Chasing Gideon (17 page)

And here's where it gets interesting; the plotlines intersect. In 1963, Peel was placed in a maximum security cell at Raiford because, against prison rules, he'd been caught preparing writs for other prisoners' new trials under Florida's then-new public defender law. After
Gideon
, no fewer than four thousand Florida convicts demanded new trials. Peel himself prepared so many of these kinds of writs that he was called the “jailhouse attorney,” and one prison official was quoted at the time as saying, “we just had to crack down
on him for trying to practice law in prison.”
⁴⁶
Jacob, who went on to befriend Fred Turner, the lawyer who represented Gideon in his second criminal trial, says he and Turner had many conversations about Gideon. “Fred Turner told me that Gideon told him that Peel helped him out,” Jacob recalls. “He said they were cell mates. Since then I've tried to figure out if they were actually in the same cell.” The record shows they were in prison together. “I'm not 100 percent sure they were actual cell mates,” Jacob tells me, “but Turner told me that. And according to Turner, they were writing that petition in their cell—and Joe Peel would stand over Gideon's shoulders, looking down and telling him what to say.”
⁴⁷
Jacob went on to suggest that Peel not only helped prepare Gideon's writ, but masterminded the idea of not including any “special circumstances” in it, so that the Supreme Court would be more inclined to use the case as an excuse to reexamine
Betts
. He also cynically suggests that Peel may have retained Gideon's misspellings and grammatical errors to impress the court with this determined but unlettered man. In any case, there is little doubt that the colorful Joseph Peel was an unrecognized character in the drama of
Gideon
—in a way that both challenges and affirms the reasoning behind the Supreme Court's decision. While Americans tend to espouse the notion of an uneducated underdog taking on the unfair laws of the land, the truth may be that even Clarence Earl Gideon needed a lawyer to prove his point, that all men need lawyers in the court of law.

Greg Bright sits on his porch in May 2012, reflecting on the twenty-seven years he spent wrongly imprisoned. “It feels like a minute since I been out here,” he says, musing over the notion of time—time past, time lost, time wasted. Photo by Karen Houppert.

 

T
he coroner's report is a yawn—just another dead black boy, in a city where 183 died that year. He wrote:

The coroner, pathologist, and morgue attendant viewing the body of teenager Elliot Porter at the New Orleans City Morgue at 9
A.M.
on October 31, 1975, agreed that rigor mortis was not yet present. Based on this, the boy could not have died more than three hours earlier. They estimated the time of death as between 5
A.M.
and 8
A.M.
that same morning.

This seemingly inconsequential detail would prove important to Greg Bright, one of the men accused of murdering the boy.

But getting to it would take twenty-seven years.

New Orleans has its own peculiar notions of time. This is true on a day-to-day level where folks may turn up for a scheduled appointment at the agreed-upon hour, but are just as likely to turn up an hour later. It is also true on a month-to-month level, where citizens—largely poor, black male ones—can be legally held in jail for up to two, three, or four months while the district attorney takes his time deciding whether or not he will prosecute them for a crime. (Locals call it “doing DA time,” and it shocks the sensibilities of most in the legal community where seventy-two hours is the national norm.) It is also true on an epochal level where most of the world divides time between
B.C.
and
A.D.
but New Orleans residents organize history into the sweeping categories “pre-Katrina” and “post-Katrina.”

Time is a relative thing in Louisiana. Justice, too. Talk to almost anyone in the New Orleans criminal justice system and they will laud the “post-Katrina” reforms. But this is a little like celebrating the move from caves to shacks. (This is not an abstract metaphor; the Orleans Parish Prison still houses hundreds of its residents in oversize tents in the heart of this often sweltering city, visible from a nearby highway overpass as drivers glance beyond the coils of razor wire.) When Hurricane Katrina hit in August of 2005, it laid bare the hoards of problems that besieged the poor in this city. Fixing these problems is taking time, New Orleans's time—leisurely, friendly, wink-and-nod, hot, humid, old-world, slow-moving, don't-kick-up-a-sweat time.

Like a stop-action film, criminal justice in the city flickers slowly enough to be studied frame by frame. This makes the city a good place to see how the various pieces fit—or fail to fit—together into a workable system that protects the constitutional rights of the accused, addresses the restorative needs of victims, and ensures public safety. After all, Louisiana is the largest “consumer” of the justice system. It sends more people to prison per capita than any other state in the country. It executes more people than forty-one other states do.
¹

In 2012, state inmates numbered more than forty thousand. As New Orleans's
Times-Picayune
newspaper observed in a meticulously reported and deeply troubling eight-part exposé called “Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital” in May 2012, “one in 86 adult citizens is behind bars”—and many of them
will live out their lives there due to the state's especially harsh mandatory sentencing laws. It is one of only six states that completely exclude the possibility of parole for lifers
²
—and leads the nation in the percentage of those behind bars who are serving life without the possibility of parole.
³
In 2012, that translated to 4,500 “lifers” and approximately $1 million per prisoner if he enters in his twenties, as most do, and lives to his seventies.

Despite decades of these tough-on-crime, zero-tolerance, three-strikes, lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key policies, Louisiana's murder rate was the highest in the country last year, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report.
⁴
And Louisiana's largest city, New Orleans, consistently has the highest homicide rate in the nation with 58 murders per 100,000 residents in 2011 (compared to the national average of 5 per 100,000).
⁵
It also has more miscarriages of justice than almost every other state, exonerating more people on death row or serving life sentences per capita than everyone but Illinois, according to the National Exoneration Registry.
⁶

So what's going on with the cops and the jails and the prisons and the courts and, indeed, the whole criminal justice system there that it so profoundly fails its citizens? This is a question that has plagued a small but persistent group of reformers in New Orleans who, in the aftermath of Katrina, saw an opportunity to step into the vacuum left in the storm's wake and reinvent the way that justice is perceived and delivered in the city.

They seized the moment. Against the tremendous obstacles of entrenched corruption, cronyism, patronage, and a history of racist practices, they made real progress. But this is not a success story. This is a miles-to-go-before-we-sleep narrative in which, in order to understand the strides the city and state have made, it's important to set the recent past up against the present, Greg Bright's pre-Katrina story against Clarence Jones's post-Katrina experience in 2012. These two indigent African American men—accused of murder and burglary, respectively—span the range of crimes and years that saw reformers battling a deeply flawed criminal justice system in New Orleans.

On the night of October 30, 1975, fifteen-year-old Elliot Porter clumped down the stairs of his home in New Orleans's Central
City Calliope Project. “It was about something to eleven when I asked him not to go outside,” his mother Myrtle Porter recalled at the time. She heard him clambering down the steps from where she lay on her bed and called out, telling him to stay put. It was a Thursday night. “You've got to go to school tomorrow,” she told the eighth grader. “And, he say, ‘I'm not going anywhere. I'm going right downstairs.'”
⁷

But he did not just go downstairs. He went outside. He took a walk with some friends and never came back. The next morning, a paperboy delivering the
Times-Picayune
discovered his body in a crawl space beneath another building in the projects. There were two bullet holes in his head.

Police began looking for leads, interviewing family members, people in the projects, a friend of Elliot's. Their investigation produced a series of suspects. Several public housing residents suggested Elliot Porter was smoking a lot of weed—and dealing a little on the side. Several witnesses came forward alleging that the boy had accepted $300 for a bag of marijuana that he promised to deliver, but then skipped out on the pair of buyers. They fingered a woman and a man from Thibodaux, Louisiana, as the thwarted buyers who sought revenge. They had threatened to go after him. Chances are, they had. Chances are, they shot him. That was the word, anyway, from folks in the project.

But before cops could follow up on this, they got a tip from a local resident named Sheila Robertson, who pointed them in a completely new direction. Robertson, twenty-three, announced eleven days after the shooting that she had actually witnessed what went down the night Elliot Porter was killed.
⁸
She happened to be sitting at her window smoking a cigarette and waiting for her boyfriend around 1
A.M.
on the night of the shooting, she told police. She saw two guys walk along the sidewalk with Porter between them. “Then I saw Elliot Porter broke out and run, he a little ways and ran between the two buildings,” she told a detective on November 10. “I saw him crawl through a hole in the fence and that's when I heard two shots.”
⁹
The next day, she learned that Elliot Porter was dead.

On November 15, a few days after this witness came forward, cops banged on Greg Bright's door at 2
A.M.
Greg was a tall, slim
African American man who lived a few blocks from the scene of the crime. Sheila Robertson, who knew him from the neighborhood, told cops where they could find him, and asserted he was one of the men she saw with Elliot Porter. The police cuffed Greg, put him into the back of a cruiser, and took him to the city jail.

Locals refer to the jail by its street address. “While I'm at Tulane and Broad, I discover there is another guy on the tier arrested and charged with the same offense. Earl and I were thrown together on a crime that neither of us had anything to do with,” Greg says, referring to his co-defendant, a seventeen-year-old African American kid named Earl Truvia who was an eleventh grader at Booker T. Washington High School and whom Greg first met at “Tulane and Broad” when he learned they were charged together with murdering Elliot Porter. Greg knew Earl's brother, but didn't know him. “Now how do you take two innocent people and frame 'em up? Haul them into a courthouse? Don't give them an opportunity or chance to say nothin'?”

Greg asks me this and shakes his head, recalling the series of events for me as I sit on his front porch in New Orleans's 7th Ward one hot day in April 2012. Thirty-seven years after his arrest, Greg Bright conjures up this moment as vividly as if it were yesterday. “At the time, I had never been in the back of a police car,” he says. “You could imagine the horror that would come after two police officers knock on your door at two in the morning and say that they have a warrant for your arrest. For murder.” He shakes his head. For nearly four decades he has been worrying this moment, reliving it, arguing it, insisting he knew nothing about the crime.

Today, at fifty-six, he is a lanky, bone-thin man dressed in khaki shorts, a grey Saints T-shirt, leather sandals with socks, and a black do-rag. He has a scruff of grey hair on his chin and has a gap between his front teeth. He perches on a wooden captain's chair that he has dragged outside from the dining room and leans forward, then back. He removes his glasses, then puts them back on. He gestures with his hands, then stills them. Both hesitant and compelled to talk, he drifts back in time to remember the twenty-seven years he spent imprisoned at Louisiana's notorious Angola prison for a crime he didn't commit, offering up his story as a cautionary tale,
and backing it up with reams of dog-eared court documents, the coffee spills and curled edges and underlined passages testament to the hours—decades, really—that he spent poring over these same papers.