Just Mercy (21 page)

More than anything else, it was the lack of concern and responsiveness by police, prosecutors, and victims’ services providers that devastated Mozelle and Onzelle. “You’re the first two people to come to our house and spend time with us talking about Vickie,” Onzelle told us. After nearly three hours of hearing their heartbreaking reflections, we promised to do what we could to find out who else was involved in their niece Vickie’s death.

We were getting to the point where, without access to police records and files, we wouldn’t be able to make more progress. Because the case was now pending on direct appeal, the State had no obligation to let us see those records and files. So we decided to file what is known as a Rule 32 petition, which would put us back in a trial court with the opportunity to present new evidence and obtain discovery, including access to the State’s files.

Rule 32 petitions are required to include claims that were not raised at trial or on appeal and that could not have been raised at trial or on appeal. They are the vehicle to challenge a conviction based on ineffective counsel, the State’s failure to disclose evidence, and most important, new evidence of innocence. Michael and I put a petition together that asserted all of these claims, including police and prosecutorial misconduct, and filed it in the Monroe County Circuit Court.

The document, which alleged that Walter McMillian was unfairly tried, wrongly convicted, and illegally sentenced, drew a lot of attention in Monroeville. Three years had passed since the trial. The initial confirmation of Walter’s conviction on appeal had generated significant press in the community, and most people now felt that Walter’s guilt was a settled matter. All there was left to do was wait for an execution date. Judge Key had retired, and none of the new Monroe County judges seemed to want to touch our petition, so it was transferred back to Baldwin County under the theory that the postconviction
appeal should be handled in the same county as the initial trial. This made little sense to us, because a Monroe County judge had presided over the trial, but there was nothing we could do.

Surprisingly, the Alabama Supreme Court agreed to stay our direct appeal process so that the Rule 32 petition could proceed. The general rule was that the direct appeal had to be completed before a postconviction collateral appeal under Rule 32 could be initiated. By staying the case, the Alabama Supreme Court had signaled there was something unusual about Walter’s case that warranted further review in the lower courts. The Baldwin County Circuit Court judge was now obligated to review our case and could be forced to grant our discovery motions, which would require disclosure of all police and prosecutorial files. This was a very positive development.

We needed to have another meeting with the district attorney, Tommy Chapman, but this time we’d be going in armed with a court order to turn over police and prosecutorial files. We would also finally meet, in the flesh, the law enforcement officers involved in Walter’s prosecution: the D.A.’s investigator, Larry Ikner; ABI agent Simon Benson; and Sheriff Tom Tate.

Chapman suggested that we come to his office in the Monroe County courthouse so that they could turn over all the files together. We agreed. When we arrived, the men were already there. Tate was a tall, heavy-set white man who had come to the meeting in boots, jeans, and a light shirt. Ikner was another white man in his mid-forties, wearing the same outfit. Neither of them smiled much—they greeted Michael and me with the bemused curiosity to which I was getting accustomed. The men knew that we were accusing them of misconduct, but for the most part they remained civil. At one point Tate told Michael that he knew, as soon as he saw him, that he was “a Yankee.”

Michael smiled and replied, “Well, actually, I’m a Nittany Lion.”

The joke died in the silent room.

Undeterred, Michael continued, “I went to Penn State. The mascot at Penn State is—”

“We kicked your ass in ’78.” Tate made the statement as if he had
just won the lottery. Penn State and the University of Alabama had been football rivals in the 1970s, when both schools had had successful programs and iconic coaches, Bear Bryant at Alabama and Joe Paterno at Penn State. Alabama had defeated the number-one-ranked Penn State team 14–7 to win the 1978 national championship.

Michael, a huge college football fan and a “JoePa” devotee, looked at me as if seeking nonverbal permission to say something reckless. I gave him a cautionary stare; to my great relief, he seemed to understand.

“How much is ‘Johnny D’ paying y’all?” Tate asked, using the nickname Walter’s friends and family had given him.

“We work for a nonprofit. We don’t charge the people we represent anything,” I said as blandly and politely as I could.

“Well, you’re getting money from somewhere to do what you do.”

I decided to let that pass and move things forward.

“I thought that it might be a good idea to sign something that verifies these are all the files you all have on this case. Can we index what you’re turning over to us and then all sign?”

“We don’t need to do anything that formal, Bryan. These men are officers of the court, just like you and I. You should just take the files,” Chapman said, apparently sensing that this suggestion had provoked Tate and Ikner.

“Well, there could be files that have inadvertently been missed or documents that dropped out. I’m just trying to document that what we receive is what you give us—same number of pages, same file folder headings, et cetera. I’m not questioning anyone’s integrity.”

“The hell you ain’t.” Tate was direct. He looked at Chapman. “We can sign something confirming what we give him. I think we may need a record of that more than he does.”

Chapman nodded. We got the files and left Monroeville with a lot of excitement about what we might find in the hundreds of pages of records we’d received. Back in Montgomery, we eagerly started reviewing them, and not just the files from the police and prosecutors. With our discovery order from the court, we were able to collect records
from Taylor Hardin, the mental health facility where Myers was sent after he first refused to testify. We got the ABI file from Simon Benson, the only black ABI agent in South Alabama, as he had proudly told us. We got Monroeville city police department records and other city files. We even got Escambia County records and exhibits on the Vickie Pittman murder. The files were astonishing.

We might have been influenced by the pain of Mozelle and Onzelle or drawn in by the elaborate conspiracies that Ralph Myers had described, but we soon started asking questions about some of the law enforcement officers whose names kept coming up around the Pittman murder. We even decided to talk to the FBI about some of what we had learned.

It wasn’t long after that when the bomb threats started.

Trina Garnett was the youngest of twelve children living in the poorest section of Chester, Pennsylvania, a financially distressed municipality outside of Philadelphia.
The extraordinarily high rates of poverty, crime, and unemployment in Chester intersected with the worst-ranked public school system among Pennsylvania’s 501 districts.
Close to 46 percent of the city’s children were living below the federal poverty level.

Trina’s father, Walter Garnett, was a former boxer whose failed career had turned him into a violent, abusive alcoholic well known to local police for throwing a punch with little provocation. Trina’s mother, Edith Garnett, was sickly after bearing so many children, some of whom were conceived during rapes by her husband. The older and sicker Edith became, the more she found herself a target of Walter’s rage. He would regularly punch, kick, and verbally abuse her in front of the children. Walter would often go to extremes, stripping Edith naked and beating her until she writhed on the floor in pain while her children looked on fearfully. When she lost consciousness during the beatings, Walter would shove a stick down her throat to revive her for more abuse. Nothing was safe in the Garnett home. Trina once watched her father strangle her pet dog into silence because it wouldn’t stop barking. He beat the animal to death with a hammer and threw its limp body out a window.

Trina had twin sisters, Lynn and Lynda, who were a year older than her. They taught her to play “invisible” when she was a small child to shield her from their father when he was drunk and prowling their apartment with his belt, stripping the children naked, and beating them randomly. Trina was taught to hide under the bed or in a closet and remain as quiet as possible.

Trina showed signs of intellectual disabilities and other troubles at
a young age. When she was a toddler, she became seriously ill after ingesting lighter fluid when she was left unattended. At the age of five, she accidently set herself on fire, resulting in severe burns over her chest, stomach, and back. She spent weeks in a hospital enduring painful skin grafts that left her terribly scarred.

Edith died when Trina was just nine. Trina’s older sisters tried to take care of her, but when Walter began sexually abusing them, they fled. After the older siblings left home, Walter’s abuse focused on Trina, Lynn, and Lynda. The girls ran away from home and began roaming the streets of Chester. Trina and her sisters would eat out of garbage cans; sometimes they would not eat for days. They slept in parks and public bathrooms. The girls stayed with their older sister Edy until Edy’s husband began sexually abusing them. Their older siblings and aunts would sometimes provide temporary shelter, but the living situation would get disrupted by violence or death, and so Trina would find herself wandering the streets again.

Her mother’s death, the abuse, and the desperate circumstances all exacerbated Trina’s emotional and mental health problems. She would sometimes become so distraught and ill that her sisters would have to find a relative to take her to the hospital. But she was penniless and was never allowed to stay long enough to become stable or recover.

Late at night in August 1976, fourteen-year-old Trina and her friend, sixteen-year-old Francis Newsome, climbed through the window of a row house in Chester. The girls wanted to talk to the boys who lived there. The mother of these boys had forbidden her children from playing with Trina, but Trina wanted to see them. Once she’d climbed into the house, Trina lit matches to find her way to the boys’ room. The house caught fire. It spread quickly, and two boys who were sleeping in the home died from smoke asphyxiation. Their mother accused Trina of starting the fire intentionally, but Trina and her friend insisted that it was an accident.

Trina was traumatized by the boys’ deaths and could barely speak when the police arrested her. She was so nonfunctional and listless that her appointed lawyer thought she was incompetent to stand trial.
Defendants who are deemed incompetent can’t be tried in adversarial criminal proceedings—meaning that the State can’t prosecute them unless they become well enough to defend themselves. Criminally accused people facing trial are entitled to treatment and services. But Trina’s lawyer failed to file the appropriate motions or present evidence to support an incompetency determination for Trina. The lawyer, who was subsequently disbarred and jailed for unrelated criminal misconduct, also never challenged the State’s decision to try Trina as an adult. As a result, Trina was forced to stand trial for second-degree murder in an adult courthouse. At trial, Francis Newsome testified against Trina in exchange for the charges against her being dropped. Trina was convicted of second-degree murder, and the trial moved to the sentencing phase.

Delaware County Circuit Judge Howard Reed found that Trina had no intent to kill. But under Pennsylvania law, the judge could not take the absence of intent into account during sentencing. He could not consider Trina’s age, mental illness, poverty, the abuse she had suffered, or the tragic circumstances surrounding the fire.
Pennsylvania sentencing law was inflexible: For those convicted of second-degree murder, mandatory life imprisonment without the possibility of parole was the only sentence. Judge Reed expressed serious misgivings about the sentence he was forced to impose. “
This is the saddest case I’ve ever seen,” he wrote.
For a tragic crime committed at fourteen, Trina was condemned to die in prison.