Anatomy of Injustice (19 page)

On Sunday, she pulled up in front of a town house on the outskirts of Columbia. Her roommate, a first-year law student from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Marta Kahn, had already arrived. “There are only two things you need to know about me—one, I smoke, but I’ll do it outside,” Marta said as they introduced themselves. “Two, I would strongly recommend not speaking to me in the morning.” Diana grinned. She smoked, too. And morning was most definitely not the time to talk to
her
.

They bonded quickly—“We’re like that Thelma and … and … what’s her fucking name?” Diana exclaimed one day—though they were from totally different backgrounds. Marta, whose father was a psychologist and a staunch Republican (until after one presidential term of George W. Bush), had gone to an elite private girls’ school in the nation’s capital, National Cathedral, followed by Yale, where she graduated magna cum laude. Marta traced her liberalism to an incident at the Capitol when she was fifteen or sixteen: she had watched as a black man was arrested and roughed up by the cops. At Yale, she took a course on the death penalty.

Marta was ten years younger than Diana and Diana became her best friend, part big sister and part mentor. “She took me under her wing,” Marta said. “She was my big booster, a cheerleader, gave me confidence.” Marta had never met anyone quite like her—fearless, antiestablishment, passionate, and determined. “When she gets her teeth into something, you’d better not try to take it away.”

That first Sunday, after unpacking, Diana suggested they drive down to the resource center and check it out. The center is on the second and third floors of a brick building on the corner of Lady and Sumter, around the corner from the South Carolina Supreme Court. The carpet was worn, the file cabinets were battered, the chairs rickety, and papers were tossed into boxes, which were piled up in closets—a garden-variety public-interest law office.

Margulies had told Holt that two brilliant death penalty lawyers ran the center, David Bruck and John Blume. They became
her “gods,” though they had entirely different personalities—Bruck was serene, Blume explosive. Never one to shy away from difficult men, Diana gravitated to Blume, whom she found brilliant and bold. The first time she heard his voice, booming from his office down the hall, she thought he sounded like Jethro from
The Beverly Hillbillies
.

During Diana’s first week as an intern, she and Blume had a conversation about the center’s death row clients. “I don’t allow myself to believe any of them are innocent,” Blume said. For him, guilt or innocence wasn’t the issue. The issue was justice—good defense lawyers, ethical prosecutors, in short, a fair trial. “You’ve been doing this too long,” Holt shot back. She realized later hers was an inappropriate remark.

Over six feet tall with shoulder-length hair, John Henry Blume III was intensely competitive, in court and on the playing field; golf clubs and tennis rackets were part of his office decor. His office attire was shorts and tennis shoes in the summer, blue jeans in winter; a suit and tie were on standby in the corner for court appearances.

Blume grew up in a motel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which his parents owned. At fifteen, he was the Junior Men’s East Coast Surfing champion. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, he went to Yale for a master’s in theology. While a divinity student, he worked for New Haven legal aid, primarily with juvenile offenders. He decided that he could do more good as a lawyer than as a Methodist minister, so he shifted to Yale Law School. After his first year there, he worked as a summer associate in a large Atlanta law firm, generally a step to a well-paying job with the firm postgraduation. But he was still infused with a sense of social justice.

One morning, he read in
The Atlanta Constitution
about what had become known as the Alday murders, which had shocked the state, region, and nation. Three prison escapees had broken into a farmhouse in Seminole County, Georgia, looking for money and guns, and killed Jerry Alday, his father, two brothers, and an uncle. They forced Jerry Alday’s wife into a car and brutally raped her before killing her. In separate trials,
the three men had been convicted and sentenced to death. Their cases were now on appeal, and Millard Farmer, the prominent civil rights lawyer, was representing one of them. Blume called Farmer and volunteered to work on the case.

The Alday case was the kind of horrific crime that swells the ranks of capital punishment advocates and makes it hard for death penalty agnostics not to become believers. Blume didn’t deny the horror of the crime, but to him the trial had been a farce, a legal lynching. Over half the jurors had been to the Alday funerals, but the judge refused to grant a change of venue or to disqualify them. The Georgia lieutenant governor had been brought in as special prosecutor. As an idealistic law student, Blume thought this was a cause worth fighting for. (Years later, the convictions were overturned on the grounds that the pretrial publicity and community uproar had made a fair trial virtually impossible. On retrial, two of the men, Wayne Coleman and George Dungee, were sentenced to life in prison. Carl Isaacs was sentenced to death; he spent thirty years on death row before he was executed in May 2003.)

In representing men on death row, Blume had found his calling, one that “resonated with my religious background and training—all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” But the work exacts a toll. It is emotionally draining to watch a person you have fought for, maybe even gotten to know a bit as a human being, be strapped into the chair or onto the gurney. Burnout is high. Blume found release in music. When his wife gave him an acoustic guitar one Christmas, he rounded up a few musically inclined friends and soon they had a band. They called it The Reprieves.

When Blume turned fifty, he was still a death penalty lawyer, one of the most prominent in the country, and was teaching death penalty law at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” he said. “If you care about justice, it’s hard to find a field in which there’s more injustice than the death penalty.”

Elmore’s case reeked of injustice to Blume. He wasn’t sure why he had given the file to Diana when he was handing out
cases to the summer interns. Maybe it was just serendipity, he said years later. Blume didn’t offer much guidance, beyond telling her to look at everything afresh; he had even less of an idea where such looking might lead.

A few days later, Holt drove out to the Broad River Correctional Institution, on the outskirts of Columbia, announced herself at the gate, and was led by a guard to a common area. Elmore’s name was called, and he came out with a big smile. They sat at a picnic table, in the open air, talking. He was so soft-spoken, so docile, so childlike, that for Diana it was almost “innocence at first sight.” She didn’t see how someone so gentle could commit such a violent crime. Maybe she had been gullible, she thought later. And the more death row inmates she met and represented, the more guarded she was about concluding they were innocent. But her initial belief that Elmore was innocent grew to certitude the more she worked on the case. Diana would never say she favored Elmore over her other clients. But friends and colleagues detected that she had a special place for him in her heart. She spent time with his family, his sisters and brothers, and earned their trust, which wasn’t easy. “My people, they not used to lawyers, but they like Diana,” Elmore said. “She’s family,” said his brother Charles.

She came to banter easily with Elmore. “You can go out there and get a tan,” she said once during a telephone conversation on a hot summer day. “I think I’m tan enough already,” he said, laughing. When he said he did ten sets of fifty sit-ups each day, Diana responded, “We could put you on a video workout for abs.” He laughed. He liked the teasing. “It’s good to have a sense of humor, because it is so tense, good to have somebody who can break it down and make it a little lighter,” he said.

Elmore’s home was an eight- by ten-foot cell. It had a stainless steel toilet and basin and a metal bed bolted to the wall; each inmate was given a plastic mat for the bed. There was a window, about six feet high and three inches wide. The door was solid metal, with a covered slot that would slide open for meal trays and a window through which the guards could look when doing the daily count. Elmore was liked and trusted by
the guards. His day would begin around 4:30 in the morning, and after breakfast he worked around death row, cleaning the floors and serving meal trays to other men on “the row,” as they called it. He also took food that inmates wanted heated in a microwave to one of the two ovens on the floor. For a few years he had a television in his cell, but when it finally gave out, he didn’t have the money to buy a new one.

A
HEAT WAVE HIT
C
OLUMBIA
in July 1993. Temperatures exceeded one hundred degrees for seventeen straight days. With the air-conditioning blasting, Diana sat on the floor in the common area of the center’s office, which was crowded with busy interns; her legs crossed, she bent over and perused the Elmore record. When she read the testimony of Mrs. Edwards’s neighbor Jimmy Holloway, she was dumbfounded. He was on the stand longer than any witness—thirty-three pages of transcript—and Holt had to read his testimony more than once to absorb its full impact.

“Mr. Holloway, if you will, make yourself as comfortable as you can there and pull that up close where His Honor, the judge, and the fourteen jurors can hear and understand what you have to say, along with counsel for the defendant, please, sir,” Solicitor Jones began on the fourth day of Elmore’s first trial. Answering questions from Jones, Holloway told the jurors where he lived, where Mrs. Edwards lived, how they had met (at the Oregon Hotel), how long had they been neighbors (thirty-six years). Holloway said that he had watched over Mrs. Edwards after her husband died, and that he had a key to her house.

Jones asked Holloway about the events of Monday, January 18, 1982. He said that he had been surprised to see her car in the driveway, because Mrs. Edwards had told him and his
wife that she was going out of town on the weekend, to visit her boyfriend. He decided he should check on her, he said. It was about ten minutes after noon. “When I rounded the curve of the carport,” Holloway said, “I noticed that the Sunday morning
Greenville News
and the Monday morning
Greenville News
was laying out there. I picked these two up, thinking maybe Mrs. Edwards was sick, which we have found her before that way.”

He knocked on the back door. There was no answer.

“Was the door locked?” asked Jones.

“No, sir.”

He went in, he said, and saw the broken pieces of the flowerpots, the partial denture, and the needle-nose pliers on the kitchen floor. He said he heard the television blaring. He proceeded down the hall to her bedroom.

“Give us the benefit of what you remember at this time seeing then,” Jones said.

“I remember that her alarm clock was on and ringing.”

“Was that an electrical alarm clock?”

“Yes, sir,” said Holloway.

“Will they keep on running?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

“This is a matter of seconds; I did not see her in her bed and—”

Jones started to ask him about the chest of drawers, but Holloway wanted to talk about the bathroom.

“You went to the bathroom?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell us what you saw in the bathroom.”

“I saw a bloody commode and stuff,” said Holloway.

“All right, sir,” said Jones.

“I realized that something had happened.”

He went on: “As I came out of the bathroom, I finally saw the west wall of her bedroom.”

“All right, sir,” said Jones.

“I looked down and I saw a knife and I saw these things to the left.”

“All right, sir. And on the floor was there a considerable amount of blood that you saw?”

“A tremendous amount.”

“All right, sir. At this point, I certainly realize that you had to be upset, but what—did you look into the closet? Was the closet door open or closed?”

“The closet door had—was ajar, but I did not open it at this time. I decided that I should have somebody with me.”

Holloway told the jurors that he turned around and walked out of the house, retracing his steps, and went over to see Mrs. Clark, who lived next door.

Did you call the police then? Jones asked.

No. Holloway answered that he and Mrs. Clark had gone back to Dorothy’s house.

“Now, where did you and Mrs. Clark go in the house?”

“I went to Mrs. Edwards’s bedroom where I saw the bloodstains.”

“All right, sir. When the two of you got there, what if anything did you do?”

“I took a pair of woolen gloves out of my hip pocket and I used the corner of the door to the closet to let me open the door to see if her body would be there. And it was.”

“The door was ajar about how far?”

“Approximately four inches.”

“And then you pulled it how many more inches, or feet?” Jones asked.

“Oh, four or six inches. Enough for me to see what I saw.”

“And what did you see?”

“I saw the body of Mrs. Dorothy Edwards.”

Jones returned to the automatic coffeepot in the kitchen. It was set for six o’clock. Holloway said he had one just like it.

“You cannot set that coffee pot before seven p.m. the night before if you want it to come on at six o’clock the next morning,” he said.

“I want to be specific, now,” Jones said. “Do I understand you to tell us that if you want to set it for six a.m.—could the night before at six twenty you set it for six a.m. the next morning?”

“If you did, the coffee would come on then.”

“Right then.”

“Yes, sir.”

Holloway said that he had returned to the house the day after the body had been found, Tuesday.

“During the day of Tuesday, did you obtain services of people to clean up the dust in there of the fingerprinting efforts around the house, plus removing the blood-soaked material?” Jones asked.