I wanted to kill McGregor.
The knowledge hit me like a sucker punch to my gut and brought me out of my swirling thoughts. It scared me. This wanting to kill. I wanted to murder him the way he had murdered my life. I wasn’t a murderer, but I knew if he walked into my cell I could wrap my hands around his neck and enjoy watching the life leave his staring, lying eyes. I imagined it. I held my hands in the air in the night and imagined his neck between my fingers. What would he say? Would he cry and beg for his life the way he had wanted me to cry and beg for mine? Would he confess his lies, his sins, and beg for a mercy that he didn’t have?
I could feel his neck in my hands, and in the dark, I began to squeeze so hard that I could feel his bones crunch and snap against my skin. I pressed harder until his eyes bulged and his tongue rolled out of his mouth and he turned blue. I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until every last breath from his lying, hateful, racist body was gone. I squeezed until he no longer struggled. I squeezed so he could never hurt another person again. I squeezed until every last lie he had in him died with him.
I hadn’t come into this jail a murderer, but if that’s what they said I was, that’s who I would be.
“Hinton, all the way! Hinton, all the way!”
The intercom jolted me upright, and I swung around to put my feet on the floor. I heard the automatic lock click on my cell door as it opened. All the way meant to pack everything up. I couldn’t believe they were taking me so soon. It had to be around 4:00 A.M. I wasn’t ready to go to Holman. I hadn’t talked to my mom. The intercom blared again.
“Hinton, all the way! Get a move on!”
I packed up some legal papers and a few pictures. I didn’t know what else I could take, so I left my commissary behind for whoever wanted it. When the other guys woke up, they would be all over my cell like vultures to take whatever I had left behind. Let them have it. Let them have all of it.
“Let’s go, Hinton.”
I walked through the dayroom and stood at the outside door with my stuff. I was supposed to roll up my mattress and bring my sheet and blanket, but I just left it there. I wasn’t going to follow the rules anymore. I had done that, and look where it had gotten me. I was the worst of the worst, so maybe it was time I started acting like it.
They put me in a holding cell and gave me a breakfast of congealed eggs and a hard biscuit and jelly. I put the food in my mouth, but it had no taste. How was it possible to take away all the taste in food? I was strip-searched, made to bend over and spread my ass cheeks while the guards laughed and joked. They wrapped extra-heavy chains around my waist and attached them to the metal cuffs on my wrists and ankles. I could barely walk, and I wondered who had sat around and said to himself, I should invent something that will chain a man like an animal and make those chains so heavy he can’t hold up his arms or move his legs. I wondered who that bastard was, because I had a hatred for him as well. The guards who walked me out to the van tried to chitchat with me, but I said nothing. They looked uneasy. I had been nice to them since I’d been there, and cooperative. But no more. Why should I make their jobs any easier? I let myself go limp when they tried to hoist me up the first step of the van. I weighed over two hundred pounds. Let them lift me. Let them feel the weight of me as they carted me off to my death. I was somebody. I was a person. Let them feel it.
Their struggling brought me no joy, so eventually I climbed into the van and inched my way across the back seat. I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t going to speak to them or to anyone ever again. When no one believes a word you say, the best thing to do is stop talking.
We rode for over three hours. I had never been this far south before. It felt like we were driving to the end of the world. They didn’t let me call anyone before I left, I guess so I couldn’t plan an escape. I wanted to say goodbye to my mom and to Lester. I hated them even more for not giving me that chance. Two guards sat up front, and there was a mesh cage separating us. The windows had wire mesh over them as well, but I could see out. The guards were joking and laughing up front, and I watched the countryside I loved pass by me. Would I ever feel grass again? I always said this was God’s country, but where was God now? I was chained and shackled like a slave being taken to auction. I was cargo. I was less than human. I thought of my mom always reacting to good news in our neighborhood by saying, “God blessed this family. God did this for our neighbor. Praise be to God for looking out for that family.” If God blessed people, then did he also punish people? I wanted to know why God was punishing me. Why had God blessed that person but put me in the back of a van, wrapped in chains? What did I ever do to God?
I imagined the van crashing and rolling over and over again so that my chains came off and I could climb out of the van. I would run and run and run until there was no death penalty and I wasn’t a condemned man. I would keep running until I was out of Alabama and in some place where freedom was real and my life couldn’t be taken away from me.
I spent another hour just staring out the window. It had been a long time since I’d seen cars and people and open road and open sky. I tried to capture pictures. There was a little boy looking bored in the back seat of a station wagon. There was a pretty girl driving a blue car. There was a restaurant with a Closed sign. There was a family laughing in that car. There was a flash of leg on a woman with a short skirt in the passenger side of that red car. There was a whole world out there enjoying a Wednesday morning, without fear. They were free to do what they wanted, and I wondered if they understood what that meant. I saw a black man, about my age, drive by in a Buick. “Watch out,” I murmured out loud. “They’re going to come for you too.”
“Hey!” I yelled up to the guards.
“What?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
One of the guards mumbled something I couldn’t understand, and the other guy laughed.
Eventually, we pulled into a store with a gas station out front. We parked around the side, and one guard took me into the bathroom while the other went and filled up with gas. I could see some black kids outside the store staring at me like I was a strange animal in the zoo. Let them stare. Let them see what a black man looks like chained from head to toe. Let them remember.
* * *
We pulled up to Holman Prison, and I saw inmates outside the building. A tall wire fence separated them from the parking lot outside the fence and the road beyond that. Two guards opened a big gate for us, and we drove through. They brought me in through a heavy door and took the chains off but cuffed my hands.
“He’s all yours,” the county guard said and turned me over to a corrections officer. He was a short, squat man with long sideburns and a comb-over. They sat me down in a chair and asked me for my name. I said nothing.
“What’s your social?”
I just shrugged.
The guard read it off a paper. “Is that your social?”
I nodded. I wasn’t going to talk to them. I wasn’t going to make this easy.
“We’re gonna send you to the infirmary to get checked out, and then you’ll get a real physical at another time. You gonna put these whites on, and then you’ll be escorted to your cell.”
I didn’t say a word.
I changed into a white prison jumpsuit that said Alabama Department of Corrections on the back. I was given my inmate number—Z468. The infirmary weighed me. Asked me if I took any medication. Asked me if I was on drugs. If I had any medical problems they needed to know about. I shook my head to everything they asked but still didn’t speak.
After medical, I was brought down a hall. There were some other inmates in the hall, but they were told to turn and face the wall with their noses on it. I could feel the tension in the guards when we passed the other inmates. I couldn’t understand why they did this, but then I saw one of the guys look up at me from the wall, and I saw fear in his eyes.
The guard started yelling at the other inmate. “Don’t look at him! You can’t look at him! On your knees! On you
r knees, hands behind your back, nose against the wall! All of you!”
I had no idea what was going on or why the guard reacted that way. The guy was about my age, white, and I realized they all thought I might attack. The regular inmates were being protected from the death row inmate. I was the scariest person in that prison.
I was taken to another guard—the captain of the guards. He told me he was in charge of death row.
“I didn’t ask for you to come here, and I have but one job, and that’s to keep you here. As long as you are at Holman Prison, you are going to see these blue uniforms and you are going to respect them. You will abide by the rules and regulations and do anything these blue uniforms tell you to do. Is that clear?”
I nodded.
“Now, you can make it easy on yourself or you can make it hard on yourself. However you decide to do it. You are on ninety-day probation. You will be cuffed at all times when you are out of your cell. If we get no trouble, you can have the cuffs off when you shower and when you walk. You walk fifteen minutes a day in a cage on the yard. The rest of the time, you are in your cell. We don’t want no trouble. Okay?”
I kept my eyes down and nodded again.
“Sergeant, take him to his cell.”
We walked down a long hall and through a doorway that said Death Row at the top. We walked up a flight of stairs, and the guard started yelling out row numbers. Finally he stopped in front of cell number 8.
“Number 8!” he yelled.
I heard a voice call the number back, and then there was a loud clank and the door opened. Inside was a small, narrow bunk with a thin plastic mattress. Another guard walked in and put a sheet, blanket, towel, and washcloth on the bed. He also set down a brown bag of my stuff from county. It had my Bible and some letters and legal papers from my trial. I could hear guys yelling, and I saw some mirrors sticking out of the other cells so the inmates could see what was going on, who the guards were bringing in. From somewhere far off, I could hear a man screaming. Another man was laughing. Another one just kept saying, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” over and over again.
I walked into the cell, and the guards stepped out.
“When we close the door, stick your hands out through here and we’ll take off the cuffs.” I didn’t say anything, and the guard looked at me like maybe I was stupid. “It’s too late for you to order a Christmas package this year, but maybe next year.”
Christmas? The last thing I was thinking about was Christmas. I didn’t want to order a Christmas package, and I didn’t want to celebrate Jesus’s birthday.
The door slammed shut, and the sounds began to echo in my head. My mouth tasted like metal, and I wondered if I was going to throw up. I could feel my stomach doing flips, and my knees began to shake. I stuck my hands through the small slot so the guards could take off my cuffs. I flexed my wrists and turned back around to face my cell. It was five feet wide and about seven feet long. A metal toilet with a sink on top, and a shelf and the bed. That was it.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked in the bag of my stuff. I pulled out the King James Bible.
There was no God for me anymore. My God had forsaken me. My God was a punishing God. My God had failed and left me to die. I had no use for God. Forgive me, Mama, I thought to myself as I threw the Bible under the bed. I had no use for it. All of it was a lie.
I didn’t bother making my bed. I just lay down and closed my eyes. I didn’t get up when they tried to pass dinner through the slot in my door. I wasn’t going to talk to anyone or take anything from anyone.
I was completely alone.
I was full of a hate too big for that little cell.
I would find a way to escape, and I would find a way to put right all that had been made wrong. I would prove my innocence. I would get my revenge.
I lay there for hours and I must have drifted off, because when I woke up, it was dark except for a light coming from outside my cell.
The only other sound was someone on death row screaming out in the darkness.
“No, no, no, no, noooo!”
I pressed my pillow against my ears, but the screaming never stopped.
9
ON APPEAL
Representation of a death row prisoner is unlike any other kind of case because the client’s life literally depends on counsel’s effort. A capital case demands and deserves from an attorney, and others working on the case, his or her most careful, conscientious and committed effort.
—ALABAMA CAPITAL POSTCONVICTION MANUAL, 4TH EDITION
There is no Welcome to Your Appeal brochure that you get after you are condemned. Nobody sits you down and explains what you have to file and how much time you have to file it. You are guaranteed a direct appeal to the State appellate courts—the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court—but that’s really it. The State of Alabama does not want to make it easy on you, and they offer zero assistance to death row inmates. Unfairly convicted? Prejudiced at trial? Confession coerced? Constitutional rights violated? Your attorney sucked? Good luck with that. There is no postconviction help once you are condemned. You are on your own, and the State does everything it can to make it difficult—a one-year statute of limitations, attorneys general who create the laws that control the process and keep federal reviews from happening later, and a host of other obscure procedures and rules that seem to prevent you from revisiting anything once a court has ruled on it. And in Alabama, judges are elected based on how many people they send to death row, not on how many people they let off.
I called Perhacs’s office whenever I could, and his secretary assured me he was working on my appeal and promised to give him the message I had called. Every week it seemed like I would read about another robbery in Birmingham that fit the same description as Quincy’s, Mrs. Winner’s, and Captain D’s. The Cooler Killer hadn’t slowed down at all, and the times when there was a suspect description, it was the same as Smotherman’s—black male, five foot eleven, 180 pounds. It hadn’t mattered that I was six foot two and 230 pounds, and it didn’t matter that I was locked up and the same crimes kept happening. I thought about the victims’ families. Were they reading the paper? Were they seeing the similarities? Did they ever wonder if the State had convicted the wrong man? I sent Perhacs a note along with every crime report I found in the paper. “Just trying to help,” I wrote. “Thank you so much!”
I wondered if it ever kept him awake at night. What was it like for him knowing I was innocent and sleeping on death row? Did he feel anything? I didn’t know at the time that my mom had started writing Perhacs letters, pleading and begging for him to save my life. Asking him to protect her boy. She wasn’t happy with what was said about me in court. I was her baby, and listening to the lies had been a strain on her. Our neighbor Miss Wesley Mae brought my mom to see me at Holman after my ninety-day probation was over and I was allowed a visit. These two old ladies had never driven so far, alone, and had gotten lost trying to find their way to Atmore. They showed up on a Friday night, two hours after visiting time was over—but the warden had some sympathy for them in their Sunday best making their way to the prison, so he let me have a visit for about twenty minutes.
I hugged my mom as long as I could—another thing that wasn’t usually allowed. She smelled like laundry soap and rose water, but she looked tired. There were dark circles under her eyes, and I could see new lines around her mouth that weren’t there a few months ago. “God will fix this,” she kept saying. “God can do everything but fail, baby. God is going to fix this right up for you.”
“Yes, Mama,” I said, and I could see one of the guards look surprised at hearing me speak. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was done with God. God didn’t live in this place. If there was a God and he thought it was okay to send me to hell while I was still alive, well, then, he wasn’t my God. Not anymore. Not ever again.
“You come with Lester next time. I don’t want you two driving all this way alone. You got that?”
�
��You okay, baby?” My mom reached her hand out and touched my cheek. She wasn’t the only one with new lines on her face and circles under her eyes. I could see her eyes fill with tears.
“I’m okay, Mama. Don’t you be worrying about me. This place is fine. They are treating me real fine.” I knew it was wrong to lie to her, but I believe that lies told to ease pain or protect someone’s heart are lies that need to be told. She already had to live apart from me. If Alabama had its way, she was going to have to live through them putting me to death. I was going to comfort her every single moment that I could, even if it meant telling a million lies. “Now, we only have a few minutes. Don’t spend them crying. I’m just fine, but I could use some of your cooking. I could use a nice, juicy hamburger right now.”
My mama laughed, and I tried to memorize that sound in my mind. I wanted to hang on to that laugh and hear it in my head instead of the endless moaning I heard all day every day on the row.
“Your attorney sent me a couple of letters. He’s going to get you out of here. He’s working real hard.”
She carefully unfolded two letters she had brought in. They were addressed to her. I hadn’t heard from Perhacs yet, but when I called his office, his secretary said that he had filed a motion for a new trial.
I looked at the first letter. It was dated a few weeks before my sentencing.
“Mama, this first letter is from before I came here.”
“Well, I been writing him so he know who you are. I wanted to tell him that what they said at your trial was a lie. They lied on your name. My son is no killer.” She dabbed at her eyes with a white handkerchief.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” I patted her hand. “Let me have a look.” The letter had Law Office of Sheldon Perhacs at the top and my mom’s address below.
The Sun Does Shine Page 10