Chapter Sixteen

The Stonecatchers’ Song of Sorrow

On May 17, 2010, I was sitting in my office waiting anxiously when the U. S. Supreme Court announced its decision: Life imprisonment without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of non-homicide crimes is cruel and unusual punishment and constitutionally impermissible. My staff and I jumped up and down in celebration. Moments later we were inundated with a flood of calls from media, clients, families, and children’s rights advocates. It was the first time the Court had issued a categorical ban on a punishment other than the death penalty. Joe Sullivan was entitled to relief. Scores of people, including Antonio Nuñ ez and Ian Manuel, were entitled to reduced sentences that would give them a “meaningful opportunity for release. ”

Two years later, in June 2012, we won a constitutional ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences imposed on children convicted of homicides. The Supreme Court had agreed to review Evan Miller’s case and the case of our client from Arkansas, Kuntrell Jackson. I argued both cases in March of that year and waited anxiously until we won a favorable ruling. The Court’s decision meant that no child accused of any crime could ever again be automatically sentenced to die in prison. Over two thousand condemned people sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for crimes when they were children were now potentially eligible for relief and reduced sentences. Some states changed their statutes to create more hopeful sentences for child offenders. Prosecutors in many places resisted retroactive application of the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama, but everyone now had new hope, including Ashley Jones and Trina Garnett.

We continued our work on issues involving children by pursuing more cases. I believe there should be a total ban on housing children under the age of eighteen with adults in jails or prisons. We filed cases seeking to stop the practice. I am also convinced that very young children should never be tried in adult court. They’re vulnerable to all sorts of problems that increase the risk of a wrongful conviction. No child of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen can defend him- or herself in the adult criminal justice system. Wrongful convictions and illegal trials involving young children are very common.

A few years earlier, we won the release of Phillip Shaw, who was fourteen when he was improperly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in Missouri. His jury was illegally selected, excluding African Americans. I argued two cases at the Mississippi Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the convictions and sentences of young children were illegal. Demarious Banyard was a thirteen-year-old who had been bullied into participating in a robbery that resulted in a fatal shooting in Jackson, Mississippi. He was given a mandatory death-in-prison sentence after his jury was illegally told that he had to prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt and the State introduced impermissible evidence. He was resentenced to a finite term of years and now has hope for release.

Dante Evans was a fourteen-year-old child living in a FEMA trailer with his abusive father in Gulfport, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina. His dad, who had twice before nearly killed Dante’s mother, was shot by Dante while he slept in a chair. Dante had repeatedly told school officials about his father’s abuse, but no one ever intervened. I discussed Dante’s prior diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder following the attempted murder of his mother in my oral argument before the Mississippi Supreme Court. The Court emphasized the trial court’s refusal to permit introduction of this evidence and granted Dante a new trial.

Our death penalty work had also taken a hopeful turn. The number of death row prisoners in Alabama for whom we’d won relief reached one hundred. We had created a new community of formerly condemned prisoners in Alabama who had been illegally convicted or sentenced and received new trials or sentencing hearings. Most never returned to death row. Starting in 2012, we had eighteen months with no executions in Alabama. Continued litigation about lethal injection protocols and other questions about the reliability of the death penalty slowed the execution rate in Alabama dramatically. In 2013, Alabama recorded the lowest number of new death sentences since the resumption of capital punishment in the mid-1970s. These were very hopeful developments.

Of course, there were still challenges. I was losing sleep over another man on Alabama’s death row, a man who was clearly innocent. Anthony Ray Hinton was on death row when Walter McMillian arrived in the 1980s. Mr. Hinton was wrongly convicted of two robbery-murders outside Birmingham after state forensic employees mistakenly concluded that a gun recovered from his mother’s home had been used in the crimes. Mr. Hinton’s appointed defense lawyer got only $500 from the court to retain a gun expert to confront the state’s case, so he ended up with a mechanical engineer who was blind in one eye and who had almost no experience testifying as a gun expert.

The State’s primary evidence against Mr. Hinton involved a third crime where a witness identified him as the assailant. But we found a half-dozen people and security records that proved that Mr. Hinton was locked inside a secure supermarket warehouse working as a night laborer fifteen miles away at the time of the crime. We got some of the nation’s best experts to review the gun evidence, and they concluded the Hinton weapon could not be matched to the murders. I had hopes that the State might reopen the case. Instead they persisted in moving toward execution. The media was not interested in the story, citing “innocence fatigue. ” “We’ve done that story before, ” we heard again and again. We kept getting very close decisions from appellate courts denying relief, and Mr. Hinton remained on death row facing execution. It would soon be thirty years. He was always upbeat and encouraging when I met with him, but I was increasingly desperate to find a way to get his case overturned.

I was encouraged by the fact that nationwide the rate of mass incarceration had finally slowed. For the first time in close to forty years, the country’s prison population did not increase in 2011. In 2012, the United States saw the first decline in its prison population in decades. I spent a lot of time in California that year supporting ballot initiatives and was encouraged that voters decided, by a huge margin, to end the state’s “three strikes” law that imposed mandatory sentences on nonviolent offenders. The initiative won majority support in every county in the state. California voters also came very close to banning the death penalty; the ballot initiative lost by only a couple of percentage points. Almost banning the death penalty through a popular referendum in an American state would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier.

We were able to finally launch the race and poverty initiative I’d long been hoping to start at EJI. For years I’d wanted to implement a project to change the way we talk about racial history and contextualize contemporary race issues. We published a racial history calendar for 2013 and 2014. We started working with poor children and families in Black Belt counties across the South. We brought hundreds of high school students to our office for supplemental education and discussion about rights and justice. Also, we worked on reports and materials that seek to deepen the national conversation about the legacy of slavery and lynching and our nation’s history of racial injustice.

I found the new race and poverty work extremely energizing. It closely connected to our work on criminal justice issues; I believe that so much of our worst thinking about justice is steeped in the myths of racial difference that still plague us. I believe that there are four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice but remain poorly understood. The first, of course, is slavery. This was followed by the reign of terror that shaped the lives of people of color following the collapse of Reconstruction until World War II. Older people of color in the South would occasionally come up to me after speeches to complain about how antagonized they feel when they hear news commentators talking about how we were dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in the United States after the 9/11 attacks.

An older African American man once said to me, “You make them stop saying that! We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds. ”

The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.

Convict leasing was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to criminalize former slaves and convict them of nonsensical offenses so that freed men, women, and children could be “leased” to businesses and effectively forced back into slave labor. Private industries throughout the country made millions of dollars with free convict labor, while thousands of African Americans died in horrific work conditions. The practice of re-enslavement was so widespread in some states that it was characterized in a Pulitzer Prize–winning book by Douglas Blackmon as Slavery by Another Name. But the practice is not well known to most Americans.

During the terror era there were hundreds of ways in which people of color could commit a social transgression or offend someone that might cost them their lives. Racial terror and the constant threat created by violently enforced racial hierarchy were profoundly traumatizing for African Americans. Absorbing these psychosocial realities created all kinds of distortions and difficulties that manifest themselves today in multiple ways.

The third institution, “Jim Crow, ” is the legalized racial segregation and suppression of basic rights that defined the American apartheid era. It is more recent and is recognized in our national consciousness, but it is still not well understood. It seems to me that we’ve been quick to celebrate the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and slow to recognize the damage done in that era. We have been unwilling to commit to a process of truth and reconciliation in which people are allowed to give voice to the difficulties created by racial segregation, racial subordination, and marginalization. Because I was born during a time when the stigma of racial hierarchy and Jim Crow had real consequences for the ways my elders had to act or react to a variety of indignations, I was mindful of the way that the daily humiliations and insults accumulated.

The legacy of racial profiling carries many of the same complications. Working on all of these juvenile cases across the country meant that I was frequently in courtrooms and communities where I’d never been before. Once I was preparing to do a hearing in a trial court in the Midwest and was sitting at counsel table in an empty courtroom before the hearing. I was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. The judge and the prosecutor entered through a door in the back of the courtroom laughing about something.

When the judge saw me sitting at the defense table, he said to me harshly, “Hey, you shouldn’t be in here without counsel. Go back outside and wait in the hallway until your lawyer arrives. ”

I stood up and smiled broadly. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Your Honor, we haven’t met. My name is Bryan Stevenson, I am the lawyer on the case set for hearing this morning. ”

The judge laughed at his mistake, and the prosecutor joined in. I forced myself to laugh because I didn’t want my young client, a white child who had been prosecuted as an adult, to be disadvantaged by a conflict I had created with the judge before the hearing. But I was disheartened by the experience. Of course innocent mistakes occur, but the accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure. Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice.

The fourth institution is mass incarceration. Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation of people of color, the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug crimes in poor communities, the criminalization of new immigrants and undocumented people, the collateral consequences of voter disenfranchisement, and the barriers to re-entry can only be fully understood through the lens of our racial history.

It was gratifying to be able, finally, to address some of these issues through our new project and to articulate the challenges created by racial history and structural poverty. The materials we developed were generating positive feedback, and I became hopeful that we might be able to push back against the suppression of this difficult history of racial injustice.

I was also encouraged by our new staff. We were now attracting young, gifted lawyers from all over the country who are extremely skilled. We started a program for college graduates to work at EJI as Justice Fellows. Having a bigger staff with very talented people made meeting the new challenges created by our much broader docket seem possible.

A bigger staff, bigger cases, and a bigger docket also sometimes meant bigger problems. While exciting and very gratifying, the Supreme Court rulings on juveniles created all sorts of new challenges for us. Hundreds of people were now entitled to pursue new sentences, and most were in states where they had no clear right to counsel. In states like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, there were hundreds of people whose cases were affected by the recent decisions, but no lawyers were available to assist these condemned juvenile lifers. We ended up taking on almost one hundred new cases following the court’s ban on life imprisonment without parole for kids convicted of non-homicide offenses. We then took on another hundred new cases after the decision banning mandatory life without parole for juveniles. In addition to the dozens of cases already on our juvenile docket, we were quickly overwhelmed.

The total ban on life-without-parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicides should have been the easiest decision to implement, but enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling was proving much more difficult than I had hoped. I was spending more and more time in Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia, which together had close to 90 percent of the non-homicide cases. The trial courts were often less sophisticated in thinking about the differences between children and adults than we had hoped, and we would often have to relitigate the basic unfairness of treating kids like adults that the Supreme Court had already recognized.

Some judges seemed to want to get as close to life expectancy or natural death as possible before they would create release opportunities for child offenders. Antonio Nuñ ez’s judge in Orange County, California, replaced his sentence of life imprisonment without parole with a sentence of 175 years. I had to go back to an appellate court in California and argue to get that sentence replaced with a reasonable sentence. We met resistance in Joe Sullivan’s and Ian Manuel’s cases as well. Ultimately, we were able to get sentences that meant they could both be released after serving a few more years.

In some cases, clients had already been in prison for decades and had very few, if any, support systems to help them re-enter society. We decided to create a re-entry program to assist these clients. EJI’s program was specifically developed for people who have spent many years in prison after being incarcerated when they were children. We were committed to providing services, housing, job training, life skills, counseling, and anything else people coming out of prison needed to succeed. We told the judges and parole boards we were committed to providing the assistance our clients required.

In particular, the Louisiana clients serving life without parole for non-homicides faced many challenges. We undertook representation of all sixty of those eligible for relief in Louisiana. Almost all of them were at Angola, a notoriously difficult place to do time, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when many had first arrived. For many years, violence was so bad at Angola that it was almost impossible to be incarcerated and not get disciplinaries—additional punishments or time tacked onto your sentence—due to conflicts with another inmate or staff. Prisoners were required to do manual labor in very difficult work environments or face solitary confinement or other disciplinary action. It was not uncommon for inmates to be seriously injured, losing fingers or limbs, after working long hours in brutal and dangerous conditions.

For years, Angola—a slave plantation before the end of the Civil War—forced inmates to work in the fields picking cotton. Prisoners who refused would receive “write-ups” that went into their files and face months of solitary confinement. The horrible conditions of confinement and their constantly being told that they would die in prison no matter how well they behaved meant that most of our clients had long lists of disciplinaries. At the resentencing hearings we were preparing, state lawyers were using these prior disciplinaries to argue against favorable new sentences.

Remarkably, several former juvenile lifers had developed outstanding institutional histories with very few disciplinaries, even though they did their time with no hope of ever being released or having their institutional history reviewed. Some became trustees, mentors, and advocates against violence among inmates. Others had become law librarians, journalists, and gardeners. Angola evolved over time to have some excellent programs for incarcerated people who stayed out of trouble, and many of our clients took full advantage.

We decided to prioritize resentencing hearings in Louisiana for the “old-timers, ” juvenile lifers who had been there for decades. Joshua Carter and Robert Caston were the first two cases we decided to litigate. In 1963, when he was sixteen, Joshua Carter was accused of a rape in New Orleans and quickly given the death penalty. A condemned black child awaiting execution in those days had little reason to hope for relief. But to coerce a confession from him, police officers had beaten Joshua so brutally that even in 1965 the Louisiana Supreme Court felt the need to overturn his conviction. Mr. Carter was resentenced to life imprisonment without parole and sent to Angola. After struggling for years, he became a model prisoner and trustee. In the 1990s, he developed glaucoma and didn’t get the medical care he needed, and he soon lost his sight in both eyes. We tried to persuade New Orleans prosecutors that Mr. Carter, blind and in his sixties, should be released after nearly fifty years in prison.

Robert Caston had been at Angola for forty-five years. He lost several fingers working in a prison factory and was now disabled as a result of his forced labor at Angola.

I traveled back and forth between the trial courts in Orleans Parish quite a bit on the Carter and Caston cases. The Orleans Parish courthouse is a massive structure with intimidating architecture. There are multiple courtrooms aligned down an enormous hallway with grand marble floors and high ceilings. Hundreds of people crowd the hallways, bustling between the various courtrooms each day. Hearings in the vast courthouse are never reliably scheduled. Frequently, there would be a date and time for the Carter and Caston resentencings, but it seemed to mean very little to anyone. I would arrive in court, and there would always be a stack of cases, and clients with lawyers gathered in an overcrowded courtroom, all waiting to be heard at the time of our hearings. Overwhelmed judges tried to manage the proceedings with bench meetings while dozens of young men—most of whom were black—sat handcuffed in standard jail-issued orange jumpsuits in the front of the court. Lawyers consulted with clients and family members scattered around the chaotic courtroom.

After three trips to New Orleans for sentencing hearings, we still did not have a new sentence for Mr. Carter or Mr. Caston. We met with the district attorney, filed papers with the judge, and consulted with a variety of local officials in an effort to achieve a new, constitutionally acceptable sentence. Because Mr. Carter and Mr. Caston had both been in prison for nearly fifty years, we wanted their immediate release.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, I was back in court for the fourth time trying to win the release of the two men. There were two different judges and courtrooms involved, but we felt if we won release for one it might then become easier to win release for the other. We were working with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, and their lawyer Carol Kolinchak had agreed to be our local counsel in all of the Louisiana cases. At this fourth hearing, Carol and I were busily trying to process papers and resolve the endless issues that had emerged to keep Mr. Carter and Mr. Caston incarcerated.

Mr. Carter had a large family that had maintained a close relationship with him despite the passage of time. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many family members had fled New Orleans and were now living hundreds of miles away. But a dozen or so family members would dutifully show up at each hearing, some traveling from as far away as California. Mr. Carter’s mother was nearly a hundred years old. She had vowed to Mr. Carter for decades that she wouldn’t die until he came home from prison.

Finally, it seemed like we were close to success. We got things resolved so that the Court could grant our motion and resentence Mr. Caston so that he would immediately be released from prison. The State usually wouldn’t bring inmates from Angola to New Orleans for hearings but instead had them view proceedings on a video hookup at the prison. After I made our arguments in the noisy, frenetic courtroom, the judge granted our motion. She recited the facts about the date of Mr. Caston’s conviction, and then something quite unexpected happened. As the judge spoke about Mr. Caston’s decades in prison, the courtroom, for the first time in my multiple trips there, became completely silent. The lawyers stopped conferring, the prosecutors awaiting other cases paid attention, and family members ceased their chatter. Even the handcuffed inmates awaiting their cases had stopped talking and were listening intently. The judge detailed Mr. Caston’s forty-five years at Angola for a non-homicide crime when he was sixteen. She noted that Caston had been sent to Angola in the 1960s. Then the judge pronounced a new sentence that meant Mr. Caston would immediately be released from prison.

I looked at Carol and smiled. Then the people in the silent courtroom did something I’d never seen before: They erupted in applause. The defense lawyers, prosecutors, family members, and deputy sheriffs applauded. Even the inmates applauded in their handcuffs.

Carol was wiping tears from her eyes. Even the judge, who usually tolerated no disruptions, seemed to embrace the drama of the moment. A number of my former students now worked with the public defender’s office in New Orleans, and they, too, had come to court and were cheering. I had to speak with Mr. Caston by phone and explain what had happened, since he couldn’t see everything from the video monitor. He was overjoyed. He became the first person to be released as a result of the Supreme Court’s ban on death-in-prison sentences for juvenile lifers.

We went down the hall to Mr. Carter’s courtroom and had another success, winning a new sentence that meant that he, too, would be released immediately. Mr. Carter’s family was ecstatic. There were hugs and promises of home-cooked meals for me and the staff of EJI.

Carol and I busily began making arrangements for Mr. Caston’s and Mr. Carter’s releases, which would take place that evening. The protocol at Angola was to release prisoners at midnight and give them bus fare to New Orleans or a city of their choice in Louisiana. We dispatched staff to Angola, which was several hours away, to meet the men when they were released, sparing them the midnight bus trip.

Exhausted, I wandered the halls of the courthouse while we waited for one more piece of paper to be faxed and approved to clear the way for the release of Mr. Caston and Mr. Carter. An older black woman sat on the marble steps in the massive courthouse hallway. She looked tired and wore what my sister and I used to call a “church meeting hat. ” She had smooth dark skin, and I recognized her as someone who had been in the courtroom when Mr. Carter was resentenced. In fact, I thought I’d seen her each time I’d come to the courthouse in New Orleans. I assumed that she was related or connected to one of the clients, although I didn’t remember the other family members ever mentioning her. I must have been staring because she saw me looking and waved at me, gesturing for me to come to her.

When I walked over to her she smiled at me. “I’m tired and I’m not going to get up, so you’re going to have to lean over for me to give you a hug. ” She had a sweet voice that crackled.

I smiled back at her. “Well, yes, ma’am. I love hugs, thank you. ” She wrapped her arms around my neck.

“Sit, sit. I want to talk to you, ” she said.

I sat down beside her on the steps. “I’ve seen you here several times, are you related to Mr. Caston or Mr. Carter? ” I asked.

“No, no, no, I’m not related to nobody here. Not that I know of, anyway. ” She had a kind smile, and she looked at me intensely. “I just come here to help people. This is a place full of pain, so people need plenty of help around here. ”

“Well, that’s really kind of you. ”

“No, it’s what I’m supposed to do, so I do it. ” She looked away before locking eyes with me again. “My sixteen-year-old grandson was murdered fifteen years ago, ” she said, “and I loved that boy more than life itself. ”

I wasn’t expecting that response and was instantly sobered. The woman grabbed my hand.

“I grieved and grieved and grieved. I asked the Lord why he let someone take my child like that. He was killed by some other boys. I came to this courtroom for the first time for their trials and sat in there and cried every day for nearly two weeks. None of it made any sense. Those boys were found guilty for killing my grandson, and the judge sent them away to prison forever. I thought it would make me feel better but it actually made me feel worse. ”

She continued, “I sat in the courtroom after they were sentenced and just cried and cried. A lady came over to me and gave me a hug and let me lean on her. She asked me if the boys who got sentenced were my children, and I told her no. I told her the boy they killed was my child. ” She hesitated. “I think she sat with me for almost two hours. For well over an hour, we didn’t neither one of us say a word. It felt good to finally have someone to lean on at that trial, and I’ve never forgotten that woman. I don’t know who she was, but she made a difference. ”

“I’m so sorry about your grandson, ” I murmured. It was all I could think of to say.

“Well, you never fully recover, but you carry on, you carry on. I didn’t know what to do with myself after those trials, so about a year later I started coming down here. I don’t really know why. I guess I just felt like maybe I could be someone, you know, that somebody hurting could lean on. ” She looped her arm with mine.

I smiled at her. “That’s really wonderful. ”

“It has been wonderful. What’s your name again? ”

“It’s Bryan. ”

“It has been wonderful, Bryan. When I first came, I’d look for people who had lost someone to murder or some violent crime. Then it got to the point where some of the ones grieving the most were the ones whose children or parents were on trial, so I just started letting anybody lean on me who needed it. All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they’re not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don’t care. I don’t know, it’s a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other. ”

I chuckled when she said it. During the McMillian hearings, a local minister had held a regional church meeting about the case and had asked me to come speak. There were a few people in the African American community whose support of Walter was muted, not because they thought he was guilty but because he had had an extramarital affair and wasn’t active in the church. At the church meeting, I spoke mostly about Walter’s case, but I also reminded people that when the woman accused of adultery was brought to Jesus, he told the accusers who wanted to stone her to death, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. ” The woman’s accusers retreated, and Jesus forgave her and urged her to sin no more. But today, our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused even the Christians to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. I told the congregation that we can’t simply watch that happen. I told them we have to be stonecatchers.

When I chuckled at the older woman’s invocation of the parable, she laughed, too. “I heard you in that courtroom today. I’ve even seen you here a couple of times before. I know you’s a stonecatcher, too. ”

I laughed even more. “Well, I guess I try to be. ”

She took my hands and rubbed my palms. “Well, it hurts to catch all them stones people throw. ” She kept stroking my hands, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt unusually comforted by this woman. It would take me nearly five hours to drive back to Montgomery once I got things settled for Mr. Caston and Mr. Carter. I needed to keep moving, but it felt nice sitting there with the woman now earnestly massaging my palms in a way that was so sweet, even though it seemed strange, too.

“Are you trying to make me cry? ” I asked. I tried to smile.

She put her arm around me and smiled back. “No, you done good today. I was so happy when that judge said that man was going home. It gave me goose bumps. Fifty years in prison, he can’t even see no more. No, I was grateful to God when I heard that. You don’t have anything to cry about. I’m just gonna let you lean on me a bit, because I know a few things about stonecatching. ”

She squeezed me a bit and then said, “Now, you keep this up and you’re gonna end up like me, singing some sad songs. Ain’t no way to do what we do and not learn how to appreciate a good sorrow song.

“I’ve been singing sad songs my whole life. Had to. When you catch stones, even happy songs can make you sad. ” She paused and grew silent. I heard her chuckle before she continued. “But you keep singing. Your songs will make you strong. They might even make you happy. ”

People buzzed down the busy corridors of the courthouse while we sat silently.

“Well, you’re very good at what you do, ” I finally said. “I feel much better. ”

She slapped my arm playfully. “Oh, don’t you try to charm me, young man. You felt just fine before you saw me. Them men are going home and you were fine walking around here. I just do what I do, nothing more. ”

When I finally excused myself, giving her a kiss on the cheek and telling her I needed to sign the prisoners’ release papers, she stopped me. “Oh, wait. ” She dug around in her purse until she found a piece of wrapped peppermint candy. “Here, take this. ”

The gesture made me happy in a way that I can’t fully explain.

“Well, thank you. ” I smiled and leaned down to give her another kiss on the cheek.

She waved at me, smiling. “Go on, go on. ”

Epilogue

Walter died on September 11, 2013.

He remained kind and charming until the very end, despite his increasing confusion from the advancing dementia. He lived with his sister Katie, but in the last two years of his life he couldn’t enjoy the outdoors or get around much without help. One morning he fell and fractured his hip. Doctors felt it was inadvisable to operate, so he was sent home with little hope of recovery. The hospital social worker told me that they would arrange home health and hospice care, which was sad but dramatically better than what he feared when he was on Alabama’s death row. He lost a lot of weight and became less and less responsive to visitors after returning home from the hospital. He passed away quietly in the night a short time later.

We held Walter’s funeral at Limestone Faulk A. M. E. Zion Church near Monroeville on a rainy Saturday morning. It was the same pulpit where over twenty years earlier I had spoken to the congregation about casting and catching stones. It felt strange to be back there. Scores of people packed the church, and dozens more stood outside. I looked at the mostly poor, rural black people huddled together with their ungrieved suffering filling the sad space of yet another funeral, made all the more tragic by the unjustified pain and unnecessary torment that had proceeded it. I often had this feeling when I worked on Walter’s case, that if the anguish of all the stressed lives, the pain of all of the oppressed people in all of the menaced spaces of Monroe County could be gathered in some carefully constructed receptacle, it could power something extraordinary, operate as some astonishing alternative fuel capable of igniting previously impossible action. And who knew what might come of it—righteous disruption or transformational redemption? Maybe both.

The family had a large TV monitor near the casket that flashed dozens of pictures of Walter before the service. Almost all of the photos were taken on the day he was released from prison. Walter and I stood next to each other in several of the photos, and I was struck by how happy we both seemed. I sat in the church and watched the pictures with some disbelief about the time that had passed.

When Walter was on death row, he once told me how ill he had become during the execution of one of the men on his tier. “When they turned on the electric chair you could smell the flesh burning! We were all were banging on the bars to protest, to make ourselves feel better, but really it just made me sick. The harder I banged, the more I couldn’t stand any of it.

“Do you ever think about dying? ” he asked me. It was an unusual question for someone like Walter to pose. “I never did before, but now I think about it all the time, ” he continued. He looked troubled. “This, right here, is a whole ’nother kind of situation. Guys on the row talk about what they’re going to do before their executions, how they’re going to act. I used to think it was crazy to talk like that, but I guess I’m starting to do it, too. ”

I was uncomfortable with the conversation. “Well, you should think about living, man—what you’re going to do when you get out of here. ”

“Oh, I do that, too. I do that a lot. It’s just hard when you see people going down that hall to be killed. Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain’t right. People are supposed to die on God’s schedule. ”

Before the service began, I thought about all the time I had spent with Walter after he got out. Then the choir sang, and the preacher gave a rousing sermon. He spoke about Walter being pulled away from his family in the prime of his life by lies and bigotry. I told the congregation that Walter had become like a brother to me, that he was brave to trust his life to someone who was as young as I was then. I explained that we all owed Walter something because he had been threatened and terrorized, wrongly accused and wrongly condemned, but he never gave up. He survived the humiliation of his trial and the charges against him. He survived a guilty verdict, death row, and the wrongful condemnation of an entire state. While he did not survive without injury or trauma, he came out with his dignity. I told people that Walter had overcome what fear, ignorance, and bigotry had done to him. He had stood strong in the face of injustice, and his exonerated witness might just make the rest of us a little safer, slightly more protected from the abuse of power and the false accusations that had almost killed him. I suggested to his friends and family that Walter’s strength, resistance, and perseverance were a triumph worth celebrating, an accomplishment to be remembered.

I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. I told the congregation that Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?

Finally and most important, I told those gathered in the church that Walter had taught me that mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion. Walter genuinely forgave the people who unfairly accused him, the people who convicted him, and the people who had judged him unworthy of mercy. And in the end, it was just mercy toward others that allowed him to recover a life worth celebrating, a life that rediscovered the love and freedom that all humans desire, a life that overcame death and condemnation until it was time to die on God’s schedule.

After the service, I didn’t stay long. I walked outside and looked down the road and thought about the fact that no one was ever prosecuted for Ronda Morrison’s murder after Walter’s release. I thought about the anguish that must still create for her parents.

There were lots of people who came up to me who needed legal help for all sorts of things. I hadn’t brought business cards, so I wrote my number down for each person and encouraged them to call my office. It wasn’t likely that we could do much for many of the people who needed help, but it made the journey home less sad to hope that maybe we could.

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