Anatomy of Injustice (11 page)

“And y’all stayed down there—”

“Yes, sir.”

“—for about an hour?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, wouldn’t that put it up around eleven, or later?”

“Yes, sir.”

Beasley objected. Jones was leading the witness. But Judge Burnett was sympathetic to Jones’s plight in dealing with an uneducated black woman. “I think in this case some leading is going to be necessary,” the judge said. Jones continued to lead his witness. Eventually, he got all he could from Mrs. Moseley.

Then he put Mrs. Moseley’s daughter-in-law Sue Moseley on the stand.

She also was uneducated, and Jones had the same problems.

“Before you got to your mother-in-law’s house, did you meet somebody?” he asked.

“Yeah, we did. We met Lee.”

“And where did you meet him?”

“I get mixed up with the streets.”

“You get mixed up?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, was it on the street before you turn into the little street where your mother-in-law lives?”

“Yeah.”

“What did his car do, if anything?”

“What you say now?”

Jones was frustrated and again resorted to leading questions. Anderson objected. Burnett was as exasperated as Jones. “You understand we have a problem with this one, also,” the judge said. Not a problem with “this witness” or with “Mrs. Moseley.” With
“this one.”
He let Jones continue to ask leading questions.

Jones finished. Anderson had no questions.

In spite of the difficulties with the witnesses, Jones seemed to establish a gap in Elmore’s activities on the evening in question. Mary and her brother had seen him around ten and not again until about midnight. In those two hours, the state argued, he had driven over to 209 Melrose Terrace, knocked on Mrs. Edwards’s door, and raped and killed her.

J
ONES WAS METHODICALLY
building the case against Elmore. Conradi had testified that Mrs. Edwards was murdered Saturday evening. Elmore’s girlfriend and family had testified that they had not seen him late that evening. But Jones had yet to give the jurors any evidence that conclusively placed Elmore inside the house when Mrs. Edwards was murdered. The fingerprint by the back door might have been left when Elmore was legitimately working there.

Jones called Ira Parnell, one of the two SLED investigators
at the crime scene. Jones had the easel set up. He walked over to it and, using his pointer, directed Parnell’s attention to the victim’s bedroom. He asked Parnell to direct him to where the bed was.

“The upper-right-hand area of the drawing, right there,” Parnell said, as Jones moved his pointer.

Jones asked Parnell to step down from the witness box and approach the easel. He asked him to describe the condition of the bed. There was a small pillow in one corner, and the top cover of the bed had been folded back, Parnell said.

Had Parnell found anything on the bed?

“Yes sir, I did,” he said.

“And what did you find?” Jones asked.

“I found a quantity of human hair.”

“A quantity of human hair?” Jones repeated, stressing the point to the jury.

The hairs had been spread over an area approximately eighteen inches long and three feet across, Parnell said. Parnell said he had collected the hairs, put them in a baggie, and delivered it to SLED chemist Earl Wells for examination.

Jones finished his questioning of Parnell. He had now presented evidence that was damning—and new. Neither Johnson nor Owen had mentioned finding any hairs on the bed in their reports, nor had anyone else, nor had there been any reference to hairs on the bed in any of the proceedings prior to the trial. Anderson had no questions.

Parnell’s testimony about finding hairs on the bed was tantalizing, but the jury had to wait until later in the trial for the rest of the story.

On Friday, the fifth day of the trial, Jones called Earl Wells. He began with routine questions about Wells’s background—a BS in chemistry, five years in the textile industry before joining SLED as a forensic chemist. Wells said he had conducted “several hundred” tests and had testified in many trials. Jones asked Wells if he had received samples of the victim’s head and pubic hairs. He had. Had he received samples of the defendant’s head and pubic hairs? Again, he had.

“I ask you furthermore if you received a sample of hairs that were collected from the bed of the victim by SLED agent Ira Parnell, brought to you by SLED agent Dan DeFreese.”

“I did.”

Items of physical evidence that either side wants to introduce into evidence are given a number. The baggie with the hairs Parnell said he found on the bed was State Exhibit 58.

“I hand you State Exhibit 58, and I ask you if they contain fifty-three hairs gathered from the bed of the deceased, Dorothy Edwards?” Jones said to Wells.

“I think the total count on the hairs is forty-nine, Solicitor,” Wells said.

Jones was taken aback. During his opening argument, he had told the jury fifty-three hairs had been found on the bed.

“Would you check your records,” Jones now said to Wells.

“I do not recall the number, but as I recall there’s forty-two in here and seven of which I used to prepare microscopic slides with.”

“Forty-nine?” Jones asked, surprised.

Wells, a thirteen-year veteran, was uncomfortable. He knew there was a cardinal rule: You never challenge Willy T.

Wells answered honestly, “Yes, sir.” Forty-nine.

Jones knew better than to get into a disagreement with his own witness in front of the jury, and he let the matter of the number drop.

Wells testified that he had taken seven hairs out of the bag, mounted them on slides, and examined them under a microscope. Two were probably Mrs. Edwards’s pubic hair; two were her head hair, he said. Three were Elmore’s pubic hair. The remaining forty-two? “My opinion is that there’s a very high degree of probability that these hairs originated from the defendant in this case,” Wells testified.

Jones asked Wells a few more questions—how could he distinguish head hairs from pubic hairs, cut hairs from yanked hairs?—and then turned the witness over to Beasley for cross-examination. Could Wells say with absolute certainty that the hairs found on the bed came from the defendant? he asked.
No, said Wells, though with a “high degree of probability.” Beasley made nothing of the inconsistency about the number of hairs in the baggie, or of the fact that Wells said DeFreese had given him the hairs, while Parnell had testified that he had delivered them to Wells. Beasley asked three questions in all.

I
N CRIMINAL CASES
, the state must convince the jury of the defendant’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This standard of proof “dates from at least the early years as a Nation,” the United States Supreme Court noted in
In re Winship
, which held the standard applied in a juvenile delinquency hearing for a twelve-year-old boy who had stolen $112 from a women’s pocketbook. Trial lawyers and legal philosophers debate the meaning of the phrase, which is not defined in the Constitution. One of the most often cited definitions was by the renowned chief justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1850. The standard does not require the state to eliminate “mere possible doubt,” because everything in human affairs is open to some doubt, he wrote. But it must do more than “establish a probability” that the facts are true. The jurors must be convinced “to a reasonable and moral certainty,” he wrote.

The case against Elmore seemed to be loaded with doubt. If there was a moral certainty after two days of testimony from some twenty witnesses, it might have been that Elmore was innocent. How did the state explain that only one of Elmore’s fingerprints was found at the scene? And that could have been left weeks before the murder. How was it that there was an absence of any semen, even though the state was charging Elmore with rape? The police had concluded nothing valuable was taken from Mrs. Edwards’s house, so what was the motive? Yes, Jones had presented testimony that Elmore’s hairs were found on the bed, but given the inconsistencies about the number, some jurors might have had reasonable doubts about the veracity of that testimony.

As his penultimate witness, Jones called the man who could plug the holes: James Arthur Gilliam Jr. He was thirty-nine years old, with eight kids, a big man at six seven. He had a rap sheet that ran to several pages: burglary in Brooklyn, New York; a string of fraudulent-check charges in South Carolina; receiving stolen property; prison escape; disorderly conduct; resisting arrest; assault and battery. He was currently in the Greenwood County jail for violation of probation on a conviction for receiving stolen property. He was facing eighteen months in state prison.

A few days before Elmore’s trial was to open, the guards put Gilliam in a cell with Elmore. A day or two later, Gilliam scrawled a note to Sgt. Alvin Johnson, well known to Gilliam from numerous encounters:

A jailer mailed it. Two days later, Gilliam was taken to Solicitor Jones’s office on the second floor of the Grier Building. Sergeant Johnson and Detective Vanlerberghe were there. For two hours on Friday evening, as he tapped ashes and ground out cigarette butts into the ever-present, always seemingly full ashtray on his desk, Jones went over Gilliam’s testimony with him. When the lights were turned off and everyone had left, Gilliam was ready for trial time.

It was permissible for Jones to go over Gilliam’s testimony with him prior to trial, and indeed, it was part of good trial preparation. However, a lawyer may not encourage a witness to lie nor put him on the stand knowing that he will lie. But lawyers, trained to argue about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, find their ethical consolation in the difference between “knowing” someone is lying and merely “suspecting” that he is.

Anderson objected to Gilliam’s being allowed to testify to what Elmore had allegedly told him. The jury was sent out.

The guards at the jail had placed Gilliam in the cell with Elmore to ask him questions, and that made him a state agent; he was thus required to give Elmore his Miranda warning, Anderson argued to Burnett. He apologized for making the argument. “I’ll be frank with you, Judge, I think they’ve got good evidence. I think that the evidence that has been elicited at this trial has been certainly evidence that has been forthright. But, now, I think this is a distraction, frankly, on what they’re trying to do here and it’s unnecessary and prosecutorial overreach.”

Jones feigned offense.

“Now, Your Honor, I don’t like that at all. It ain’t no prosecutorial overreach. I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t bring him in here.”

Judge Burnett ruled that Gilliam could testify. “I find specifically from the evidence that there was no intention of any law enforcement personnel to place this witness, Mr. Gilliam, with this defendant for the purposes of eliciting any statements. Voluntary admissions and statements of the defendant are his prerogative and deserve no constitutional protection, and there is no violation in this case.”

Jones told Burnett that Elmore had confessed to other men in the jail, but in the interest of saving time, he was calling only Gilliam. Anderson didn’t challenge this, didn’t ask for the names of the others.

The jury was brought back in.

“How did this conversation about this case come up with him?” Jones asked Gilliam, who was casually dressed.

“I don’t know. I guess he just needed somebody to talk to him,” Gilliam said.