Just Mercy (36 page)

Around the same time, I started teaching at the New York University School of Law. I would travel to New York to teach my classes and then fly back to Montgomery to run EJI. I asked Walter to come to New York each year to talk with students, and it was always a powerful moment when he walked into the classroom. He was a survivor of a criminal justice system that had proven, in his case, just how brutally unfair and cruel it could be. His personality, presence, and witness said something extraordinary about the humanity of people directly impacted by systemic abuse. His firsthand perspective on the plight of people wrongfully convicted was deeply meaningful to students, who often seemed overwhelmed by Walter’s testimony. He usually spoke very briefly and would give short answers to the questions posed to him. But he had an enormous effect on the students who met him. He would laugh and joke and tell them he wasn’t angry or bitter, just grateful to be free. He would share how his faith had helped him survive his hundreds of nights on death row.

One year, Walter got lost on the trip to New York, and he called to tell me that he couldn’t make it. He seemed confused and couldn’t offer a coherent explanation of what had happened at the airport. When I got back home, I went to see him and he seemed his usual self, just a little down. He told me that his junkyard business wasn’t going great. When he described his finances, it became clear he was spending the money we’d secured for him more quickly than seemed prudent. He was buying equipment to make his collection of cars simpler, but he wasn’t generating the kind of revenue necessary to support the costs. After an hour or two of anxious talk, he relaxed a bit and seemed to return to the jovial Walter I’d come to know. We agreed that we would travel together on any future trips.

Walter wasn’t the only one who was facing new financial pressures. When a conservative majority took power in Congress in 1994, legal aid to death row prisoners became a political target, and federal funding was quickly eliminated. Most of the capital representation resource centers around the country were forced to close. We had never received state support for our work, and without the federal dollars we faced serious financial challenges. We scraped along and found enough private support to continue our work. Teaching and increased fund-raising responsibilities got piled on top of my bulging litigation docket, but somehow things progressed. Our staff was overextended, but I was thrilled with the talented lawyers and professionals we had working with us. We were assisting clients on death row, challenging excessive punishments, helping disabled prisoners, assisting children incarcerated in the adult system, and looking at ways to expose racial bias, discrimination against the poor, and the abuse of power. It was overwhelming but gratifying.

I received a surprising call one day from the Swedish Ambassador to the United States, who told me that EJI had been selected for the Olof Palme International Human Rights Award. They invited me to Stockholm to receive it. I had studied Sweden’s progressive approach
to the rehabilitation of criminal offenders as a graduate student and had long marveled at how focused on recovery their system appeared. Their punishments were humane, and their policymakers took rehabilitation of criminal offenders very seriously, which made me excited about the award and the trip. That they were giving an award named after a beloved prime minister who had been tragically murdered by a deranged man to someone who represented people on death row revealed a lot about their values. The trip to Stockholm was planned for January. They sent a film crew to interview me a month or two before the trip, and the crew also wanted to speak with a few clients. I made arrangements for them to interview Walter.

“I can come down for this interview,” I told Walter.

“No, you don’t need to do that. I don’t have to travel, so I’m okay to talk to them. Don’t spend time driving all the way down here.”

“Do you want to go to Sweden?” I asked, half-joking.

“I don’t know exactly where that is, but if you have to fly a long way to get there, no, I’m not too interested. I think I’d like to stay on the ground from now on.” We laughed and he sounded fine.

He then became quiet and asked one final question before we hung up. “Maybe you can come and see me when you get back? I’m okay, but we can just hang out.”

It was an unusual request from Walter so I eagerly agreed. “Sure, that would be great. We can go fishing,” I teased. I’d never gone fishing in my life, and Walter found that so scandalous that he never stopped questioning me about it. When we traveled together, I never ordered fish to eat, and he was sure I didn’t eat fish because I’d never caught a fish. I tried to follow his logic and made promises, but we had never gotten around to taking a fishing trip.

The Swedish film crew was eager to meet the challenge of finding Walter’s trailer in the backwoods of South Alabama. I told them how to get there. I’d always been with Walter when he spoke to the press, but I felt like this was probably safe.

“He doesn’t give speeches. He’s usually very direct and succinct,” I told the interviewers. “He’s great, but you should ask him good questions.
And it’s probably better if you talk to him outside, too. He prefers to be outdoors.” They nodded sympathetically but seemed confused by my anxiety. I called Walter before leaving for Sweden, and he told me that the interview had gone fine, which was reassuring.

Stockholm was beautiful, despite the constant snow and frigid temperatures. I gave some speeches and attended a few dinners. It was a short, cold trip, but the people were lovely and unusually kind to me. I was surprised at how gratifying I found their enthusiasm for our work. Most everyone I met offered support and encouragement. A couple of years earlier, I had been invited to Brazil to talk about punishment and the unjust treatment of disfavored people. I had spent a lot of time in local communities, mostly in the
favelas
outside São Paulo, where I met hundreds of desperately poor people who were intensely interested in talking. I spent hours in conversation with all sorts of people, from struggling mothers to impoverished children who sniffed glue to help them cope with hunger and police brutality. The cross-cultural conversations with those people, who had shared a lot of the same history and struggle as my clients in America, had a huge impact on me. In Sweden, the people I met were equally interested and responsive, even though they hadn’t experienced profound need or shared struggle with an abusive justice system. People all over the country seemed motivated to connect from a common place of tremendous compassion.

The organizers asked me to speak at a high school on the outskirts of Stockholm. Kungsholmens Gymnasium is in an extraordinarily beautiful section of Stockholm, an island surrounded by seventeenth-century architecture. As an American with limited experience outside the United States, I was dazzled by the age of the buildings and marveled at their ornate architecture. The school itself was nearly a hundred years old. I was escorted through the school to a narrow, winding staircase with handcrafted railings that led up to a cavernous auditorium. Several hundred high school students packed the room, waiting for my presentation. The domed ceiling of the enormous hall was covered with delicate hand paintings and Latin phrases written in decorative
script. Floating angels and trumpet-wielding infants danced all over the walls and ceiling. A large balcony packed with more students seemed to ascend elegantly into the drawings.

While the room was very old, the acoustics were perfect, and there was a balance and precision to the space that seemed almost magical. I studied the hundreds of Scandinavian teenagers seated in the hall while I was being introduced. I was impressed by how eager they appeared. I spoke for forty-five minutes to the strangely silent and attentive group of teens. I knew English wasn’t their first language and had real doubts about how much they were even following what I said, but when I finished, they erupted into vigorous applause. Their response actually startled me. They were so young but so interested in the plight of my condemned clients thousands of miles away. The headmaster joined me onstage to thank me and suggested to the students that they offer their own thanks with a song. The school had an internationally famous music program and student choir. The headmaster asked the choir students to stand wherever they were in the auditorium and briefly sing something. About fifty giggling kids stood up and looked around at each other.

After a minute of uncertainty, a seventeen-year-old boy with strawberry blond hair stood on his chair and said something to his choir-mates in Swedish. The students laughed, but they became more sober. As they became still and perfectly quiet, the boy hummed a note in a beautiful tenor voice. His pitch was perfect. Then he slowly waved his arms to prompt these extraordinary children to sing. Their voices bounced off the walls and ceiling of this ancient hall and fell into a glorious harmony the likes of which I’d never heard. After starting his classmates in song, the young man stepped off his chair and joined them in performing a heartbreaking melody with tremendous care and precision. I could not understand a word of the Swedish lyrics, but it sounded angelic. Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved into warm chords—the sound was transcendent. The singing built gloriously with each line.

Standing on a stage above the singers with the headmaster beside
me, I looked up at the ceiling—at the majestic artwork. My mother had died a few months before this trip. She’d been a church musician most of her life and had worked with dozens of children’s choirs. When I looked up and saw the drawings of angels on the domed ceiling I thought of her. I quickly realized I would never recover my composure looking up there, so I looked back at the students and forced a smile. When the students finished their song, the rest of the students cheered and applauded wildly. I joined the applause and tried to hold myself together. When I left the stage, students came up to thank me for the talk, ask questions, and take pictures. I was completely charmed.

It was a long and exhausting but beautiful day. When I got back to the hotel I was grateful for the two-hour break before my next speaking commitment. I don’t know what prompted me to turn on the television, but I’d been away from home for four days and hadn’t seen any headlines. The local news blasted into my room. The unfamiliar Swedish TV anchors were chatting away when I heard my name. It was the piece the crew had filmed with me; familiar images filled the screen. I watched myself walking with the reporter into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, then up the street to the Civil Rights Memorial. The scene then switched to Walter, standing in overalls amid his pile of discarded cars down in Monroeville.

Walter gently put down a little kitten he’d been holding as he started to answer the reporters’ questions. He’d mentioned to me previously that all kinds of cats had sought shelter in his field of abandoned metal. He said things I’d heard him say dozens of times before. Then I watched his expression change, and he began talking with more animation and excitement than I’d ever heard from him.

He became uncharacteristically emotional. “They put me on death row for six years! They threatened me for six years. They tortured me with the promise of execution for six years. I lost my job. I lost my wife. I lost my reputation. I lost my—I lost my dignity.”

He was speaking loudly and passionately and looked to be on the verge of tears. “I lost everything,” he continued. He calmed himself
and tried to smile, but it didn’t work. He looked soberly at the camera. “It’s rough, it’s rough, man. It’s rough.” I watched worriedly while Walter crouched down close to the ground and began to sob violently. The camera stayed on him while he cried. The report switched back to me saying something abstract and philosophical, and then it was over. I was stunned. I wanted to call Walter, but I couldn’t figure out how to dial him from Sweden. I knew it was time to get back to Alabama.

On the morning of May 4, 1989, Michael Gulley, fifteen, and Nathan McCants, seventeen, convinced thirteen-year-old Joe Sullivan to accompany them when they broke into an empty house in Pensacola, Florida. The three boys entered the home of Lena Bruner in the morning, while no one was there. McCants took some money and jewelry. The three boys then left. That afternoon, Ms. Bruner, an older white woman in her early seventies, was sexually assaulted in her home. Someone knocked on her door, and as she went to open it, another person who had entered through the back of her home grabbed her from behind. It was a violent and shocking rape; Ms. Bruner never even saw her attacker clearly. She could describe him only as “quite a dark colored boy” with “curly type hair.” Gulley, McCants, and Sullivan are all African American.

Within minutes of the assault, Gulley and McCants were apprehended together. McCants had Ms. Bruner’s jewelry on him. Facing serious felony charges, Gulley—who had an extensive criminal history involving at least one sexual offense—accused Joe of the sexual battery. Joe was not apprehended that day, but he voluntarily turned himself in the next day after learning that Gulley and McCants had
implicated him. Joe admitted helping the older boys with the burglary earlier in the day but adamantly denied any knowledge of or involvement in the sexual assault.