Just Mercy (23 page)

The next day, the dead bodies of the girls were found in a shallow ditch. George was immediately arrested for the murders because he had admitted seeing the girls before they disappeared and was the last person to see them alive. He was subjected to hours of interrogation without his parents or an attorney present. The understandable anger about the death of the girls exploded when word circulated that a
black boy had been arrested for the murders. The sheriff claimed that George had confessed to the murders, though no written or signed statement was presented. George’s father was summarily fired from his job; his family was told to leave town or else they would be lynched. Out of fear for their lives, George’s family fled town late that night, leaving George behind in jail with no family support.
Within hours of announcing the alleged confession, a lynch mob formed at the jailhouse in Alcolu, but the fourteen-year-old had already been moved to a jail in Charleston.

A month later, a trial was convened. Facing charges of first-degree murder, George sat alone in front of an estimated crowd of fifteen hundred white people who had packed the courtroom and surrounded the building. No African Americans were allowed inside the courthouse. George’s white court-appointed attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations, called no witnesses. The prosecution’s only evidence was the sheriff’s testimony regarding George’s alleged confession. The trial was over in a few hours. An all-white jury deliberated for ten minutes before convicting George of rape and murder. Judge Stoll promptly sentenced the fourteen-year-old to death. George’s lawyer said there would be no appeal because his family didn’t have the money to pay for it.

Despite appeals from the NAACP and black clergy, who asked that the sentence be converted to life imprisonment, Governor Olin Johnston refused to intervene and George was sent to Columbia to be executed in South Carolina’s electric chair. Small even for his age, the five foot two, ninety-two-pound Stinney walked up to the chair with a Bible in his hand. He had to sit on the book when prison staff couldn’t fit the electrodes to his small frame. Alone in the room, with no family or any people of color present, the terrified child sat in the oversized electric chair. He frantically searched the room for someone to help but saw only law enforcement personnel and reporters. The adult-size mask slid off George’s face when the first jolt of electricity struck his body.
Witnesses to the execution could see his “wide open, tearful
eyes and saliva dripping from his mouth.” Eighty-one days after being approached by two young girls about where flowers might be found, George Stinney was pronounced dead. Years later, rumors surfaced that a white man from a prominent family confessed on his deathbed to killing the girls.
Recently, an effort has been launched to exonerate George Stinney.

The Stinney execution was horrific and heartbreaking, but it reflected the racial politics of the South more than the way children accused of crimes were generally treated. It was an example of how policies and norms once directed exclusively at controlling and punishing the black population have filtered their way into our general criminal justice system. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the politics of fear and anger sweeping the country and fueling mass incarceration was turning its attention to children.

Influential criminologists predicted a coming wave of “super-predators” with whom the juvenile justice system would be unable to cope.
Sometimes expressly focusing on black and brown children, theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.”
Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation that increased the exposure of children to adult prosecution. Many states lowered or eliminated the minimum age for trying children as adults, leaving children as young as eight vulnerable to adult prosecution and imprisonment.

Some states also initiated mandatory transfer rules, which took away any discretion from prosecutors and judges over whether a child should be kept in the juvenile system. Tens of thousands of children who had previously been managed by the juvenile justice system, with its well-developed protections and requirements for children, were now thrown into an increasingly overcrowded, violent, and desperate adult prison system.

The predictions of “super-predators” proved wildly inaccurate.
The juvenile population in America increased from 1994 to 2000, but the juvenile crime rate declined, leading academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to disclaim it.
In 2001, the surgeon general of the United States released a report labeling the “super-predator” theory a myth and stated that “[t]here is no evidence that young people involved in violence during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than youths in earlier years.” This admission came too late for kids like Trina, Ian, and Antonio. Their death-in-prison sentences were insulated from legal challenges or appeals by a maze of procedural rules, statutes of limitations, and legal barricades designed to make successful postconviction challenges almost impossible.

When I met Trina, Ian, and Antonio years later, they had each been broken by years of hopeless confinement. They were legally condemned children hidden away in adult prisons, largely unknown and forgotten, preoccupied with surviving in dangerous, terrifying environments with little family support or outside help. They weren’t exceptional. There were thousands of children like them scattered throughout prisons in the United States—children who had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole or other extreme sentences. The relative anonymity of these kids seemed to aggravate their plight and their despair. I agreed to represent Trina, Ian, and Antonio, and our office would eventually make challenging death-in-prison sentences imposed on children a major focus of our work. But it became immediately clear that their extreme, unjust sentences were just one of the problems that had to be overcome. They were all damaged and traumatized by our system of justice.

Trina’s mental and physical health made her life in prison extremely challenging. She was grateful for our help and showed remarkable improvement when we told her that we were going to fight to get her sentence reduced, but she had many other needs. She talked constantly
about wanting to see her son. She wanted to know that she was not alone in the world. We tracked down her sisters and arranged a visit where Trina could see her son, and it seemed to strengthen her in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible.

I flew to Los Angeles and drove hundreds of miles through the heart of Central California farmland to meet Antonio at a maximum-security prison dominated by gangs and frequent violence. He was trying to acculturate himself to a world that corrupted healthy human development in every way. Reading had always been challenging for Antonio, but he had a strong desire to learn and was so determined to understand that he would read a passage over and over, looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary we sent him, until he got it. We recently sent him Darwin’s
The Origin of Species
, which he hopes will help him better understand those around him.

It turns out that Ian was very, very bright. Although being smart and sensitive made his extended time in solitary confinement especially destructive, he had managed to educate himself, read hundreds of books, and write poetry and short stories that reflected an eager, robust intellect. He sent me dozens of letters and poems. I’d return to the office after traveling for a few days and often find letters from Ian. Sometimes I’d find within a letter a scrap of wrinkled paper, which, once unfolded, would reveal thoughtful and sobering poems with titles like “Uncried Tears,” “Tied Up with Words,” “The Unforgiving Minute,” “Silence,” and “Wednesday Ritual.”

We decided to publish a report to draw attention to the plight of children in the United States who had been sentenced to die in prison. I wanted to photograph some of our clients in order to give the life-without-parole sentences imposed on children a human face. Florida was one of the few states that would allow photographers inside a prison, so we asked prison officials if Ian could be permitted out of his solitary, no-touch existence for an hour so that the photographer we hired could take the pictures. To my delight, they agreed and allowed Ian to be in the same room with an outside photographer. As soon as the visit was over, Ian immediately wrote me a letter.

Finally, the date for Walter McMillian’s hearing had arrived. We would now have an opportunity to present Ralph Myers’s new testimony and all the exculpatory evidence we’d discovered in police records that had never been disclosed.

Michael and I had gone over the case a dozen times, thinking through the best way to present the evidence of Walter’s innocence. Our biggest concern was Myers, mostly because we knew he would feel incredible pressure once he was brought back to the county courthouse, and he’d broken under pressure before. We were consoled by the fact that so much of our evidence was documentary and could be admitted without the complications and unpredictability that Myers’s testimony might introduce.

We now had a paralegal on staff, so we brought her into the case. Brenda Lewis was a former Montgomery police officer who joined us after seeing more abuses of power than she could tolerate at the police department. An African American woman, she was adept even in environments where her gender or race made her an outsider. We had asked her to touch base with our witnesses before the hearing to go over last-minute details and calm their nerves.

Chapman had called in the state attorney general’s office to help defend Walter’s conviction, and they’d sent Assistant Attorney General Don Valeska, a longtime prosecutor with a reputation for being intense and combative. Valeska was a white man in his forties whose fit, medium frame suggested someone who stayed active; the glasses he wore added to his serious demeanor. His brother Doug was the district attorney in Houston County, and both men were aggressive and unapologetic in their prosecution of “bad guys.” Michael and I had reached out to Chapman once more before the hearing to see if we could persuade him to reopen the investigation and independently reexamine whether McMillian was guilty. But by now, Chapman and all of the law enforcement officers had grown tired of us. They seemed increasingly hostile whenever they had to deal with us. I had considered reporting to them the bomb threats and death threats we’d received, since they were likely coming from people in Monroe County, but I wasn’t sure anyone in the sheriff’s or D.A.’s office would care.

The new judge on the case, Judge Thomas B. Norton Jr., had also grown weary of us. We’d had several pretrial hearings on different motions during which he would sometimes become frustrated because of the bickering between the lawyers. We kept insisting on obtaining all files and evidence the State had in its possession. We had uncovered so much exculpatory evidence that had not been disclosed previously that we were sure there was still more that had not been turned over. The judge finally told us that we were fishing after we’d made our ninth or tenth request for more police and prosecution files. I suspect that Judge Norton had scheduled the final Rule 32 hearing in part because he wanted to get this contentious, complicated case off his docket and out of his court.