Dark Spell

by Mara Leveritt

  To Jason, the whole show seemed to be summed up at the end, when Fogleman, having reminded the jurors about all “this Satanic stuff,” pointed at Damien and pronounced, “There’s not a soul in there.”84 Just as Jason remembered, when all was said and done, that’s what the state’s case had rested on: a lacework of unsupported claims, the testimony of a charlatan, and language from the Inquisition.

  For Jason, Paradise Lost was both awful and fascinating to watch, like seeing a film of a car crash in which you were almost killed or of a disaster that ruined your home and swept away your family. Yet such comparisons weren’t quite apt, either. There was something off-kilter about this tragedy. It wasn’t as straightforward as a car crash or as indifferent as a natural disaster. Jason saw more clearly now the veil of officiousness that clothed the case. The trial looked dignified and formal, but it rested on clever absurdity.

  For all in the film that rattled Jason, it held one shining moment when someone spoke a plain and beautiful truth. That someone was his mother. Overcoming all her frailties, Jason saw his mother in a scene he’d never known had taken place. There she stood outside the courtroom, confronting all the forces arrayed against her son—and making more sense, it seemed to Jason, than anyone else in the film. “It’s kind of like the Nazis, you know,” she was telling the filmmakers. “They can just take somebody’s word and come in your house and take you away. And, basically, that’s what they did, because of what Jessie told them, even though it had all those inconsistencies in it.”

  Afterward, just as after the trial, Jason felt indignant. “What I found insulting was how, if Damien said anything, Brent Davis and John Fogleman would twist it around,” he said. “I found all that stuff repulsive. And it really got everything and everyone away from the real issue of who committed the crime.” Still, Jason thought—then and now—that Damien had conducted himself well. “He was honest. He wasn’t hiding anything. He was totally operating under the security of what you’re taught about being an American: that trials are fair, that you have the freedom to educate yourself, and that you have the freedom to worship whatever religion you want. He was being totally honest and saying all that under the premise that, ‘I might not live the way you do, but in America, that’s okay.’”

  As soon as the credits began to roll, Mojo jumped up and said, “JB, you’re going home, man!” But Jason was not elated. The film had taken a toll. “It’s hard to see yourself going through all that stuff again,” he later explained. “And I could see the people I wasn’t able to see while it was going on—my mom and Little Terry—there in the courtroom at my sentencing. After it was all over, I could see in the video that my mom was trying to get my attention. It was painful for me. So while Mojo was jumping up, I was just kind of sitting there in a daze and reliving it all. Seeing my mom and Little Terry that close to me and not even knowing they were that close to me at the time, and seeing how much pain was in her face, I was like, man, I wish I could have just said, ‘Hey, Mom, I love you and everything will be all right.’”

  Back in his rack, with time to think, Jason experienced a rush of conflicting reactions. He realized how much better able he was now to “absorb” the experience of his trial than he’d been at sixteen. Back then, he’d literally taken to heart the notion that the jury would consider Damien, Jessie, and him innocent until the state proved they were guilty. Tonight, though, he’d seen his trial more clearly. Going into it, he said, “Everyone knew we were guilty, so everyone made sure there was something to support that.” At his trial, Jason expected the jurors to want to be shown evidence. Tonight he realized that the jury had simply “let Fogleman dramatize and ostracize us.”

  In fairness, he also acknowledged to himself how lame his defense team had been. “The jurors heard Michael Carson, but they didn’t hear my alibi witnesses. They weren’t allowed to hear stuff that was available even then. So they were only getting one side of the picture.” Reflecting from yet another angle, he thought, “It’s supposed to be a jury of your peers, but people on the jury were so far removed from a character like Damien, they could hardly relate to him. And even if they’d been able to, the picture they got of him from the prosecutors was so vilified, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  Scenes of Jessie, Damien, and himself being led in handcuffs into and out of courtrooms—alone and so estranged, from each other and from the mobs around them—had been especially hard to watch, despite Metallica’s familiar music in the background. As hard as prison had been for him, he’d felt anew “how much pain Damien’s family and Jessie’s family and my family were put through during all that.” Seeing Paradise Lost had reminded him “how the whole community turned against us.”

  As for seeing himself back then: “Oh, man. That was the worst. Everything about it was bad. Just seeing myself going through that, all the time thinking, ‘Justice will prevail.’” Watching his world collapse, he’d heard himself warn his younger self on the screen: “Dude, you had no idea!”

  Chapter FIVE

  GRIMES

  February 1, 1998 - July 31, 2001

  Memories from Paradise Lost pummeled Jason well beyond that night. For the first time, he had seen—seen!—events that surrounded his arrest, plans which were laid while he waited in jail, and the officials who conducted his trial. The images took their time working their way through his brain, knocking over this misconception, bulldozing that belief, returning him to an all new square one, raising a riot of new questions. Jason was no longer a shackled sixteen year-old kid being run through the machinery of law. He was now nearly twenty-one—a man, whose maturity had been bought at the price of his youth. He’d spent the last five years enduring some of the harshest brutality his country could legally offer, from the threat of death at his trial to the day-to-day threats at Varner. He’d entered the system young, trusting and visually impaired. He was none of those things now.

  He’d survived, at least so far, both physically and spiritually. He had not succumbed to meanness, though meanness surrounded him. He’d become a man with hope but without delusions. He hadn’t graduated from high school, but he’d earned his GED. Instead of studying art in college, he’d come through “gladiator school.” Varner had turned out to be everything they’d warned him about at Diagnostic. “Windows were knocked out. Fights were constant things,” he recalled. Yet, in that environment, he’d managed to find a measure of peace and respectability as a count-room clerk. One morning, as Jason was coming off the graveyard shift, a supervisor stopped Jason in the hall. “Are you going to Grimes when it’s open?” the supervisor asked. “I’m looking for somebody to go over there and run our school.”

  Rumors had circulated for months about the two new prisons being built in northeast Arkansas. One would be for men, the other for women, and they were going to be run by a private company, the Wackenhut Corporation.85 The men’s unit would be named after Sgt. Scott A. Grimes, a prison guard who was stabbed to death the year after Jason entered prison.

  Jason had heard that the Grimes Unit would be for young offenders, twenty-one and under, who were entering with nonviolent charges. He waited to hear more. “Do you work on computers yet?” the supervisor asked. “Not officially,” Jason answered. The supervisor said, “Well, I’ve talked to people about you, and they say you could go over and run the unit’s school.”

  Jason understood the prison’s staffing dilemma. With prison populations burgeoning, the state could not afford to hire enough employees, and among those who were hired, turnover was high. As a result, reliable inmate clerks were needed throughout the system. Without them, no unit could function. A good clerk serving a life sentence was especially valuable.

  Administrators recognized the clerks’ importance, and so did the clerks themselves. In every unit they formed tight-knit groups, stayed in the same barracks, and tended to hold onto their positions, especially if they liked their supervisors. Jason enjoyed being a count-room clerk, and he liked his supervisor a lot.
He realized that the new prison was probably finding it hard to recruit qualified clerks who were willing to leave their current posts to work at the new unit’s school. On the other hand, given a choice between the job he was doing and clerking in a school, Jason would choose the school. The decision was made easier when his friend Smitty agreed to go and clerk in the school, too.

  “So after that,” Jason said, “instead of going back to the barracks, I’d go sit in the school and watch the clerks. I learned all three of their jobs; school management, running the office, and running the computer lab.” In February 1998, two months shy of his twenty-first birthday, Jason and Smitty boarded the prison bus for the three-hour drive north to the just-opened Scott Grimes Unit.

  It wasn’t what he’d expected. “When I got over there, they put me into 1-Delta, a barracks with two-man cells. I get in there and I notice that everybody in this barracks has a murder charge. Why is that?” The answer wasn’t long in coming. “Once they got the place built, Varner just got rid of everybody who’d been giving them trouble. They dumped all their knuckleheads into Grimes. It was the same thing that happened just before I got to Varner. So all these guards at Varner were telling the Wackenhut guys, ‘You won’t be able to handle these guys.’ So the guys running Grimes were really aggressive starting out. Their entire message was: ‘You’re not going to do here what you did at Varner.’”

  Inmates at Grimes were separated by charge, so Jason, despite his Class 1-C status, was in with the murderers. Within each group, the men were separated alphabetically. His roommate was André Blair. “The first thing I noticed was that the TVs in the barracks were twice as big as at Varner, and the

  barracks had microwaves. And the food wasn’t farm food. It was like school cafeteria food, prepared at the women’s unit. The women fixed food for both units, and the men at Grimes did the laundry for both. The food was awesome.”

  The staff was on heightened security alert. “All they kept saying was, ‘This ain’t Varner,’ Jason recalled. “The school was not up and running yet, so when I first got there, they pretty much just kept us in lockdown in our cells.” Gradually, the staff began to let the men into the commons area, and not long after that, violence erupted. Jason was using the telephone when he saw, all of a sudden, an inmate walk over and swing a chair at the back of a captain’s head. Jason hung up and walked to his cell. Within seconds, a voice came over the intercom instructing everyone to go immediately to their cells, that the doors were about to be locked and that they had better be inside.

  “Of course, there were guys that did not go in their cells,” Jason said. “And, sure enough, they brought in the goon squad. It was a search team. They were dressed all in black. They had shields, batons, and gas masks. The barracks was built with three tiers, and there were pipes coming down from the ceiling. All of a sudden, these canisters of tear gas start dropping down from the pipes. The doors to our cells are solid steel, so I get my towel and put it in my sink and get it wet. I put it on the floor in front of the door. They were using some kind of pepper-based gas that attacks the mucus membranes. They never had done anything like that at Varner. Varner wasn’t designed in cell blocks. It was open barracks. So they’d spray a person with mace but not attack the whole barracks.”

  The steel door on Jason’s cell had a small, shatter-resistant plastic window strengthened with something like chicken wire. Guards could see in and inmates could see out. The doors electronically locked. Jason stood at the window and watched. “After they threw the gas in,” he said, “they came in and they beat them dudes. There were five, six or seven guys outside, and they came out there and just beat them down. There was a stairwell right by my cell. I saw them dragging a guy by his feet. His hands and feet were tied with zip ties. They were dragging him down the stairs on his belly, and his chin would bounce on every step.”

  Time passed. Jason hoped the incident was over. But no. “After a good while, they come around and opened everybody’s bean flap”— the slot in the door that opens from the outside through which food trays can pass. “They told everybody to strip down to our boxers. They said, ‘You will strip down. This is not Varner.’ So I look at André. He looks at me. I’ve already seen what’s going to happen when you exhibit disobedience. So André and I strip down to our boxers.”

  Guards told the men to stick their hands out the bean hole. “They take a plastic zip tie and wrap it around my wrists, and they make it tight,” Jason said. “I mean, it’s biting to the bone. Of course, me, I understand that these people are like in a hornets’ nest that’s been kicked. There’s no reasoning with them. They do Blair the same way and tell us to go sit down on our bunks. Then, they open the door and order us out. ‘Over by the wall! Bend over and kiss your ass! On your knees! Heads against the wall!’ Pretty soon, everybody that didn’t stay out and fight is out there. But there’s still some gas, and now my nose is running because I’m out in it. It’s just a gross, messed-up, compromised situation—and painful. It’s a concrete floor, and I’ve got bony knees. My hands are aching. It’s really bugging me. But I’m not going to say anything. I’m not going be the one they get. My runny nose—it was what it was.”

  As Jason recalls, guards had at least a hundred men against the wall. The warden, a man who’d worked for Wackenhut prisons all over the world, strode along the line like a general. “’This isn’t Varner,’ he says, “and he’s got in his left hand, while he’s talking, he’s got a whole box of freaking toothpicks. He puts one in the right side of mouth. He chews on it. He moves it to the left side. Then he spits it out and gets another one. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was ripping through them things. He’s telling us how we’re going to be good or we’re going to be punished. Then, he has us stand up and march outside into the hallway. We’re marching down the hallway, and we get all the way to the last window, and they tell us to get up along the wall again, only now they tell us to lie down on our bellies. They’ve got all the guys with the big time, and that includes me, of course. So they’re putting down what’s called a demonstration of their power. And after we sit out there for a while, with the warden giving us his speech with the toothpicks where other guys in their cells could hear, there was one guy who said something about his hands, and he got summarily dealt with.”

  That was Jason’s welcome to Grimes. Eventually, the men were marched to the prison gymnasium, where a nurse looked them over. She went to Jason first and asked if he could wiggle his fingers. An officer beside her cut the zip tie. The nurse asked, “Are you okay?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “I’m going to take this one with me down to the infirmary.” When circulation returned to his hands, Jason was put back in his cell, where he and his roommate stayed on lockdown for several, chaotic days. Important parts of the prison, such as the commissary, that were manned by inmates weren’t running yet. “Guys were complaining,” Jason said. “Tensions were high.” As with Varner, no word about the troubles at Grimes made it into the Arkansas news. That would have been unlikely at any time, but the gassing occurred in 1998, when the impeachment of President Bill Clinton dominated the nation’s—and Arkansas’s—news.

  Within a few months of Jason’s arrival at Grimes, the staff got the new prison structured, inmates’ got their original classifications back, and talk turned to starting the school. Jason was more than ready to be let out of his cell and get back to doing a job. The day finally came when Mac Kennedy, the civilian teacher hired to run the school, showed up at Jason’s door. Kennedy said, “Baldwin, I need to get this school up and running.” Jason replied that he was ready but demanded, “Get me out of here.” Kennedy made the move happen, and Jason was returned to his trustee status in a twenty-five man open barracks. Smitty went to work in the school with Jason in the computer lab. “But then Smitty got out,” Jason said, “and after he got released, I ended up running all of it.” By 1999, conditions were quieter at Grimes.86

  Jason heard that Damien’s lawyers had filed his Rule 3
7 petition and that Judge Burnett had held eight days of hearings on it, staggered between May 1998 and March 1999. Jason knew that, after that, Edward Mallett, a lawyer representing Damien on his appeal, had argued that Damien’s trial lawyers had compromised themselves by accepting five thousand dollars from the HBO filmmakers to offset legal expenses.87 He also knew that Mallett had called in an expert who said that a wound on the face of victim Stevie Branch could have been a bite mark made by a human. The question was, if the wound was a bite mark, who—or what—had made it? Jason, Damien and Jessie all agreed to have impressions taken of their teeth to establish that, if the human bite theory turned out to be correct, they could be excluded as the source. Once again, Jason allowed himself to hope that science would come to his rescue. “I was excited about everything that came out,” Jason said. “Things like a bite mark on Stevie Branch—I’d say, ‘Okay, this is going to be it.’ If an expert says, ‘Whoever killed them bit them,’ I say, ‘Yeah, get my impression made.’”

  Otherwise, for Jason, the arguments were interesting but abstract; at this point, he had neither an attorney nor any idea how results favoring Damien might also favor him.88 All Jason could do was live his life, which, at that time, revolved mostly around his work. He loved his job at the school.

  “The staff, the people who I work with—they make me feel like just another guy on the job, not an inmate in a white suit,” he said at the time. “They care about me. Every day, we talk and debate over what’s going on with my case, and they know—they know—I don’t belong here. It’s weird, to be so liked in the place where I work, doing something I enjoy, and yet to have to walk out of here every day, back into the population, where the security runs the show and how different that is. In here I’m treated nicely, fairly, and respectfully. But when I step out of where I work, I am ridiculed, picked on, and treated with the utmost prejudice. If I could I’d just bring my bed and things down here to the school and stay!”