The Innocence Commission and the Innocent Man

October 1987.  Nine at night.  Hickory, North Carolina, an hour or so west of Charlotte, they called it Little Berlin.   Carrie Eliot, widowed just under a year, 69 years old, five foot nothing on a good day, widowed, living alone.  

A man forced his way in.  "I want you. . . . I like older women. . . . They don't mess around."

He raped her.  First in the living room.  then the bedroom.

A neighbor, paid $1,000 for the tip, told police it was Willie Grimes.  Carrie Elliot, whose description didn't match Willie, picked him from a photo spread.  Then she identified him in court.  

Willie testified. He'd gone to the police station voluntarily.  Had no idea what they wanted.  They hadn't let him go. And now here he was. And damn, he never raped that woman.  Or anyone else, for that matter.

You know what happened next.  Nice white lady.  Black guy.  She says it's him. He says nope. There's no DNA.  No forensics.  Just she said.  And he denied.

Willie J. Grimes was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

* * * * *

It's not giving anything away to say that Willie Grimes didn't do it.  The title of Benjamin Rachlin's book, Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption, makes that clear.

And if you read the flap on the dust jacket, you'll realize that the title tells only half the story. Rachlin's book is as much about Willie's "relentless champion, Christine Mumma, a cofounder of North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission," as it is about Willie.  That's its strength - and its weakness.

Here's Willie.  He knows he's innocent.  His family and friends know he's innocent.  His lawyer fully believes he's innocent.  But the jury didn't buy it and the judge didn't buy it and the appellate courts don't buy it and . . . .  Damn.

The guy is shuffled from prison to prison.  He has menial jobs (there are no other sorts in prison) but makes the best of them.  He tries to stay out of trouble.  He wishes his lawyer would get back to him with what's happening - or even what isn't happening.

He'd probably have been paroled, but that required rehabilitation, which required accepting responsibility for raping Carrie Elliott.  And he couldn't do that, of course, because he hadn't raped her.

Christine Mumma was a juror in the capital case of one James McDowell.  She voted for death, but really . . . .  A few years later she went to law school. First thing she did when she got there was look up the guy she'd condemned. He hadn't been killed. In fact, he was off the row.  New lawyers got his sentence reduced to life.

She felt strangely relieved he'd never been executed.  Even a criminal like McDowell deserved a better attorney than he'd had.

After law school, after one thing and another, she ended up clerking for I. Beverly Lake, chief justice of the state supreme court.  She noticed that some of the criminal cases were incompetently tried.  Maybe the guys were guilty, maybe not.  But if they were innocent . . . . No, that never happened.  But shit.

She talked to Lake who told her what she probably knew anyway.  "Guilt wasn't a question his court considered.  That had been addressed already, at trial. . . . A judge didn't overrule jurors based on his own subjective opinion."  But you know, and they knew, that some folks behind bars were being proved innocent.  So it seemed it did happen.

Meanwhile, Willie, who was innocent but without proof, sat in prison.  In time he converted.  He became a Jehovah's Witness.  

And Christine got to working with a small clinic at UNC's law school.  And then she got Lake involved and others.  And they put together a committee to try to figure out how to make convicting innocent people harder.  

Willie's case eventually made it to Christine's file cabinet.  Where it sat because while it seemed pretty clear that his was a good innocence case, there wasn't the evidence to help him.  There just wasn't anything she could do.

And then she dragged that commission kicking and screaming into actually trying to figure out how to get North Carolina to make a serious effort to undo past wrongful convictions.  

Which eventually led (as you learned from the dust jacket) to North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission.  Which is something extraordinary.*

And as you might imagine, after, years and years and false starts and dead ends.  YIPPEE!  The NCII gets its second exoneration.  And it's Willie.

And it's all very cool.

Rachlin tells the stories in alternating chapters until the end when they merge.  It's an effective narrative technique, and he tells the stories well.  That's especially true as he reports on the rape and what passes for an investigation and the trial.  And it's true as he follow's Christine's efforts to create something new in North Carolina.  And it's true when the strands come together at the end.

But the day to day of Willie's life in prison.  All 24 years of it.  Too often not so much.  It's not surprising.  It's hard to make the quotidian - even the prison quotidian - fascinating.  There are moments, but they don't tend to get developed.  An then there's another visit from his Jehovah's Witness teachers.

I'm carping, and probably shouldn't.  It's not how I'd have told the story.  But that's not the test.

So let's go with this.  You know, if you're among the people who read this blawg, that the legal system fucks up more than its fair share of the time.  Too damn many factually innocent folks are in prison - often leaving the actual criminals to prey on others.  Willie Grimes's story of innocence eventually recognized is, in that sense, nothing much new.  

By itself, it's one of those long New Yorker articles.  But it's not by itself.  it's connected to Christine Mumma's effort to do something not just for him but for a conception of justice.  That's something to write home about.  

It's something, too, to read a book about.  Ghost of the Innocent Man is that book.


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* And unique.  There are, scattered around the country in various prosecutors' offices, conviction integrity units.  Some of which actually seem to function - though others pretty clearly don't.  But no other state has an actual, statutory Commission and a procedure for locating and exonerating.

Two Down; Thousands To Go

It was September last year when a judge in North Carolina declared Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown innocent of the horrific rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie.  I wrote about it at the time, quoting Scalia explaining why Lee McCollum ought to be killed (without actually hearing his appeal).  He wrote that an 

11-year-old girl [was] raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat.

And I noted that he barely touched the surface.  I quoted the North Carolina Supreme Court.

An autopsy was performed upon the body of Sabrina Buie. Linear abrasions on her back and buttocks revealed a pattern indicating that the body had been dragged over a rough surface. There was a tear or laceration deep within the victim's vagina and a tear or laceration in her anal canal. Petechial hemorrhaging, characterized as the bursting of small blood vessels caused by pressure, was observed in the victim's eyes. Similar hemorrhaging caused by a pressure mechanism was also observed in the heart and lungs. The brain appeared slightly swollen due to a lack of oxygen.
A stick and pair of panties were wedged in the victim's throat, completely obstructing the airway. Dr. Deborah Radisch, Chief Assistant Medical Examiner for the State of North Carolina, testified that the victim died of asphyxiation.

But mostly I wrote about how, after 30 years in prison/on death row, McCollum and Brown were exonerated, declared innocent by a judge.  

I wrote about how Johnson Britt, the current prosecutor in Robeson County, joined defense counsel in urging the judge to declare the half brothers innocent. About how DNA, finally tested,* pointed to a neighbor - who'd committed a similar crime.

And I wrote about how Joe Freeman Britt,** the now-retired prosecutor who got the two innocent men convicted and sentenced to die, insists that they're guilty. Because who you gonna believe, fucking science which happens to exonerate them and point to a nearby guy who's doing life for a similar rape-murder a month after Sabrina Buie's?  Or the coerced, inconsistent, promptly recanted confessions of a pair of teen-aged half brothers with mental disabilities?

But mostly I wrote about 30 years.  And about how this thing called "criminal justice" which freed the now-middle-aged men bears no real relationship to justice.  Whatever justice might be.

It's been about nine months now.  And of course it's been a struggle.  Had they been freed by the North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission, they'd have been eligible to collect $750,000 each. Small compensation for 30 years but certainly helpful for getting started again in the outside world. But no, they were declared innocent by a judge.  So fuck 'em.  Hey, we gave each of them $45 on the way out the door.  Isn't that enough?

Craig Jarvis in the Raleigh News and Observer.

Since being freed from prison last year, the men have been living with their sister in Fayetteville, where she has been struggling to pay rent and utilities on her home. The death penalty center established a fund to help them survive.
Because they had been freed by a judge, and not on a declaration of innocence by the Innocence Inquiry Commission, McCollum and Brown could not collect compensation. To do so, they needed a pardon from the governor.

Which he's now done.  After nine months.  Per the press release.

Governor Pat McCrory signed official pardons of innocence for Henry McCollum and Leon Brown today. The governor announced his decision to pardon the brothers yesterday after a thorough and comprehensive review by the Office of Executive Clemency, the governor's legal team and the Clemency Committee.

Because you want to be damned sure before tapping into the treasury.  And really, after 30 years, what's another nine months?  (And counting, since there are still some hoops to jump through before getting the checks come in.)

I don't mean to sound churlish, and good for the Governor to finally do the right thing.  And certainly good for Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown (who didn't attend the press conference at which McCrory expressed his deepest sympathy to the family of Sabrina Buie - but offered no sympathy at all to the men who lost 30 years of their lives).  But you know, it all raises some questions.

I quoted Scalia above and in that earlier blog post.  His point was that what Henry Lee McCollum did was so horrific that being executed is just a walk in the park by comparison.  Of course he should die. 

Now, I don't imagine that Scalia is so cold-blooded that he favors killing innocent people even in revenge for the most appalling crimes.  But then, McCollum and Brown weren't executed.  So it's all good.

And hell, they'll even get the big bucks now.
But just how many eggs do you break to make that omelet?  How close to a killing do you have to come before it's a problem?  

It's not just the men and women on the row.  They're the ones who get attention, who have lawyers (and yes, I've been one of them) working for decades on their cases with little or no remuneration. But there are the LWOP folks, too.  And the ones doing a term of years.

Our system, any system, is going to make mistakes.  We're going to kill some number of factually innocent people.  We're going to lock up for a very long time some number of factually innocent people.  We're going to lock up for lesser periods some number of factually innocent people.  We're going to destroy lives that shouldn't be destroyed.

All that's a given.  At some level, it's unavoidable.  We won't, we can't catch all the mistakes.  And we need some system.

But death mistakes are irreversible.  And possible mistakes that we aren't eager to review are, frankly, inexcusable.

Yet our system says no.  Our system says finality.  Our system says we review for procedure not accuracy.  Our system says that it's better to throw away the key, hell, throw away the life, than to find out.  

Because who really gives a shit.  Because if they didn't do that, they probably did something.  And because

Well, because.

"Today we put the past behind us with not just a clear conscience, but a clear name, committed to living a good life and doing God's work,” half-brothers Leon Brown and Henry McCollum said in a statement released by their lawyer, Patrick Megaro.
Brown and McCollum have awaited the pardon, which allows them to collect compensation for their wrongful imprisonment, since pardon applications were received by McCrory on Sept. 15.
“We pray that justice will again prevail and the real murderer is punished justly for his crimes, and we also pray for the victim's family that they find justice and peace,” the statement said.

30 years.  And they take the high road.

Like I said, good for them.  But there are all those others.

And nobody, really, gives enough of a damn to find out.
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*I keep asking, often in all caps to indicate shouting, WHY DON'T THEY JUST TEST THE FUCKING DNA?  And of course, the answer is always, ultimately they same - they don't really want to know. 
**Not related to Johnson according to most reports, a "distant relative" per Alan Blinder in the Times.