Anatomy of Injustice (14 page)

“All right. Answer any questions the solicitor might have.”

Now it was Jones’s turn.

“Put your feet on either side of that and pull it up closer to you, like that,” Jones began, gently enough, telling Edwards to get closer to the microphone. “Speak into that and speak up.” He was positioning him for the kill.

The jury might have sympathy for a man as quiet and meek as Elmore, might even think he was simply not capable of such a grisly crime. Jones had to destroy the choirboy image. He showed Elmore the drawings of the house, which he had set on the easel in his opening argument, and asked questions. Elmore had difficulty understanding.

“Remember that breezeway between her house and the guest room back there? You remember that, don’t you?”

“Breezeway?”

“You know what a breezeway is, don’t you, Mr. Elmore?”

“No, sir, not right now.”

The tempo accelerated—questions, charges, objections, rulings.

Anderson jumped up. Objection.

Jones had almost slipped. He had told the jury during his closing argument that there was no blood on the bed because Mrs. Edwards had swallowed it.

Jones showed Elmore State Exhibit 58, the baggie with the hairs Agent Wells said were Elmore’s and Jones had argued Mrs. Edwards had pulled from Elmore when he had thrown her on the bed.

Jones was finished. It was 6:00 p.m. On Sunday. Closing arguments commenced—the defense, then the state, and then the defense would get a rebuttal.

Beasley stood up. “I’ll be brief,” he said. First, he told the jury that he had “no criticism whatsoever” of their having found Elmore guilty. But he argued that the evidence
was circumstantial—no one had seen Elmore murder Mrs. Edwards. With circumstantial evidence, he said, you can never be sure with absolute, moral certainty that you could be right in imposing the death penalty. Then he sat down. He had spoken for only five minutes.

Now Jones was ready once more to whip up the jury, to feign humility, to ask for sympathy—for himself, not Elmore. “I beg of you not to allow the tone of my voice, my general appearance, whatever kind of clothes I’ve got on, and the shoes I wear to interfere with your dispensation of justice. I’m confident that you won’t—you won’t do that. But allow me to beg of you not to do it. I do the best I can do and everybody is handicapped.”

It was Sunday, and Jones, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and thin tie, was in his pulpit. He believed in an eye for an eye and in vengeance; he knew that most of the jurors did as well. He focused on those jurors who had religious scruples about the death penalty. “It’s not for us to get into the religious aspect of it,” he said. “We’re here to do our duty. And I don’t feel there’s any religion on the face of God’s earth that calls upon us not to be a citizen in the country that we live and stand by and carry out our duty, according to law.”

He turned spiritual. Mrs. Edwards is “not here today where we can see and touch her, but she’s somewhere around here. I have that faith. When I was little, I used to think heaven was up that way and hell was down this way. But I think both of them are all around us. I think it’s just a different state. And I’ve got faith that those who have gone on are looking at us and watching us every day.”

He shamed them, challenged them, taunted them. “Either you have the fortitude and the manhood to do it, or it is a blight upon our jury system.”

He sat down.

Anderson, in a suit slightly less conservative than Jones’s, stood up. It was Elmore’s last chance. The courtroom was packed.

“Mr. Foreman, members of the jury, certainly the solicitor has the ability, the oratory, to work you into a frenzy. I hope that
he hasn’t done that. I hope that you can maintain calm deliberations as you enter the jury room to begin your deliberations.”

Anderson was hoping to get just one juror to hold out against the death penalty. That’s all it would take to spare Elmore’s life. He argued against the death penalty in principle. He gave the jurors a brief survey of the death penalty. In England, they used to hang people for stealing a horse, for witchcraft, for petty theft, he told them. The public was invited. “They put you on a high hill and the point was, they’d hang you up there and hang you by the neck until you were dead and the point was that the people who would walk up there, come on, let’s watch the hanging.” The theory was that a public hanging would be a deterrent. “You were supposed to be good. Just there he is hanging by his neck. The reaction is, I sure don’t want to do that.” It didn’t work. “You know what it does? It breeds it. That hard feeling breeds more cruelty, breeds it, engenders it, fosters it. There’s no deterrence here.”

He didn’t neglect religion. “I’m more of a New Testament man,” he said. He embraced forgiveness, not an eye for an eye.

“I’m going to sit down now, and let the judge charge you, but I want to tell you one more time if I haven’t reached all of you about this killing business, I hope I’ve reached some of you. If I’ve reached some of you, hang in there, and come back with a recommendation of life and let him spend the rest of his days behind bars. No sense in taking his life.”

It was nearly 7:30 on a Sunday evening. Most evenings during the trial, The Ranch, the best restaurant in town, had catered the jurors’ meals, but it and other restaurants were closed on Sunday, leaving the jurors to choose between McDonald’s or Hardee’s, Judge Burnett told them. Hamburgers were brought in.

At 7:50 p.m. the jury began deliberating Edward Elmore’s life, whether he would spend the rest of his days in prison or whether he was to be strapped into the electric chair. Anderson had reached a couple of the jurors. After two hours, the foreman notified Judge Burnett that at least one juror was holding
out for a life sentence. In fact, two were: Elizabeth Hackett and Georgia Moten, the two African Americans on the jury.

Judge Burnett brought the jurors back into the courtroom. He reminded them that during jury selection, when a potential juror said he was opposed to capital punishment, he had been asked if he could put aside those views and impose the death penalty if that is what the evidence required. All had said yes, Burnett reminded them. He urged them to go back into the deliberations and reach a verdict “according to the oath that you took, each of you, and the duty of a juror as I explained to each of you to render a verdict that is supported by the law and the evidence in this case.”

It was nearly 10:30. The jurors continued to discuss the evidence. Hackett and Moten were against executing Elmore. But the two black women, thirty-one and twenty-four years old, respectively, were no match for the ten whites. “This could have been anybody’s mother,” juror Susan Burnett said at one point. “We have to think about the innocent.” She was thirty-three years old, taught Sunday school at the Methodist church, and believed in capital punishment. She was uncomfortable with sentencing a man to die, as were other jurors. “But we didn’t feel we had a choice as far as the law was concerned.”

Another juror, James Walker, who had considered the case against Elmore open-and-shut, wasn’t at all uncomfortable with sentencing him to die for what he considered a most heinous crime. Walker planned to attend the execution.

An hour later, there was still no verdict. It was nearly midnight. Burnett had no choice but to let the jury go for the night. They were taken to the Holiday Inn.

A
T 10:00 A.M
. Monday, April 19, 1982 (the day Sally Ride was announced as the first woman astronaut and Guion Bluford the first black), the jurors tried again.

This time, their deliberations were short. At 10:50, they reached a verdict, advised the court, and were led back into the courtroom. Elmore rose, hands in his pockets. The courtroom
was about half full. The foreman passed the verdict to the clerk. She read: