Chapter Thirteen

Recovery

Events in the days and weeks following Walter’s release were completely unexpected. The New York Times covered his exoneration and homecoming in a front-page story. We were flooded with media requests, and Walter and I gave television interviews to local, national, and even international press who wanted to report the story. Despite my general reluctance about media on pending cases, I believed that if people in Monroe County heard enough reports that Walter had been released because he was innocent, there would be less resistance to accepting him when he returned home.

Walter was not the first person to be released from death row after being proved innocent. Several dozen innocent people who had been wrongly condemned to death row had been freed before him. The Death Penalty Information Center reported that Walter was the fiftieth person to be exonerated in the modern era. Yet few of the earlier cases drew much media attention. Clarence Brantley’s 1990 release in Texas attracted some coverage—his case had also been featured on 60 Minutes. Randall Dale Adams inspired a compelling, award-winning documentary film by Errol Morris called The Thin Blue Line. The movie had played a role in Adams’s exoneration, and he was released from Texas’s death row not long after its release. But there had never been anything like the coverage surrounding Walter’s exoneration.

In 1992, the year before Walter’s release, thirty-eight people were executed in the United States. This was the highest number of executions in a single year since the beginning of the modern death penalty era in 1976. That number rose to ninety-eight in 1999. Walter’s release coincided with increased media interest in the death penalty, triggered by the increasing pace of executions. His story was a counternarrative to the rhetoric of fairness and reliability offered by politicians and law enforcement officials who wanted more and faster executions. Walter’s case complicated the debate in very graphic ways.

Walter and I traveled to legal conferences and spoke about his experience and about the death penalty. The U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled hearings on innocence and the death penalty a few months after Walter’s release, and we both testified. Pete Earley’s book Circumstantial Evidence was published a few months after Walter was freed, and it provided a detailed account of the case. Walter enjoyed the travel and the attention, even though he didn’t much like speaking in public. Politicians would sometimes say provocative things—such as that his exoneration just proved the system works—which irritated and angered me. My own speaking would sometimes take on an edge of combativeness. But Walter remained calm, jovial, and earnest, and it was very effective—watching Walter tell his story with such good humor, intelligence, and sincerity heightened the horror our audiences felt, that the State had been determined to execute this man in all of our names. It was a compelling presentation. We spent a good bit of time together, and Walter would occasionally share with me that he was still troubled by the cases of the men he’d left behind on death row. He thought of the guys on the row as his friends. Behind his gentle presentations, Walter had become fiercely opposed to capital punishment, an issue he readily admitted he had never thought about until his own experience confronting it.

A few months after winning his freedom, I was still nervous about Walter’s return to Monroe County. The big feast immediately following his release had brought hundreds of people to his home to celebrate his freedom, but I knew that not everyone in the community was overjoyed. I didn’t tell Walter about the death threats and bomb threats we’d received until he was free, and then I told him that we needed to be careful. He spent his first week out of prison in Montgomery. He then moved to Florida to live with his sister for a couple of months. We still talked almost every day. He’d accepted that Minnie wanted to move forward without him and seemed mostly happy and hopeful. But that didn’t mean there were no aftereffects from his time in prison. He started telling me more and more about how unbearable it had been to live under the constant threat of execution on death row. He admitted fears and doubts he hadn’t told me about when he was incarcerated. He had witnessed six men leave for execution while he was on the row. At the time of the executions, he coped as the other prisoners did—through symbolic protests and private moments of anguish. But he told me that he didn’t realize how much the experience had terrified him until he left prison. He was confused about why that would bother him now that he was free.

“Why do I keep thinking about this? ”

He sometimes complained of nightmares. A friend or a relative might say something about how they supported the death penalty—just not for Walter—and he would find himself shaken.

All I could tell him was that it would get better.

After a few months, Walter very much wanted to return to the place he’d spent his whole life. It made me nervous, but he went ahead and put a trailer on property he owned in Monroe County and resettled there. He returned to logging work while we made plans to file a civil lawsuit against everyone involved in his wrongful prosecution and conviction.

Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling—nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them. At the time of Walter’s release, only ten states and the District of Columbia had laws authorizing compensation to people who have been wrongly incarcerated. The number has since grown, but even today almost half of all states (twenty-two) offer no compensation to the wrongly imprisoned. Many of the states that do authorize some monetary aid severely limit the amount of compensation. No matter how many years an innocent person has been wrongly incarcerated, New Hampshire caps compensation at $20, 000; Wisconsin has a $25, 000 cap; Oklahoma and Illinois limit the total amount an innocent person can recover to under $200, 000, even if the person has spent decades in prison. While other states have caps of more than a million dollars, and many have no cap at all, several states impose onerous eligibility requirements. In some jurisdictions, if the person lacks the support of the prosecuting attorney who wrongly convicted him, compensation will be denied.

At the time Walter was set free, Alabama was not among the handful of states that provided aid to innocent people released from prison. The Alabama legislature could pass a special bill granting compensation to a person wrongly convicted, but that almost never happened. A local legislator introduced a bill seeking compensation on Walter’s behalf that prompted the local press to report that Walter was seeking $9 million. The proposed legislation, of which Walter had no prior knowledge, went nowhere. But the news coverage about the possible $9 million payoff outraged people in Monroeville who still questioned his innocence and titillated some of Walter’s friends and family, a few of whom started soliciting him aggressively for financial help. One woman even filed a paternity suit falsely claiming that Walter was the father of her child, a child that was born less than eight months after Walter’s release. DNA tests confirmed that he was not the father.

Walter at times expressed frustration that people didn’t believe him when he told them he had received nothing. We pressed ahead in our efforts to get compensation for him through a lawsuit, but there were obstacles. Our civil suit ran up against laws that give police, prosecutors, and judges special immunity from civil liability in criminal justice matters. While Chapman and the state officers connected with the case now readily acknowledged Walter’s innocence, they were unwilling to accept any responsibility for his wrongful prosecution and death sentence. Sheriff Tate, who seemed most active in Walter’s wrongful pretrial placement on death row and whose racist threats and intimidation tactics seemed the most actionable in a civil suit, reportedly accepted Walter’s innocence upon his release but then started telling people that he still believed Walter was guilty.

Rob McDuff, an old friend of mine from Jackson, Mississippi, agreed to join our team for the civil litigation. Rob is a white native Mississippian whose Southern charm and manner enhanced his outstanding litigation skills in Alabama courts. He had recently asked me to help him with an Alabama civil rights case involving law enforcement misconduct. That case involved a police raid on a nightclub in Chambers County during which black residents had been illegally detained, mistreated, and abused by local authorities who refused to accept any responsibility for their misconduct. We ended up taking the case all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, and we ultimately won a favorable ruling.

Walter’s civil case would also go to the U. S. Supreme Court. We sued almost a dozen state and local officials and agencies. As expected, the defendants all claimed immunity for the conduct that had resulted in Walter’s wrongful conviction. The immunity from civil liability given to prosecutors and judges is even greater than the protections provided to law enforcement officers. So even though it was clear that Ted Pearson, the prosecutor who had tried the case against Walter, had illegally withheld evidence that directly resulted in Walter’s wrongful conviction, we would likely not succeed in a civil action against him. As he was the person most in charge of Walter’s wrongful prosecution and conviction, it was hard to reconcile his immunity with his culpability in the whole affair, but there was little we could do. State and federal courts have persistently insulated prosecutors from accountability for egregious misconduct that results in innocent people being sent to death row.

In 2011, the U. S. Supreme Court again reinforced the protections that shield prosecutors from accountability. A month before an inmate named John Thompson was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana, a crime lab report was uncovered that contradicted the State’s case against him for a robbery-murder that had taken place fourteen years earlier. State courts overturned his conviction and death sentence, and he was subsequently acquitted of all charges and released. He filed a civil suit, and a New Orleans jury awarded Thompson $14 million. The jury found that the district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., had illegally suppressed evidence of Thompson’s innocence and had allowed him to spend fourteen years in prison for a crime he had not committed. Connick appealed the judgment, and the U. S. Supreme Court overturned the award in a bitterly divided 5–4 decision. As a result of immunity law, the Court held that a prosecutor cannot be held liable for misconduct in a criminal case, even if he intentionally and illegally withheld evidence of innocence. The Court’s decision was strongly criticized by scholars and Court observers, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a compelling dissent, but Thompson did not get any money.

We faced similar obstacles in Walter’s case. After a year of depositions, hearings, and pretrial litigation, we eventually reached a settlement with most of the defendants that would provide Walter with a few hundred thousand dollars. Walter’s claim against Monroe County for Sheriff Tate’s misconduct could not be settled, so we appealed the case to the U. S. Supreme Court. Law enforcement officers generally have no personal resources to pay damages to victims of misconduct, so the city, county, or agency that employs them is typically the target of any civil action that seeks compensation. That’s why we had sought relief from Monroe County for the misconduct of its sheriff. The county took the position that even though the sheriff’s jurisdiction is limited to the county, he’s elected by people only in the county, and he’s paid by the county, he’s not an employee of the county. The county sheriff was an employee of the State of Alabama, the county claimed.

State governments are broadly shielded from recovery for their employees’ misconduct unless the employee works for an agency that can be sued. If Tate was a state officer, Monroe County would have no liability for his misconduct and no recovery would be possible from the State of Alabama. Unfortunately for Walter, the Supreme Court ruled that county sheriffs in Alabama are state officers, again in a close 5–4 decision, which limited our ability to recover damages for the most egregious misconduct in Walter’s case. We ultimately reached settlement with all parties, but I was disappointed that we couldn’t get more for Walter. Adding insult to injury, Tate went on to be re-elected sheriff, and he remains in office today; he has been sheriff continuously for more than twenty-five years.

While the money wasn’t as much as we would have liked, it did allow Walter to restart his logging business. He loved getting back into the woods and cutting timber. He told me that it was working from morning until night, being outdoors, that made him feel normal again. Then one afternoon, tragedy struck. He was cutting a tree when a branch dislodged and struck him, breaking his neck. It was a serious injury that left Walter in very poor condition for several weeks. He didn’t have a lot of care available, so he came to live with me in Montgomery for several months until he recovered. He eventually regained his mobility, although the injury put an end to his ability to cut trees and perform difficult landscape work. I marveled at how he seemed to take it in stride.

“I’ll figure out something else to do when I get back on my feet, ” he told me.

After a few months, he went back to Monroe County and started collecting car parts for resale. He owned the plot of land where he’d put his trailer and had become convinced, on the advice of some friends, that he could generate income with a junk business—collecting discarded vehicles and car parts and reselling them. The work was less physically demanding than logging and allowed him to be outdoors. Before long his property was littered with busted vehicles and scrap metal.

In 1998, Walter and I were asked to go to Chicago to attend a national conference where exonerated former death row prisoners were planning to gather. By the late 1990s, the evolution of DNA evidence had helped expose dozens of wrongful convictions. In many states, the number of exonerations exceeded the number of executions. The problem was so significant in Illinois that in 2003, Governor George Ryan, a Republican, citing the unreliability of capital punishment, commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on death row. Concerns about innocence and the death penalty were intensifying, and support for the death penalty in opinion polls began to drop. Abolitionists were becoming hopeful that more profound death penalty reform or possibly a moratorium might be achievable. Our time in Chicago with other exonerated former death row prisoners was energizing for Walter, who seemed more motivated than ever to talk about his experience.

Around the same time, I started teaching at the New York University School of Law. I would travel to New York to teach my classes and then fly back to Montgomery to run EJI. I asked Walter to come to New York each year to talk with students, and it was always a powerful moment when he walked into the classroom. He was a survivor of a criminal justice system that had proven, in his case, just how brutally unfair and cruel it could be. His personality, presence, and witness said something extraordinary about the humanity of people directly impacted by systemic abuse. His firsthand perspective on the plight of people wrongfully convicted was deeply meaningful to students, who often seemed overwhelmed by Walter’s testimony. He usually spoke very briefly and would give short answers to the questions posed to him. But he had an enormous effect on the students who met him. He would laugh and joke and tell them he wasn’t angry or bitter, just grateful to be free. He would share how his faith had helped him survive his hundreds of nights on death row.

One year, Walter got lost on the trip to New York, and he called to tell me that he couldn’t make it. He seemed confused and couldn’t offer a coherent explanation of what had happened at the airport. When I got back home, I went to see him and he seemed his usual self, just a little down. He told me that his junkyard business wasn’t going great. When he described his finances, it became clear he was spending the money we’d secured for him more quickly than seemed prudent. He was buying equipment to make his collection of cars simpler, but he wasn’t generating the kind of revenue necessary to support the costs. After an hour or two of anxious talk, he relaxed a bit and seemed to return to the jovial Walter I’d come to know. We agreed that we would travel together on any future trips.

Walter wasn’t the only one who was facing new financial pressures. When a conservative majority took power in Congress in 1994, legal aid to death row prisoners became a political target, and federal funding was quickly eliminated. Most of the capital representation resource centers around the country were forced to close. We had never received state support for our work, and without the federal dollars we faced serious financial challenges. We scraped along and found enough private support to continue our work. Teaching and increased fund-raising responsibilities got piled on top of my bulging litigation docket, but somehow things progressed. Our staff was overextended, but I was thrilled with the talented lawyers and professionals we had working with us. We were assisting clients on death row, challenging excessive punishments, helping disabled prisoners, assisting children incarcerated in the adult system, and looking at ways to expose racial bias, discrimination against the poor, and the abuse of power. It was overwhelming but gratifying.

I received a surprising call one day from the Swedish Ambassador to the United States, who told me that EJI had been selected for the Olof Palme International Human Rights Award. They invited me to Stockholm to receive it. I had studied Sweden’s progressive approach to the rehabilitation of criminal offenders as a graduate student and had long marveled at how focused on recovery their system appeared. Their punishments were humane, and their policymakers took rehabilitation of criminal offenders very seriously, which made me excited about the award and the trip. That they were giving an award named after a beloved prime minister who had been tragically murdered by a deranged man to someone who represented people on death row revealed a lot about their values. The trip to Stockholm was planned for January. They sent a film crew to interview me a month or two before the trip, and the crew also wanted to speak with a few clients. I made arrangements for them to interview Walter.

“I can come down for this interview, ” I told Walter.

“No, you don’t need to do that. I don’t have to travel, so I’m okay to talk to them. Don’t spend time driving all the way down here. ”

“Do you want to go to Sweden? ” I asked, half-joking.

“I don’t know exactly where that is, but if you have to fly a long way to get there, no, I’m not too interested. I think I’d like to stay on the ground from now on. ” We laughed and he sounded fine.

He then became quiet and asked one final question before we hung up. “Maybe you can come and see me when you get back? I’m okay, but we can just hang out. ”

It was an unusual request from Walter so I eagerly agreed. “Sure, that would be great. We can go fishing, ” I teased. I’d never gone fishing in my life, and Walter found that so scandalous that he never stopped questioning me about it. When we traveled together, I never ordered fish to eat, and he was sure I didn’t eat fish because I’d never caught a fish. I tried to follow his logic and made promises, but we had never gotten around to taking a fishing trip.

The Swedish film crew was eager to meet the challenge of finding Walter’s trailer in the backwoods of South Alabama. I told them how to get there. I’d always been with Walter when he spoke to the press, but I felt like this was probably safe.

“He doesn’t give speeches. He’s usually very direct and succinct, ” I told the interviewers. “He’s great, but you should ask him good questions. And it’s probably better if you talk to him outside, too. He prefers to be outdoors. ” They nodded sympathetically but seemed confused by my anxiety. I called Walter before leaving for Sweden, and he told me that the interview had gone fine, which was reassuring.

Stockholm was beautiful, despite the constant snow and frigid temperatures. I gave some speeches and attended a few dinners. It was a short, cold trip, but the people were lovely and unusually kind to me. I was surprised at how gratifying I found their enthusiasm for our work. Most everyone I met offered support and encouragement. A couple of years earlier, I had been invited to Brazil to talk about punishment and the unjust treatment of disfavored people. I had spent a lot of time in local communities, mostly in the favelas outside Sã o Paulo, where I met hundreds of desperately poor people who were intensely interested in talking. I spent hours in conversation with all sorts of people, from struggling mothers to impoverished children who sniffed glue to help them cope with hunger and police brutality. The cross-cultural conversations with those people, who had shared a lot of the same history and struggle as my clients in America, had a huge impact on me. In Sweden, the people I met were equally interested and responsive, even though they hadn’t experienced profound need or shared struggle with an abusive justice system. People all over the country seemed motivated to connect from a common place of tremendous compassion.

The organizers asked me to speak at a high school on the outskirts of Stockholm. Kungsholmens Gymnasium is in an extraordinarily beautiful section of Stockholm, an island surrounded by seventeenth-century architecture. As an American with limited experience outside the United States, I was dazzled by the age of the buildings and marveled at their ornate architecture. The school itself was nearly a hundred years old. I was escorted through the school to a narrow, winding staircase with handcrafted railings that led up to a cavernous auditorium. Several hundred high school students packed the room, waiting for my presentation. The domed ceiling of the enormous hall was covered with delicate hand paintings and Latin phrases written in decorative script. Floating angels and trumpet-wielding infants danced all over the walls and ceiling. A large balcony packed with more students seemed to ascend elegantly into the drawings.

While the room was very old, the acoustics were perfect, and there was a balance and precision to the space that seemed almost magical. I studied the hundreds of Scandinavian teenagers seated in the hall while I was being introduced. I was impressed by how eager they appeared. I spoke for forty-five minutes to the strangely silent and attentive group of teens. I knew English wasn’t their first language and had real doubts about how much they were even following what I said, but when I finished, they erupted into vigorous applause. Their response actually startled me. They were so young but so interested in the plight of my condemned clients thousands of miles away. The headmaster joined me onstage to thank me and suggested to the students that they offer their own thanks with a song. The school had an internationally famous music program and student choir. The headmaster asked the choir students to stand wherever they were in the auditorium and briefly sing something. About fifty giggling kids stood up and looked around at each other.

After a minute of uncertainty, a seventeen-year-old boy with strawberry blond hair stood on his chair and said something to his choir-mates in Swedish. The students laughed, but they became more sober. As they became still and perfectly quiet, the boy hummed a note in a beautiful tenor voice. His pitch was perfect. Then he slowly waved his arms to prompt these extraordinary children to sing. Their voices bounced off the walls and ceiling of this ancient hall and fell into a glorious harmony the likes of which I’d never heard. After starting his classmates in song, the young man stepped off his chair and joined them in performing a heartbreaking melody with tremendous care and precision. I could not understand a word of the Swedish lyrics, but it sounded angelic. Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved into warm chords—the sound was transcendent. The singing built gloriously with each line.

Standing on a stage above the singers with the headmaster beside me, I looked up at the ceiling—at the majestic artwork. My mother had died a few months before this trip. She’d been a church musician most of her life and had worked with dozens of children’s choirs. When I looked up and saw the drawings of angels on the domed ceiling I thought of her. I quickly realized I would never recover my composure looking up there, so I looked back at the students and forced a smile. When the students finished their song, the rest of the students cheered and applauded wildly. I joined the applause and tried to hold myself together. When I left the stage, students came up to thank me for the talk, ask questions, and take pictures. I was completely charmed.

It was a long and exhausting but beautiful day. When I got back to the hotel I was grateful for the two-hour break before my next speaking commitment. I don’t know what prompted me to turn on the television, but I’d been away from home for four days and hadn’t seen any headlines. The local news blasted into my room. The unfamiliar Swedish TV anchors were chatting away when I heard my name. It was the piece the crew had filmed with me; familiar images filled the screen. I watched myself walking with the reporter into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, then up the street to the Civil Rights Memorial. The scene then switched to Walter, standing in overalls amid his pile of discarded cars down in Monroeville.

Walter gently put down a little kitten he’d been holding as he started to answer the reporters’ questions. He’d mentioned to me previously that all kinds of cats had sought shelter in his field of abandoned metal. He said things I’d heard him say dozens of times before. Then I watched his expression change, and he began talking with more animation and excitement than I’d ever heard from him.

He became uncharacteristically emotional. “They put me on death row for six years! They threatened me for six years. They tortured me with the promise of execution for six years. I lost my job. I lost my wife. I lost my reputation. I lost my—I lost my dignity. ”

He was speaking loudly and passionately and looked to be on the verge of tears. “I lost everything, ” he continued. He calmed himself and tried to smile, but it didn’t work. He looked soberly at the camera. “It’s rough, it’s rough, man. It’s rough. ” I watched worriedly while Walter crouched down close to the ground and began to sob violently. The camera stayed on him while he cried. The report switched back to me saying something abstract and philosophical, and then it was over. I was stunned. I wanted to call Walter, but I couldn’t figure out how to dial him from Sweden. I knew it was time to get back to Alabama.

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