TRANSCRIPT: AMERICAN JUSTICE
CARLOS WATKINS (NARRATION): Chester March agreed to give me access to all the files pertaining to his case, and Edward Heffernan—who you may remember is the Vanderbilt law professor who is leading Chester’s defense—was kind enough to allow me to dig into six banker’s boxes stuffed with documents that he had in his office.
I took the first box down to Vanderbilt’s Alyne Queener Massey Law Library to start sifting through the materials. It’s a beautiful space: two stories of books with high ceilings, warm organic light, heavy cherrywood furniture with ergonomic chairs, and carpets the color of money.
Vanderbilt is the third-best law school in the southeastern United States, according to the influential US News and World Report ranking. Only the University of Virginia and Duke have it beat. Upon graduation, the students who were sitting around me would be near the front of the line for elite jobs paying six-figure starting salaries at the best law firms in Nashville, Atlanta, St. Louis, New Orleans, or anywhere in Florida.
The library wasn’t terribly crowded at that time; it was midmorning on a Wednesday, and most of the law students were probably in class. But I couldn’t help noticing that I was the only black person in there. Everyone at the law school had been very polite toward me, but I still felt uneasy in this bastion of privilege. Vanderbilt’s law school is only about 7 or 8 percent black. The city of Nashville is about a quarter black, and the Riverbend prison is nearly half. The only institution in the state of Tennessee more racially inclusive than Riverbend is the 90 percent black Memphis City School system.
I opened the boxes. Inside, I found Chester’s confession. It is an eight-page report based on four hours of interrogation conducted by Baruch Schatz. Seven pages, actually, and really closer to six: The first page is a signed waiver that states Chester was informed of his rights and waived them, and the last page is mostly blank, except for Chester’s signature, certifying that the report accurately represents his statements to police. This small stack of paper got Chester March condemned to death.
Schatz wrote the report. Chester signed and dated those first and last pages. He initialed each of the other pages, to indicate that he’d seen them and that they were consistent with his statements. There are no audio or video recordings of the interrogation, but interrogations weren’t typically recorded in 1976.
Schatz’s report says Chester confessed to the 1953 killing of a sex worker named Cecilia Tompkins. According to the report, Chester said he had been thinking about killing a woman since adolescence, and he’d decided to try it. He attempted to dissolve the body using sulfuric acid, and when that failed, he dumped her in the Mississippi River. Chester further admitted that, two years later, he killed his wife Margery. He beat and strangled her in the kitchen of their Memphis house and buried her body on a wooded tract of land his father owned in Mississippi. He also confessed to the 1976 killing of a woman named Evelyn Duhrer, who had rented a room to him in her home.
Appended to the confession was a report from Schatz, documenting the excavation of the area where Chester said he buried his wife. A forensic team discovered skeletal remains under a layer of calcium oxide—quicklime—and three feet of dirt. A report by the coroner notes that a full autopsy was impossible, due to the advanced state of decomposition, but that the body was that of a Caucasian woman, about five foot three, which was Margery March’s height, and while some of the teeth were missing, those that were present matched Margery March’s dental records. The coroner concluded that the condition of the remains was consistent with death by beating and strangulation as described by Chester in the report.
While I was reading, I got a collect call from Chester at the prison.
CHESTER MARCH: Did you catch up to Ed Heffernan?
CARLOS WATKINS: Yes, we spoke. He gave me your records. They make for interesting reading. I’m looking at your confession right now.
MARCH: It looks bad, doesn’t it? Schatz certainly knew his business.
WATKINS: And you admitted to these things?
MARCH: I have no idea what I said to him. I don’t remember talking to him at all. Take a look at the exhibits from my appeal in 1986.
WATKINS (NARRATION): I found the file in the box. It contained X-ray photographs of Chester’s head. They’re dated one day after Schatz’s interrogation report.
MARCH: You find the pictures?
WATKINS: Yes.
MARCH: You’re looking at what they call a concussive brain injury, and a cranial fracture. Whatever I said in that room, I was not in my right mind when I said it. And listen: When you talk to Buck and you hear him make references to busting heads or stoving people’s skulls in, he’s not embellishing or being colloquial. That is what he went around doing to people in a very literal sense. He busted my head. Imagine tapping a soft-boiled egg with a spoon. What that does to an eggshell is what he did to me. I’m lucky to be alive. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d be better off if he’d just killed me.
WATKINS (NARRATION): In the 1986 appeal, Chester’s lawyers argued that the statement should not have been admitted at trial, due to Chester’s head injury. The Tennessee State Supreme Court ruled that Chester couldn’t get his conviction reversed for that reason because Chester’s lawyer hadn’t objected to the admission of the statement on that basis at trial.
In 1992, a different team of appellate attorneys hired a handwriting analysis expert to examine Chester’s signatures on the statement. The expert said that the handwriting on the documents, when compared to existing samples of Chester’s handwriting, was clumsy and tremulous. This showed that Chester had signed his confession while in a diminished cognitive state, due to his traumatic brain injury.
Since handwriting analysis was not typically used for this purpose in 1976, Chester’s lawyers argued this analysis was evidence produced through newly available forensic techniques that had not been available at trial. This kind of argument was often used in the early ‘90s to get new trials in cases where DNA testing created doubts about the factual determinations of old cases. But a panel of appellate judges did not see Chester’s handwriting analysis as equivalent to new DNA evidence, and they denied the appeal.
In 1996, Chester’s lawyers tried to get a court to order the alleged remains of Margery March exhumed. They argued that the forensics used at the time to identify the remains were no longer accepted science, that it could no longer be said that the remains had been identified as Margery beyond a reasonable doubt, and that it was unconstitutional to perform a contemporary execution on the basis of such outdated evidence. The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the conviction and refused to dig up Margery’s alleged body.
In 2002, a different appellate team came back to the head injury. They tried to get around the fact that the courts had already ruled on the issue by arguing that advances in neurology and our progressing understanding of the effects of traumatic brain injuries raised new constitutional questions about the admissibility of Chester’s 1976 statement. The state supreme court wasn’t having any of that and upheld the conviction again.
If you are recognizing a pattern, you’re not alone. Every one of these appeals is an objection to carrying out a modern execution that is justified by abandoned and repudiated police practices and outdated, outmoded methods of evidence gathering. Chester March has been on death row for thirty-five years, and the men who are going to kill him are following orders given by a judge and jury two generations removed.
Here’s something to think about: William Faulkner, who is still revered in these parts, said that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And here in Faulkner’s South, the past is still killing people.
Here’s something else to think about: William Faulkner was only twenty-five years old when Buck Schatz was born. Some people would like to believe we’ve moved past the pernicious aspects of our history, but that history is still with us, and here in Tennessee, a man is going to be put to death on the say-so of that history. In the procedural his
tory of Chester March’s appeals, we see the decrepit, liver-spotted hand that operates the levers of the death machine that is American Justice.
13
I awoke at six thirty. Rose was still sleeping. My habit was to go downstairs on my own in the mornings, get some coffee, and flip through The Commercial Appeal. Usually I’d get up—by myself, if I was feeling strong, and with assistance from an aide the rest of the time. There was a cord on the wall above the bed that I could pull to call for help. If I pulled it, somebody would come into the room—the doors here didn’t lock—and haul me out of bed. Rose would sleep through it. Or at least she’d pretend to, as I slowly dressed myself.
I had reached the point where putting on pants had become a difficult process. The staff was willing to help out with that as well, but I wasn’t quite ready to hand over that much of my dignity. So I would sit in a chair with the walker in front of me, and I would pull the pants over my feet and get them up around my knees, before lifting myself up and leaning on the walker to pull them up the rest of the way. Most days, I could stand on my own long enough to zip the fly and fasten my belt, but I usually needed to thread the belt through the loops on the pants before I put them on, because I had a lot of difficulty reaching behind myself. I was lucky that my fingers were still dexterous enough to fasten buttons and operate zippers, but my wardrobe choices had, nonetheless, shifted toward sweaters and pullovers in the last couple of years, after favoring oxford shirts for decades. It was easier to find the sleeves in a pullover, and there was nobody to look sharp for anyway.
I didn’t pull the cord for assistance, though. I didn’t clamber for the walker. I didn’t undertake the burdensome ritual of struggling into my clothes in the dark while Rose slept. I looked at the ceiling and listened to her breathing.
She got up a little after eight.
“Surprised to see you still in bed,” she said, after she checked the clock on the nightstand.
“I guess I was pretty tired,” I replied.
We both dressed quietly, her with a bit less difficulty than me, on account of the fact that she was slightly younger, and she had never been shot.
Then we padded down the carpeted hallway and took the elevator to the ground floor to find some breakfast. Before I came here, I hadn’t been a huge fan of breakfast food, but I’d learned to like it at Valhalla, because the dining room was less crowded during breakfast than it was during other meals. I grabbed a plastic tray with some chlorine-smelling dishes and tarnished flatware. The forks and knives were stainless steel, and I didn’t know that even could get tarnished, but everything at Valhalla found a way to become decrepit. I scooped some overcooked scrambled eggs out of a buffet tray warmed by a Sterno can, and I grabbed a bagel—the kind that comes frozen in a package. Rose picked some honeydew melon out of the bowl of fruit salad to go with her eggs. I don’t think Rose ever bought a honeydew melon at the grocery store in all the years I was married to her. I’m not sure anyone does. I only ever saw it on buffets and in fruit salads. I think it lasts longer than other cut fruit; cantaloupe turns to mush after a couple of hours at room temperature, and honeydew stays firm. But stability is a questionable virtue in a fruit nobody enjoys. And if stability was the goal of the salad, why was there so much banana in it? Cut pieces of banana turn brown and slimy real fast. Nobody wants to eat a fruit salad full of bland honeydew and slimy banana.
That’s what it means to consign yourself to a place like Valhalla. Filler fruit for the rest of your life.
The honeydew on the breakfast bar looked underripe, and its flesh was mostly white. Even if it had been juicy and green, we’d have barely been able to taste it, and it still would have been an inferior fruit. Considering how much they charged us each month, you’d think this dump could at least serve strawberries. Everybody likes strawberries.
We sat at our usual table, at the far back corner of the dining room. I had to walk farther to get there than I’d need to if I’d been less picky about where to sit, and it wasn’t easy to move the walker across the rug with a tray perched on top of it. But I preferred to eat in a spot where nobody could sneak up on me from behind.
At Valhalla, the smallest tables in the dining room are set for four people. Since it’s less crowded in the morning, it’s less likely somebody will try to sit with us, so breakfast is the one meal of the day I am not usually forced to eat while having a conversation about things I don’t care about with people whose names I can’t remember.
But, while Rose and I picked at our eggs in eloquent silence, some guy came over and sat at our table.
“Hello, Schatzes!” said this putz, whose high spirits were entirely inappropriate under the circumstances.
“Hello, Gus Turnip,” Rose said. She enunciated the name loudly and slowly because she knew I had no idea who he was.
“What kind of a name is Turnip?” I asked.
“Scots-Irish,” said Turnip. “We’ve had this conversation before. My people were Scots-Irish, and yours were Jews from Eastern Europe. You told me about your great-grandfather, who was born in a Lithuanian shtetl and burned Atlanta with Sherman.”
How had I told this guy those things, when I was pretty sure I had never met him before?
“Buck’s just giving you a hard time, Gus,” Rose said.
“She’s right,” I agreed. “I’ll do that.”
Turnip smiled at her. His teeth were the color of an old sidewalk. “I just wanted to see if y’all were going to be joining us for Lunch Bunch this week.”
“Nope,” I said. “Got other plans.”
I didn’t remember who Gus Parsnip was, but I remembered Lunch Bunch. Eight or ten of the inmates met up every week in the lobby, and one of the aides loaded them into a van and took them to TGI Friday’s or Applebee’s to enjoy a lousy meal with lousy company.
“Maybe we could go, Buck,” Rose said.
“I’m pretty sure we have that other thing we need to do, and also, I don’t want to,” I reminded her.
She set her fork down on her napkin. “You always talk about how much you hate the food here. Why don’t you want to go for a meal out?”
“Our grandson is in town,” I said.
“He’s busy studying for the bar exam. We have the time.”
“Why are you being so persistent about this?”
“Why are you being so obstinate?”
Gus Pumpkin was looking uncomfortable. “I didn’t mean to start a controversy. Why don’t y’all check your schedule, and if you feel like joining us, just show up, and we’d be delighted to have you.”
“Thank you, Gus,” Rose said. “It was so nice to see you.”
“Well, I have my breakfast here,” Gus said, gesturing at the plate he had set in front of him. “I thought I might join y’all.”
“It was good talking to you, Potato,” I said. “I guess we’ll be seeing you around.” Then I lit a cigarette, even though smoking was banned in the common areas of the building.
“Oh, all right, then,” Gus said, and he gathered up his breakfast and carried it to a table on the other side of the dining room.
When Gus was safely out of earshot, Rose started laughing. “Did you see the look on his face when you called him a potato?”
“What did you say his name was?” I asked.
“Turnip.”
“So, pretty much the same thing,” I said.
“Mr. Schatz!” called one of the aides from across the room, waving a finger at me.
I stubbed out the cigarette, and Rose started laughing again.
“I know they’re annoying, but I worry about you, Buck,” she said. “If I’m not here, are you going to eat all your meals alone?”
“If you’re not here, I doubt I will find solace in the Lunch Bunch,” I said.
Still laughing, she put her head in her hands.
“Can you picture me at Friday’s splitting an order of loaded potato skins with Gus, who is, himself, a loaded potato skin?” I asked. “Do you think they sing son
gs together in the van when they’re riding to the restaurant?”
“I just worry about you,” she said. “I worry about a lot of things.”
“When did I tell him about my great-grandfather? And why?”
“I don’t know,” Rose said. “But we’ve got an appointment with your neurologist today, to talk about your memory problems.”
“Wonderful. That guy’s always a real ray of sunshine,” I said.
TRANSCRIPT: AMERICAN JUSTICE
CARLOS WATKINS (NARRATION): It’s about a four-hour drive from Nashville to Memphis. I thought I might get to see the Smoky Mountains, but it turns out that I was heading in the wrong direction. West Tennessee is mostly flat—mostly farmland. I drove past thousands of acres of what I think were soybeans. Memphis is a transportation hub, and I was sharing the highway with a lot of tractor-trailers heading in and out of it; I got good gas mileage riding in their draft, and I was pleased that I was lowering my carbon footprint, until I thought about how much diesel all those trucks were burning. These are the systems of convenience that Ed Heffernan is always talking about, running invisibly in the backgrounds of our lives, making things effortless for us, and causing mounting and irreparable harm.
With so much freight traveling along the highway, there are a lot of stops along this stretch of I-40. Gas stops. Truck stops. Rest stops. IHOP, Denny’s, Shoney’s, the Cracker Barrel, and, every so often, a Waffle House. Lots of little towns with names like Fairview and Dickson and Bucksnort. Places that might seem inviting, if you’re white. But I wanted no fellowship at the Cracker Barrel, and I did not take the exit to visit the world-famous Bucksnort Trout Ranch. I gassed up before I left Nashville and stayed on the highway until I saw the Mississippi River, and I listened to Memphis music the whole way down.
If you look at the travel brochures in the lobby of any Motel 6 or Holiday Inn Express in these parts, you’ll always see the pasty, swollen face of Elvis Presley on the front of them, but Memphis is one of the cultural capitals of black America. It is as important, in its way, as Motown or Harlem. Memphis had Sun Studio, where B. B. King, Rufus Thomas, and Junior Parker laid down the blues, as well as Stax Records, the birthplace of Southern soul, and home to Booker T. & the M.G.s, Isaac Hayes, and Otis Redding.
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