Just Mercy (18 page)

We were sitting at a wooden table that was probably four by six feet. Charlie was on one side of the table, and I was on the other. It had been three days since his arrest.

“Charlie, my name is Bryan. Your grandmother called me and asked me if I would come and see you. I’m a lawyer, and I help people who get in trouble or who are accused of crimes, and I’d like to help you.”

The boy wouldn’t make eye contact with me. He was tiny, but he had big, beautiful eyes. He had a close haircut that was common for little boys because it required no maintenance. It made him look even younger than he was. I thought I saw tattoos or symbols on his neck, but when I looked more closely, I realized that they were bruises.

“Charlie, are you okay?”

He was staring intensely to my left, looking at the wall as if he saw something there. His distant look was so alarming that I actually turned to see if there was something of interest behind me, but it was just a blank wall. The disconnected look, the sadness in his face, and his complete lack of engagement—qualities he shared with a lot of the other teenagers I’d worked with—were the only things that made me believe he was fourteen. I sat and waited for a very long time in the hope that he would give me some kind of response, but the room remained silent. He stared at the wall and then looked down at his own wrists. He wrapped his right hand around his left wrist where the handcuffs had been and rubbed the spot where the metal had pinched him.

“Charlie, I want to make sure you’re doing okay, so I just need you to answer a few questions for me, okay?” I knew he could hear me; whenever I spoke, he would lift his head and return his gaze to the spot on the wall.

“Charlie, if I were you, I’d be pretty scared and really worried right now, but I’d also want someone to help me. I’d like to help, okay?” I waited for a response, but none was forthcoming.

“Charlie, can you speak? Are you okay?” He stared at the wall when I spoke and then back at his wrists when I was finished, but he didn’t say a word.

“We don’t have to talk about George. We don’t have to talk about what happened; we can talk about whatever you want. Is there something you want to talk about?” I was waiting for longer and longer stretches after each question, desperately hoping that he would say something, but he didn’t.

“Do you want to talk about your mom? She’s going to be fine. I’ve checked, and even though she can’t visit you, she’s going to be fine. She’s worried about you.”

I thought talking about his mother would spark something in Charlie’s eyes. When it didn’t, I became even more concerned about the child.

I noticed that there was a second chair on Charlie’s side of the table, and I realized that lawyers were apparently supposed to sit on that side and the clients on the side I chose, where there was only one chair. I’d sat in the wrong place.

I lowered my voice and spoke more softly, “Charlie, you’ve got to talk to me. I can’t help you if you don’t. Would you just say your name—say something, please?” He continued to stare at the wall. I waited and then stood up and walked around the table. He didn’t look at me as I moved but returned his gaze to his wrist. I sat in the chair next to him, leaned close, and said quietly, “Charlie, I’m really sorry if you’re upset, but please talk to me. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.” He leaned back in his chair for the first time, nearly placing his head on the wall behind us. I pulled my chair closer to him and leaned back in mine. We sat silently for a long time and then I started saying silly things, because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Well, you won’t tell me what you’re thinking, so I guess I’m going to just have to tell you what I’m thinking. I bet you think you know
what I’m thinking,” I said playfully, “but in fact you really couldn’t possibly imagine. You probably think I’m thinking about the law, or the judge, or the po-lice, or why won’t this young man speak with me. But what I’m actually thinking about is food. Yes, that’s right, Charlie,” I continued teasingly, “I’m thinking about fried chicken and collard greens cooked with turkey meat and sweet potato biscuits.… You ever had a sweet potato biscuit?”

Nothing.

“You’ve probably never had a sweet potato biscuit, and that’s a shame.”

Still nothing. I kept going.

“I’m thinking about getting a new car because my car is so old.” I waited. Nothing. “Charlie, you’re supposed to say, ‘How old is it, Bryan?’ and then I say my car is so old—”

He never smiled or responded; he just continued looking at the spot on the wall, his face frozen in sadness.

“What kind of car do you think I should get?” I went through a range of ridiculous musings that yielded nothing from Charlie. He continued to lean back, and his body seemed a little less tense. I noticed that our shoulders were now touching.

After a while I tried again. “Come on, Charlie, what’s going on? You’ve got to talk to me, son.” I started leaning on him somewhat playfully, until he sat forward a bit, and then I finally felt him lean back into me. I took a chance and put my arm around him, and he immediately began to shake. His trembling intensified before he finally leaned completely into me and started crying. I put my head to his and said, “It’s okay, it’s all right.” He was sobbing when he finally spoke. It didn’t take me long to realize that he wasn’t talking about what had happened with George or with his mom but about what had happened at the jail.

“There were three men who hurt me on the first night. They touched me and made me do things.” Tears were streaming down his face. His voice was high-pitched and strained with anguish.

“They came back the next night and hurt me a lot,” he said, becoming
more hysterical with each word. Then he looked in my face for the first time.

“There were so many last night. I don’t know how many there were, but they hurt me.…”

He was crying too hard to finish his sentence. He gripped my jacket with a force I wouldn’t have imagined he was capable of exerting.

I held him and told him as gently as I could, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.” I’d never held anyone who gripped me as tightly as that child or who cried as hard or as long. It seemed like his tears would never end. He would tire and then start again. I just decided to hold him until he stopped. It was almost an hour before he calmed down and the crying stopped. I promised him that I would try to get him out of there right away. He begged me not to leave, but I assured him that I would be back that day. We never talked about the crime.

When I left the jail, I was more angry than sad. I kept asking myself, “Who is responsible for this? How could we ever allow this?” I went directly to the sheriff’s office inside the jail and explained to the overweight, middle-aged sheriff what the child had told me, and I insisted that they immediately place him in a protected single cell. The sheriff listened with a distracted look on his face, but when I said I was going to see the judge, he agreed to move the child into a protected area immediately. I then went back across the street to the courthouse and found the judge, who called the prosecutor. When the prosecutor arrived in the judge’s chambers, I told them that the child had been sexually abused and raped. They agreed to move him to a nearby juvenile facility within the next several hours.

I decided to take on the case. We ultimately got Charlie’s case transferred to juvenile court, where the shooting was adjudicated as a juvenile offense. That meant Charlie wouldn’t be sent to an adult prison, and he would likely be released before he turned eighteen, in just a few years. I visited Charlie regularly, and in time he recovered. He was a smart, sensitive child who was tormented by what he’d done and what he’d been through.

At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and
the plight of incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn’t expect to hear from them, but within days they called, and they were persistent. We eventually agreed that they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable.

Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they had been putting money away to send him to college. They explained in their letter that they wanted to use the money they’d saved for their grandson to help Charlie.

Eventually, Charlie and this couple began corresponding with one another, building up to the day when the Jenningses met Charlie at the juvenile detention facility. They later told me that they “loved him instantly.” Charlie’s grandmother had died a few months after she first called me, and his mother was still struggling after the tragedy of the shooting and Charlie’s incarceration. Charlie had been apprehensive about meeting with the Jenningses because he thought they wouldn’t like him, but he told me after they left how much they seemed to care about him and how comforting that was. The Jenningses became his family.

At one point early on, I tried to caution them against expecting too much from Charlie after his release. “You know, he’s been through a lot. I’m not sure he can just carry on as if nothing has ever happened. I want you to understand he may not be able to do everything you’d like him to do.”

They never accepted my warnings. Mrs. Jennings was rarely disagreeable or argumentative, but I had learned that she would grunt when someone said something she didn’t completely accept. She told me, “We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”

The Jenningses helped Charlie get his general equivalency degree in detention and insisted on financing his college education. They were there, along with his mother, to take him home when he was released.

Walter’s appeal was denied.

The seventy-page opinion from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirming his conviction and death sentence was devastating. I’d filed a lengthy brief that documented the insufficiency of the evidence and raised every legal deficiency in the trial that I could identify. I argued that there was no credible corroboration of Myers’s testimony and that under Alabama law the State couldn’t rely exclusively on the testimony of an accomplice. I argued that there was prosecutorial misconduct, racially discriminatory jury selection, and an improper change of venue. I even challenged Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s override of the jury’s life sentence, though I knew the reduction of an innocent man’s death sentence to life imprisonment without parole would still have been an egregious miscarriage of justice. The court rejected all of my arguments.

I didn’t think it would turn out this way. At the oral argument months earlier, I’d been hopeful as I walked into the imposing Alabama Judicial Building and stood in the grand appellate courtroom that was formerly a Scottish Rite Freemasonry temple. Constructed in the 1920s, the building was renovated into a cavernous courthouse in
the 1940s, complete with marble floors and an impressive domed ceiling. It stood at the end of Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, across the street from the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had pastored during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A block away was the state capitol, adorned with three banners: the American flag, the white and red state flag of Alabama, and the battle flag of the Confederacy.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals courtroom was on the second floor. The chief judge of the court was former governor John Patterson. He had made national news in the 1960s as a fierce opponent of civil rights and racial integration. In 1958, with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan, he defeated George Wallace for governor. His positions were even more pro-segregation than Wallace’s (who, having learned his lesson, would become the most famous segregationist in America, declaring in 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” just a block away from this courthouse). When he was attorney general before becoming governor, Patterson banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama and blocked civil rights boycotts and protests in Tuskegee and Montgomery. As governor, he withheld law enforcement protection for the Freedom Riders—the black and white college students and activists who traveled south in the early 1960s to desegregate public facilities in recognition of new federal laws. When the Freedom Riders’ bus traveled through Alabama, they were abandoned by the police. Alone and unprotected, they were beaten violently, and their bus was bombed.