Just Mercy (35 page)

Events in the days and weeks following Walter’s release were completely unexpected.
The New York Times
covered his exoneration and homecoming in a front-page story. We were flooded with media requests, and Walter and I gave television interviews to local, national, and even international press who wanted to report the story. Despite my general reluctance about media on pending cases, I believed that if people in Monroe County heard enough reports that Walter had been released because he was innocent, there would be less resistance to accepting him when he returned home.

Walter was not the first person to be released from death row after being proved innocent. Several dozen innocent people who had been wrongly condemned to death row had been freed before him. The Death Penalty Information Center reported that Walter was the fiftieth person to be exonerated in the modern era. Yet few of the earlier cases drew much media attention. Clarence Brantley’s 1990 release in Texas attracted some coverage—his case had also been featured on
60 Minutes
. Randall Dale Adams inspired a compelling, award-winning documentary film by Errol Morris called
The Thin Blue Line
. The movie had played a role in Adams’s exoneration, and he was released
from Texas’s death row not long after its release. But there had never been anything like the coverage surrounding Walter’s exoneration.

In 1992, the year before Walter’s release, thirty-eight people were executed in the United States. This was the highest number of executions in a single year since the beginning of the modern death penalty era in 1976. That number rose to ninety-eight in 1999. Walter’s release coincided with increased media interest in the death penalty, triggered by the increasing pace of executions. His story was a counternarrative to the rhetoric of fairness and reliability offered by politicians and law enforcement officials who wanted more and faster executions. Walter’s case complicated the debate in very graphic ways.

Walter and I traveled to legal conferences and spoke about his experience and about the death penalty. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled hearings on innocence and the death penalty a few months after Walter’s release, and we both testified. Pete Earley’s book
Circumstantial Evidence
was published a few months after Walter was freed, and it provided a detailed account of the case. Walter enjoyed the travel and the attention, even though he didn’t much like speaking in public. Politicians would sometimes say provocative things—such as that his exoneration just proved the system works—which irritated and angered me. My own speaking would sometimes take on an edge of combativeness. But Walter remained calm, jovial, and earnest, and it was very effective—watching Walter tell his story with such good humor, intelligence, and sincerity heightened the horror our audiences felt, that the State had been determined to execute this man in all of our names. It was a compelling presentation. We spent a good bit of time together, and Walter would occasionally share with me that he was still troubled by the cases of the men he’d left behind on death row. He thought of the guys on the row as his friends. Behind his gentle presentations, Walter had become fiercely opposed to capital punishment, an issue he readily admitted he had never thought about until his own experience confronting it.

A few months after winning his freedom, I was still nervous about Walter’s return to Monroe County. The big feast immediately following
his release had brought hundreds of people to his home to celebrate his freedom, but I knew that not everyone in the community was overjoyed. I didn’t tell Walter about the death threats and bomb threats we’d received until he was free, and then I told him that we needed to be careful. He spent his first week out of prison in Montgomery. He then moved to Florida to live with his sister for a couple of months. We still talked almost every day. He’d accepted that Minnie wanted to move forward without him and seemed mostly happy and hopeful. But that didn’t mean there were no aftereffects from his time in prison. He started telling me more and more about how unbearable it had been to live under the constant threat of execution on death row. He admitted fears and doubts he hadn’t told me about when he was incarcerated. He had witnessed six men leave for execution while he was on the row. At the time of the executions, he coped as the other prisoners did—through symbolic protests and private moments of anguish. But he told me that he didn’t realize how much the experience had terrified him until he left prison. He was confused about why that would bother him now that he was free.

“Why do I keep thinking about this?”

He sometimes complained of nightmares. A friend or a relative might say something about how they supported the death penalty—just not for Walter—and he would find himself shaken.

All I could tell him was that it would get better.

After a few months, Walter very much wanted to return to the place he’d spent his whole life. It made me nervous, but he went ahead and put a trailer on property he owned in Monroe County and resettled there. He returned to logging work while we made plans to file a civil lawsuit against everyone involved in his wrongful prosecution and conviction.

Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling—nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them. At the time of Walter’s release, only
ten states and the District of Columbia had laws authorizing compensation to people who have been wrongly incarcerated. The number has since grown, but even today almost half of all states (twenty-two) offer no compensation to the wrongly imprisoned. Many of the states that do authorize some monetary aid severely limit the amount of compensation. No matter how many years an innocent person has been wrongly incarcerated, New Hampshire caps compensation at $20,000; Wisconsin has a $25,000 cap; Oklahoma and Illinois limit the total amount an innocent person can recover to under $200,000, even if the person has spent decades in prison. While other states have caps of more than a million dollars, and many have no cap at all, several states impose onerous eligibility requirements. In some jurisdictions, if the person lacks the support of the prosecuting attorney who wrongly convicted him, compensation will be denied.

At the time Walter was set free, Alabama was not among the handful of states that provided aid to innocent people released from prison. The Alabama legislature could pass a special bill granting compensation to a person wrongly convicted, but that almost never happened. A local legislator introduced a bill seeking compensation on Walter’s behalf that prompted the local press to report that Walter was seeking $9 million. The proposed legislation, of which Walter had no prior knowledge, went nowhere. But the news coverage about the possible $9 million payoff outraged people in Monroeville who still questioned his innocence and titillated some of Walter’s friends and family, a few of whom started soliciting him aggressively for financial help. One woman even filed a paternity suit falsely claiming that Walter was the father of her child, a child that was born less than eight months after Walter’s release. DNA tests confirmed that he was not the father.

Walter at times expressed frustration that people didn’t believe him when he told them he had received nothing. We pressed ahead in our efforts to get compensation for him through a lawsuit, but there were obstacles. Our civil suit ran up against laws that give police, prosecutors, and judges special immunity from civil liability in criminal justice matters. While Chapman and the state officers connected with the
case now readily acknowledged Walter’s innocence, they were unwilling to accept any responsibility for his wrongful prosecution and death sentence. Sheriff Tate, who seemed most active in Walter’s wrongful pretrial placement on death row and whose racist threats and intimidation tactics seemed the most actionable in a civil suit, reportedly accepted Walter’s innocence upon his release but then started telling people that he still believed Walter was guilty.

Rob McDuff, an old friend of mine from Jackson, Mississippi, agreed to join our team for the civil litigation. Rob is a white native Mississippian whose Southern charm and manner enhanced his outstanding litigation skills in Alabama courts. He had recently asked me to help him with an Alabama civil rights case involving law enforcement misconduct. That case involved a police raid on a nightclub in Chambers County during which black residents had been illegally detained, mistreated, and abused by local authorities who refused to accept any responsibility for their misconduct. We ended up taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and we ultimately won a favorable ruling.

Walter’s civil case would also go to the U.S. Supreme Court. We sued almost a dozen state and local officials and agencies. As expected, the defendants all claimed immunity for the conduct that had resulted in Walter’s wrongful conviction. The immunity from civil liability given to prosecutors and judges is even greater than the protections provided to law enforcement officers. So even though it was clear that Ted Pearson, the prosecutor who had tried the case against Walter, had illegally withheld evidence that directly resulted in Walter’s wrongful conviction, we would likely not succeed in a civil action against him. As he was the person most in charge of Walter’s wrongful prosecution and conviction, it was hard to reconcile his immunity with his culpability in the whole affair, but there was little we could do. State and federal courts have persistently insulated prosecutors from accountability for egregious misconduct that results in innocent people being sent to death row.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court again reinforced the protections
that shield prosecutors from accountability. A month before an inmate named John Thompson was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana, a crime lab report was uncovered that contradicted the State’s case against him for a robbery-murder that had taken place fourteen years earlier. State courts overturned his conviction and death sentence, and he was subsequently acquitted of all charges and released. He filed a civil suit, and a New Orleans jury awarded Thompson $14 million. The jury found that the district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., had illegally suppressed evidence of Thompson’s innocence and had allowed him to spend fourteen years in prison for a crime he had not committed. Connick appealed the judgment, and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the award in a bitterly divided 5–4 decision. As a result of immunity law, the Court held that a prosecutor cannot be held liable for misconduct in a criminal case, even if he intentionally and illegally withheld evidence of innocence. The Court’s decision was strongly criticized by scholars and Court observers, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a compelling dissent, but Thompson did not get any money.

We faced similar obstacles in Walter’s case. After a year of depositions, hearings, and pretrial litigation, we eventually reached a settlement with most of the defendants that would provide Walter with a few hundred thousand dollars. Walter’s claim against Monroe County for Sheriff Tate’s misconduct could not be settled, so we appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Law enforcement officers generally have no personal resources to pay damages to victims of misconduct, so the city, county, or agency that employs them is typically the target of any civil action that seeks compensation. That’s why we had sought relief from Monroe County for the misconduct of its sheriff. The county took the position that even though the sheriff’s jurisdiction is limited to the county, he’s elected by people only in the county, and he’s paid by the county, he’s not an employee of the county. The county sheriff was an employee of the State of Alabama, the county claimed.

State governments are broadly shielded from recovery for their employees’
misconduct unless the employee works for an agency that can be sued. If Tate was a state officer, Monroe County would have no liability for his misconduct and no recovery would be possible from the State of Alabama. Unfortunately for Walter, the Supreme Court ruled that county sheriffs in Alabama
are
state officers, again in a close 5–4 decision, which limited our ability to recover damages for the most egregious misconduct in Walter’s case. We ultimately reached settlement with all parties, but I was disappointed that we couldn’t get more for Walter. Adding insult to injury, Tate went on to be re-elected sheriff, and he remains in office today; he has been sheriff continuously for more than twenty-five years.

While the money wasn’t as much as we would have liked, it did allow Walter to restart his logging business. He loved getting back into the woods and cutting timber. He told me that it was working from morning until night, being outdoors, that made him feel normal again. Then one afternoon, tragedy struck. He was cutting a tree when a branch dislodged and struck him, breaking his neck. It was a serious injury that left Walter in very poor condition for several weeks. He didn’t have a lot of care available, so he came to live with me in Montgomery for several months until he recovered. He eventually regained his mobility, although the injury put an end to his ability to cut trees and perform difficult landscape work. I marveled at how he seemed to take it in stride.

“I’ll figure out something else to do when I get back on my feet,” he told me.

After a few months, he went back to Monroe County and started collecting car parts for resale. He owned the plot of land where he’d put his trailer and had become convinced, on the advice of some friends, that he could generate income with a junk business—collecting discarded vehicles and car parts and reselling them. The work was less physically demanding than logging and allowed him to be outdoors.
Before long his property was littered with busted vehicles and scrap metal.

In 1998, Walter and I were asked to go to Chicago to attend a national conference where exonerated former death row prisoners were planning to gather. By the late 1990s, the evolution of DNA evidence had helped expose dozens of wrongful convictions. In many states, the number of exonerations exceeded the number of executions. The problem was so significant in Illinois that in 2003, Governor George Ryan, a Republican, citing the unreliability of capital punishment, commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on death row. Concerns about innocence and the death penalty were intensifying, and support for the death penalty in opinion polls began to drop. Abolitionists were becoming hopeful that more profound death penalty reform or possibly a moratorium might be achievable. Our time in Chicago with other exonerated former death row prisoners was energizing for Walter, who seemed more motivated than ever to talk about his experience.