Chasing Gideon (28 page)

On this particular afternoon in May 2012, he tells his story to me. For a fourth time. He is deeply preoccupied with the judge who repeatedly denied his requests over the years (the same one who was on the team prosecuting his murder case in 1976). The very month that Greg was released in 2003, the judge died. Greg goes into his house to retrieve the judge's yellow and tattered obituary that he has kept these nine years. He reads it—as he has done hundreds of times. The obituary, like all obituaries, says nice things.

“The judge may have been a good man,” Greg muses. “He might have been a good husband, a good father, a good friend to many people—and I'm sure he was. But people may be saying the same thing about me.” Q, the dog, who lies panting at Greg's feet, lifts his head for a moment to look around, as if considering the matter. Then he lowers his head to rest his muzzle on Greg's shoe. “But because I'm not a lawyer, but because I'm the little guy, man, you step on my head and crush me. I don't have money or influence or even God on my side.” Interestingly, he saves most of his venom for the judge and the old boys' network that got him a lawyer, but one friendly with the judge and disinclined to even work up a sweat when it came to Greg's case.
Gideon
guaranteed him an attorney, but a flawed indigent defense system and a lackluster lawyer rendered that almost meaningless. “But why?” he says. “You know, why? Sometimes I think about it.” He wonders what the solutions are to the troubled criminal justice system here, to the high incarceration rates in the black community, to the racism and power imbalance. He talks on and on, indignant, furious, rambling—but
right. He grows heated. Mostly he wonders how one draws attention to these problems, how change happens. “Sometimes I think about, what is it? This Mahatma Gandhi thing, this passive resistance,” he says. “They crack your head to the skull. You get up and say to the man, ‘Thank you.' He cracks your head again. You got to be an animal to continue that. That's what I felt like the judge was doing to me every time I came forward. It's an outrage.” He pauses, inhales, collects himself. “But I'm not talking from bitterness.” He says this, and yet, how can he let go of bitterness? Like a dog licking a wound, keeping it open and raw, Greg Bright revisits his past, alternately trying to decide whether he—and the city of New Orleans—get to have a happy ending or whether their shared story is a tragedy. Is it a happy ending because he now sits on the porch of the modest little yellow house he owns in New Orleans's 7th Ward—“my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” as he once called it after finally receiving $190,000 restitution in 2011 for being wrongly imprisoned? Or is it a tragedy because he wasted twenty-seven years of his life behind bars?

The criminal justice system in New Orleans—indeed, the nation—seems similarly poised between plot twists, an ending that could go either way.

Rodney Young at his capital murder trial in February 2012. The jury had to decide whether his school years in special ed meant he was “retarded” and thus ineligible for the death penalty. Photo courtesy of
The Covington News.

 

A
t 11:20
P.M.
on the night of March 30, 2008, a 911 operator in Covington, Georgia, took a call.

The woman on the other end of the line was sobbing—almost unintelligible—as she stood at the end of her driveway in the eerie pitch-black silence of a warm spring night. The operator tried to calm her down, get some information.

“What's the address?”

“Sixty-five Benedict Drive,” the woman said. “My son is in the house. He tied up to the chair. I just came home for work . . . I don't know. Help me, Lord. Help me.”

“Ma'am—”

The woman's sobs interrupted her.

“Ma'am, you came home and your son was tied to a chair?”

“Yes.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Is he hurt?”

“Yes, yes. He's out.”

“Sixty-five Benedict?”

“Yes, please help. Please help.”

“Your name?”

“Doris Jones. Help! Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

“Did you go in the house?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see any blood?”

“Yes, all over. Oh, God. I need help.”

“What kind of vehicle are you in?”

“A Chrysler. I been calling him all day long.”

“You been calling all day? When was the last time you talked to him?”

“This morning.”

“This morning?”

“Yes.” Doris Jones began moaning, sobbing.

“Talk to me,” the operator says.

“I can't go back in—”

“Don't go back in! Just stay right here and talk to me. They are on their way.”

“Can't you please hurry up. I'm scared. Oh, Lord. Please God, I need someone to help me.”

“What's his name?”

“Gary Jones.”

The operator tried to calm her, to keep her talking, her questions now on repeat. “How old is he?”

“Twenty-eight . . .”

“Ma'am, is anybody else there with you?”

“No, I open the door and everything is knocked off . . . the chair . . . he there . . . he still has his church clothes on.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm across the street. I'm so scared someone still there. Oh, God.” Doris Jones's primal terror fueled her voice. It rose and swelled and spilled out into the night in a gulping horror at what she'd seen.

“Hold on,” the operator says. “There someone I can call for you?”

“My family all in New Jersey.”

“A friend?”

“I can't think of anybody right now. Help me, Lord. Help me, Jesus. Oh, Lord, help me. Tell them to hurry up and get here. Oh, Lord, tell them to hurry and come.”

“They are coming.”

“. . . Last night when I came home from work, he called me and said . . . the window broken. . . .” She remembered that he told
her the window in the laundry room looked tampered with, as if someone had tried to break in. She remembered that they found the window's screen tossed in the woods at the edge of the house. She remembered that he was concerned about a robbery. “Oh, oh, Lord, help me . . .” Doris spied a police cruiser approaching. “They're here.”

“They're there?”

“Yes.”

“They see you?”

A cop approached Doris. “Listen. Stay right here.” He asked about the situation, her son inside. “He in trouble?”

“I don't know. I think so. He been there all day long.”

The line to the 911 operator goes dead.

Cops rushed the home she shared with her son. They found his body, bloody and battered, tied to a chair.

Gary Jones was dead.

Four years later, in February 2012, Doris sits in a Covington courtroom testifying against the man accused of murdering her son. Her ex-boyfriend, a forty-four-year-old African American from Bridgeton, New Jersey, named Rodney Young, is on trial for Gary Jones's murder. Doris, also African American, had dated Rodney for seven years; the romance had gone sour several months before the murder and she had fled New Jersey to live with her son in Georgia. Prosecutors allege that Rodney killed Doris's son in order to get to her, to scare her back into his arms by making her think that roving, violent gangs were out to get her in Georgia. Rodney was extradited from New Jersey, hauled down to Georgia, and faced the death penalty.

Technically, as the district attorney plays Doris Jones's recorded 911 call for the jury, she is trying to persuade the jury that Rodney is guilty of murder in this first phase of the trial. In reality, his public defender, Joseph Romond, acknowledges in opening arguments that Rodney likely committed the murder. However, Romond insists his client is mentally retarded and thus ineligible for the death penalty; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 2002 decision,
Atkins v. Virginia
, that people with mental retardation were not
morally culpable for their actions and thus could not be executed. Unfortunately, the Court didn't define mental retardation. Nor did it spell out what kind of proof was required—beyond a reasonable doubt? a preponderance of the evidence?—to make the determination of mental retardation. As a result, Georgia is the only state in the nation that requires evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a defendant is mentally retarded.

If the jury finds that Rodney is guilty but mentally retarded, then he'll be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. If the jury decides he is guilty but
not
mentally retarded, the trial goes into a second phase. At this point, the jury gets a second chance to decide on the appropriate sentence for him: should he be put to death or should he be sent to prison for life, without the possibility of parole?

The jury deciding Rodney Young's fate in this February 2012 capital case joins thousands of other juries in the United States over the last fifteen years in determining whether a person convicted of murder should himself be killed—943 of these juries returned a death sentence.
¹
In Georgia, this particular capital trial is business as usual—just one of the 94 death penalty cases sitting on the desks of the public defenders at the Georgia Capital Defenders office that same week in February 2012. But in Georgia such “business as usual” is deeply tangled in the politics of race, power, and money. Being poor, black, and accused of a crime in this country always increases a person's chances of conviction. But here in Georgia—at the far end of the punishment spectrum where the stakes are highest—the right to counsel, and the funding so crucial to mounting a defense equal to that of the well-funded, well-resourced district attorney's office, is in daily jeopardy. Indeed, justice is not necessarily the principal
business
of business-as-usual in the Georgia courts; justice is too expensive.

I arrive in the Covington, Georgia, courthouse on Tuesday, February 14, 2012—Valentine's Day. It is the first full day of Rodney Young's murder trial, and there is a lot of red. Bloody weapons. Bloody clothing. Bloody flesh displayed in oversize slides. As the jury returns from lunch at 2
P.M.
, the state calls Dr. Jonathan Eisenstat, a Georgia medical examiner, to talk them through the autopsy he
performed on Gary Jones's body, and to share the pictures documenting the event. It is a gruesome scene.

“Can you tell us what is depicted here?” asks Layla Zon, the trim thirty-something district attorney, as she strides across the courtroom to dim the lights and direct the jury's attention to photos projected from an overhead projector. She sets a photo down on the machine, adjusts the focus, and turns her attention back to the medical examiner.

“It's a photo of the body,” Dr. Eisenstat says, “just as it comes out of the bag.”

“I'd like to enter into evidence state's exhibit number 301,” Zon says as she puts down another photo. Then another. Then another. On the huge screen, in slow succession, thirty-two images of a mangled man lying face up on an exam table flash by. The series of photos changes perspectives and moves closer and closer, from a bird's-eye view of the man's chest and head to a close-up of a bruise, a laceration, a rope burn. Jurors see that the corpse, in repose, has one eye closed and one eye open, staring straight ahead in startled surprise that death caught him—and possibly at the form and person it arrived in. The button-down oxford that clothes the corpse is so drenched in deep red blood that it is impossible to detect what color it might have once been.

“Now we see the body before it has been cleaned,” says Eisenstat. “The right side of the face and upper chest.” He points out a rip and explains that the “defects” in the shirt are “consistent with traumatic injury.” He borrows a pointer from the judge and steps out of the witness box to help the jury focus on the details. The camera had zoomed in so that every pore in the dead man's skin was visible as an unseen lab technician used tweezers to fold his ear into a gruesome carbuncle, squeezing and pulling it forward to show a mark behind the ear. The technician pinches again with the tweezers to pull the eyelid back, to point out the lacerated flesh beneath. The medical examiner had cut into the body and peeled back the flesh, and he narrates his process as dully as someone sharing vacation photos of the Jersey shore. The photos flicker by, on and on.

A blond woman in the front of the jury box puts her hand over her mouth and folds her head down to stare at her lap. The woman
next to her looks away, away from her neighbor, away from the photos, away from the defendant, Rodney Young, who prosecutors say committed this murder. She digs into her purse for a pink tissue and blows her nose.

The district attorney plows ahead. “Can you give me an opinion as to whether Gary Jones was alive when those ligature marks were made?” she asks.