole Miss coed married a Lebanese Shiite student and ended up reliving the agony of an international parental kidnapping eerily reminiscent of Sally Field in the movie Not without My Daughter. Another concerned the investigation and prosecution of Dr. Abdel Ashqar, international secretary of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group, who spent seven years as a graduate student in Oxford where he got his Ph.D. while raising millions of dollars for Hamas through Oxford banks. My last civil trial involved a suit by Adnan Awad, a Palestinian veteran of the PLO hired by terrorists in Iraq to blow up the Hilton Hotel in Geneva. Terrorism expert Steve Emerson wrote his biography, Terrorist: The Inside Story of the Highest-Ranking Iraqi Terrorist Ever to Defect to the West (1991). Awad, or “Captain Joe” as I called him, was in the federal Witness Protection Program but had to be relocated numerous times for talking too much about his real-life exploits. His final relocation was to Tupelo where he married the pretty blonde daughter of a dentist, then talked too much and was kicked out of the witness program. Frustrated by our bureaucracy, he sued the FBI, U.S. Marshals, and several federal officers including one U.S. Attorney. I was assigned to defend them. The case was so secret that its title was Sealed Plaintiffs v. Sealed Defendants. Captain Joe’s story is the last in the book. It is a fitting end, perhaps, since my first case involved our own local terrorists from the Ku Klux Klan and my last a reluctant terrorist who finally rejected militant Islam. It was quite a ride.

  Alice El-Sarji: “Not without My Daughters,” an International Parental Kidnapping1

  Alice Livingston had it made. Her father was a successful contractor who owned a big farm near Sardis, less than an hour from Oxford. The farm had chickens, ducks, and all the other farm animals that can make a child’s life so enjoyable. But Alice was no simple farm girl. Her uncle was a psychiatrist in Seattle, her family was educated. But of all the attributes with which nature had blessed her, the most important was her beauty. When I first met her at my office as a victim of crime, she was already in her mid-30s and resembled the English actress Dana Wynter, with refined and delicate features, an educated way of speaking and a charming smile. Her story, however, was less pretty.

  At eighteen, Alice had gone off to Ole Miss as a happy, carefree coed. She enjoyed the parties and did not study very hard, but was doing well enough. Then she met a handsome business major from Lebanon. A real charmer who sang and danced well, he swept Alice off her feet. Hassan El-Sarji had adapted well to American life. Funny and enthusiastic, he fit in well with the culture, taking the good ole boy nickname “Sonny.” Being Lebanese was not that exotic at Ole Miss. The state has long been rich in Lebanese Christians, natural businessmen who thrived in the deep south climate. When Alice and Sonny married, it presented several problems. First, she needed to finish her education. Second, Sonny had no intention of becoming American. He was a Shiite Muslim and insisted on living in a Muslim country and that Alice become a strict Muslim wife. Alice married him anyway.

  As long as they stayed in the U.S., things went fairly well. Sonny had a habit of chasing women, which wounded Alice deeply, but she kept taking him back. Finally, seeking to make more money more quickly, Sonny moved them to the United Arab Emirates. Although places like Dubai can look as free as Las Vegas in external w
ays, behind closed doors and off the main streets the UAE is a very conservative patriarchy. The couple had two children with good American names, Sarah and Megan, but Alice had to learn to wear the veil and keep her body covered from head to toe. And Sonny was disappointed that he was not becoming rich. There was too much competition. The Emirates were crawling with talented young men seeking their fortune. Sonny was frustrated. With Alice’s whole-hearted agreement, they returned to the U.S. Again things got steadily worse. Sonny could not find as much income in the U.S. as he had in the UAE, even with lots of help from Alice’s father. His womanizing got completely out of control. The little girls were the only ones who were happy, loving their grandparents and life on their farm. In 1989 Alice filed for divorce and got “paramount” custody of the girls with Sonny having visitation rights.

  Sonny had many relatives in Southern California and began traveling between California, Lebanon, and Mississippi on business. During vacations Alice let the girls spend a month each summer in California with their father and his brothers and cousins. The divorce was fairly amicable as those things go. But Sonny wanted more. He wanted the girls to visit their grandparents in Lebanon, where his family had not only a multistory apartment complex in Sidon but a fine old stone house with swimming pool, high in the beautiful Lebanese mountains. The girls had always enjoyed the warm, loving family of their father and had a hard time understanding the divorce.