Anatomy of Injustice (2 page)

For this reason, I felt the desire to write Elmore’s story more than that of any of the other men Sara and I met on death row. But that wasn’t the only factor leading to this book. For me, as a lawyer and as a journalist, what transformed the story was the character, dedication, and determination of his appellate lawyer, Diana Holt, an intense native of Texas whose conversations are punctuated by flailing arms and eye rolls. She’s sui generis, her life having more in common with Elmore’s than with Ivy League–educated death penalty lawyers. Listening to her speaking with her death row clients is surreal. Using words like “pokie wokie” and “peachie,” she talks as if she were at the mall with friends. She is as much a mother, big sister, or friend to these men—most of whom have been abandoned by their families—as she is their lawyer. In the summer of 1993, at the age of thirty-four, Diana, with pure grit and the blossoming of innate intelligence, had overcome Sisyphean odds and finished her second year of law school. As an intern at the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center, she was given the Elmore file. By then, he had been on death row for eleven years.

Elmore’s case, and Holt’s effort to save his life, is a textbook study of how our criminal justice system works in capital cases, as well as how it doesn’t. Americans consider their criminal justice system to be the best in the world. Some conservatives may carp that it coddles criminals, and some liberals may believe that there are not enough protections for suspects, particularly indigent ones. By and large, however, the system yields justice. As a former prosecutor and defense counsel, however, I know the system is only as good as the lawyers who administer it—prosecutors, defense counsel, judges. If prosecutors abuse their authority, if defense lawyers are lazy or incompetent, if judges are weak or biased, the result is injustice, and in capital cases that can spell death.

BOOK ONE
Rush to Judgment

A
FEROCIOUS SNOWSTORM
hit the South in January 1982. An Air Florida 737 crashed into the Fourteenth Street Bridge in Washington, D.C., and then plunged into the icy Potomac River, killing seventy-eight people. In Atlanta, temperatures fell to near zero. Some 160 miles east, two inches of snow covered buildings, lawns, and cars in Greenwood, South Carolina. On the front page of the Greenwood
Index-Journal
, there appeared a picture of Emily James, two and a half years old, bundled in a snowsuit, watching “in amazement as her family went sledding.” Government offices and schools were closed. In a graceful hand, Dorothy Edwards wrote “Snow” in the squares on her calendar for Wednesday and Thursday, the thirteenth and fourteenth.

Along with some ten thousand homeowners, Mrs. Edwards was without power for thirty-six hours. She jumped rope to keep warm. She was seventy-six years old but could have passed for fifty-six, a petite five foot three, size 6. Every morning, she pulled on her leotards for thirty minutes of exercise. She was a handsome woman, reserved, very much a lady—“elegant in a comfortable sort of way,” in the eyes of her daughter, Carolyn. There had been no TV dinners or fast food when Carolyn was growing up; the dining room table was set with china and silver for every meal, breakfast included.

Dorothy’s home since the end of World War II was on the north side of Greenwood, on Melrose Terrace; her three-acre wooded plot backed onto Edgewood Cemetery, adding to the feeling of seclusion and tranquillity—except for the nights when young men brought their six-packs for parties among the dead. The west end of the half-mile-long, leafy street is anchored by the First Baptist Church, founded in 1870. The current stately structure with its cathedral sanctuary and stained-glass windows was erected in 1954; the bell tower was added in 1968. Dorothy lived where the boomerang-shaped street curved, at 209. Most of her neighbors were elderly. Christine Henderson, whose husband had died in 1967, lived in a white brick house with a large lawn across the street, at 210; her son was a criminal investigator for the state. The redbrick house at 213 belonged to Mildred Clark, a widow, who was the neighborhood recluse—she didn’t even answer the door for trick-or-treaters. At 205 was Roy Raborn, a salesman at Fred Smith Co., a men’s clothing store, who had landed at Omaha Beach in 1944. Dorothy’s neighbors thought she was a drug company heiress, which was not quite true. She was well-off, having inherited close to $1 million from her mother, while her stepfather had been an executive with Geer Drug Co. in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a lovely town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dorothy’s mother, Beatrice Ely, had moved to the South from New York after she divorced; her husband was a jeweler in New York City. Beatrice raised her daughter to be independent and refined. They spent vacations in the mountains, where Beatrice taught Dorothy to ride horses and shoot; years later, Dorothy’s neighbors were not alarmed when they heard the crack of a rifle from the yard behind her house. “Did you get it, Dorothy?” a neighbor would shout, knowing she’d spotted another snake.

Beatrice sent her daughter to Converse College, a women’s liberal arts school in Spartanburg. The school is strong in music and sends graduates to symphonies and conservatories around the world. Dorothy, a coloratura soprano, won local, regional,
and national singing contests. When she was thirty, she took a train to New York to appear on
Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour
, performing “Carmena.” She took second place. It made front-page news in Spartanburg.

A few months later, back in Spartanburg, she married James Edward Edwards, the son of a well-liked family doctor who would accept a chicken or vegetables from a patient’s garden as payment. Dorothy and Ed, as family and friends called him, had met in college when he was at Wofford, a liberal arts college near Converse. They were married on a Thursday morning at the Church of the Advent, in a ceremony marked by “simplicity and dignity,” the Spartanburg newspaper reported in a prominent article. The bride, it noted, wore “a becoming fall suit of beige wool with collar of faux fur.”

Ed and Dorothy’s only child, Carolyn, was born in 1939, and soon afterward, Ed went off to war, a U.S. Navy Seabee. After the war, he moved his family to Greenwood. They bought a marshy plot. Ed drained it, filled it, landscaped it, and built a spacious two-bedroom house; later he added a screened-in porch and a guest room.

He worked primarily in construction, and became Greenwood’s first civil defense director in the 1950s. He was a generous, big-hearted man who “championed the underdog, and hired the handicapped,” his daughter recalled. A heavy drinker, he eventually joined Alcoholics Anonymous and helped set up several groups throughout the state. He died at the age of fifty-eight, in 1966. It was a devastating loss for Dorothy, but she had a strong inner resolve, and gradually she found a strength and independence that impressed close friends. She now put much of her energy into painting, displaying remarkable talent; the walls of her home were decorated with her work. She also made needlepoint pillows and hooked rugs, passing hours in front of a large frame stretched with a rug, peering through a magnifying glass at designs she had bought from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “My brains are in my fingers,” she would say jovially to Carolyn.

G
REENWOOD, NAMED IN
the early 1800s after a plantation that the owner’s wife had called Green Wood, has rich chocolate soil, fertile for small-scale agriculture. But it had grown as a textile town—Greenwood Cotton Mill opened in 1889, a second mill in 1896, and a third in 1897. At its peak, there were 250,000 spindles in the Greenwood environs. In 1897, the town’s voters—all white males, of course—approved a $25,000 bond issue for a courthouse and jail. By the turn of the century, the population had soared to 4,828 and nine railroad lines passed through the municipality, bringing twenty-seven trains each day. Traveling salesmen stayed at the Oregon Hotel, the only hotel in town until the 1960s.

Though perhaps today “an hour and a half from everyplace else” (as President Obama would describe it good-naturedly during his presidential campaign), Greenwood residents have much to boast about in their history. After World War I, they saluted Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch with a huge celebration on Main Street, slightly wider than the length of a football field at the time—before office buildings went up. In 1954, the street was packed with cheering residents turned out to welcome a local girl who had been crowned Miss Universe, Miriam Stevenson. The small town has produced the Swingin’ Medallions, modeled on the Beach Boys; a justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court; and three star quarterbacks in succession for Clemson University. Greenwood residents are crazy about their sports. The high school football coach Julius “Pinky” Babb became a legend, winning more than three hundred games between 1943 and 1981. “We were confident in our excellence,” said a resident.

It was a white, Protestant community, primarily Southern Baptist. It had very few Catholics until the 1960s, when some northern companies began to relocate in the Emerald City, as the town calls itself. As for blacks, fifteen years after the Supreme Court had declared, in
Brown v. Board of Education
,
that separate schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional, and a year later ordered integration “with all deliberate speed,” Greenwood’s high schools were still segregated. The segregationists held out until 1969, and then they gave in grudgingly. Greenwood doesn’t hide its racial past. A war memorial sits at the corner of Oak and Main, in front of the redbrick, seven-story Textile Building. American Legion Post No. 20 erected it in 1929. A pole carrying the Stars and Stripes extends from a six-foot-high granite base. The bronze plaque on the west side of the base lists the World War I dead in two categories—“White” and “Colored.” Thirty-one “whites” and 24 “coloreds” gave their lives. The “colored” include Henry Chin. Another plaque was added after World War II. It also racially divides the men who were killed in action: 131 “white” and 11 “colored.” The racial categories were eliminated for the Korean War—12 men from Greenwood are remembered in alphabetical order. Twenty-four men died in the Vietnam War; their names are also listed alphabetically.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, C. Rauch Wise, a lawyer and probably Greenwood’s only card-carrying member of the ACLU, offered to replace the segregationist plaques from the first two wars with plaques that listed the dead alphabetically. He quietly took the proposal to the mayor. After some inquiries, the mayor, an African American, reported back that it couldn’t be done. The monument didn’t belong to the city, he said. It belonged to the local American Legion post, which opposed the change. A few years later, in 2010, Wise tried again. Again, the legionnaires said no.

Over the decades Greenwood grew out, not up. The eight-story Grier Building, at 327 Main Street, was the tallest in town when it was built in 1919 and is the tallest today. Greenwood’s charm gave way to sprawl, and the town became indistinguishable from thousands of others across the country—shopping malls with enormous parking lots, chains replacing independents, fast-food franchises. A small grocery store owned by Dorothy’s next-door neighbor Jimmy Holloway was bought by a supermarket chain, which later sold to a chain steak house.

D
OROTHY SPENT
C
HRISTMAS
1981 with her daughter, Carolyn, and her grandchildren. Carolyn had married—she was now Carolyn Lee—and was living in Pensacola, Florida. Dorothy returned home on Sunday, December 27, she noted on her calendar. On Wednesday, Edward Elmore, a lean black man with bright eyes, knocked on the back door. With only a fifth-grade education and of limited intelligence—he could do simple addition and subtraction only if he used his fingers—he worked as a handyman. A few weeks earlier, while working for one of Dorothy’s neighbors, he had noticed that the gutters on the house at 209 were full of leaves; he asked Dorothy if she would like him to clean them. Mrs. Edwards said yes. She showed him where the ladder was, underneath the porch. The job took him about two hours, for which he was paid $3. Come back in a few weeks, after the leaves have finished falling, she said.