A Reason to Believe (16 page)

Their case was pending in the Somerville District Court before a notoriously difficult—and famously pro-landlord—judge. I was as nervous as the Jean-Pierres, so I prepared exhaustively. I filed my motions and counterclaims and won a stay of the family’s eviction until trial. The case then went to trial, which was unheard of in a landlord-tenant dispute. I made my opening statement, presented my evidence, cross-examined witnesses, and argued that in Massachusetts, you can withhold your rent if the conditions of tenancy have been violated. I showed how the faulty appliances, sporadic utility service, poor insulation, and general unresponsiveness of the landlord were chronic and justified my clients’ withholding the rent. We won, and the judge grudgingly ordered the largest payment to a tenant in the history of that court at the
time. My clients never collected, but they remained in their home and stabilized their lives. I will never forget the look of relief on their faces and the pride they felt as immigrants in a system that would vindicate those who were most vulnerable. That, I felt, was why I was in law school—the secular extension of everything I had learned in church. And I was touched, during my first campaign for governor, when one of the daughters of the Jean-Pierres called after all those years to wish me well.

When I joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after my clerkship in Los Angeles, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to put social justice into action. The organization and its legal giants—Thurgood Marshall, Spotswood Robinson, and the man who hired me, Jack Greenberg—cast a long shadow over American law. In law school we had studied their strategies and admired their courage, and we were awed by how they confronted the most important issues of their time. Now I was part of that tradition, and I was nervous. My assignment was the death penalty docket. I honestly could not say at first how I felt about the death penalty. Knowing the signature cruelty some killers showed their victims, I was not automatically opposed. I wasn’t sure I could be an effective advocate for such unsavory characters. Is this what social justice was about?

Not long after I started, I was given my first case to handle on my own. It arose the way they all did—as an emergency with an imminent execution date. The defendant had been convicted of first-degree murder, had lost all
of his appeals, and was within days of electrocution. An attorney in Montgomery had agreed to challenge his sentence and filed a petition in the Alabama trial court. In less than twenty-four hours, the case was heard and rejected by both the trial court and the Alabama supreme court. The only recourse was an appeal to the federal courts, and the lawyer called LDF for help. I gulped.

I prepared the necessary petitions and sent them to my new cocounsel in Montgomery, who filed them the next day. The federal judge ordered an emergency hearing on our motion to stay the execution, but I could not get there in time to appear in court. My cocounsel was uncomfortable handling the matter without me, so the judge agreed to hear the motion by conference call. We all got on the phone.

“Counsel, state yo’ names for the recud,” said the judge in a deep southern drawl rich with history and tobacco.

“Deval Patrick for the petitioner,” I said, my voice cracking.

“All right then, Mr. Patrick, hold on an’ let me hear who’s representin’ the State of Alabama.”

When the assistant attorney general of Alabama identified himself, the judge replied warmly, “Hey there, Ed, how you doin’?”

Oh, brother! I thought. I’m in trouble.

The judge opened the hearing by asking me directly, “Now then, Mr. Patrick, don’t you just think there are some people who ought to die?”

“Well, Your Honor, we all will someday,” I said. “But this proceeding is about whether his trial was fair.”

The judge granted the stay. Our client was within hours of the death chamber by then, having had his last meal and his head shaved (which avoids the unpleasant odor of burning hair at electrocution). The judge even allowed us discovery so the defense team could have access to the prosecutor’s files. There we found a sworn statement from an eyewitness positively identifying another man as the killer. Either it had been withheld from the court-appointed defense counsel or it had been disclosed and never used by counsel to build a defense. Either way, my client’s constitutional rights had been violated. His conviction and sentence were vacated, and he was granted a new trial.

I had so many cases like this one that I was finally persuaded that there are certain things the government just does not do well. Making irreversible decisions about life and death is one of them.

Voting rights cases lacked the grisly tension of a death-row case, but they were still momentous, and in my three years at LDF, no case drew more interest than a notorious voting rights trial in Selma, Alabama. The year was 1985, and President Reagan’s Justice Department accused three civil rights leaders of voting fraud. The case centered on the actions of Albert Turner, an iconic figure in the civil rights movement. He had been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s top lieutenant in Alabama in the 1960s and
had helped to organize the march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965. On that fateful day, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” Turner had been on the Edmund Pettus Bridge when Alabama state troopers bludgeoned and teargassed the civil rights marchers trying to make their way to Montgomery.

Three years later, after Dr. King was killed, Turner had also been part of the funeral procession, leading one of the mules that pulled the wagon to the Atlanta gravesite.

Turner had tried to keep his mentor’s dream alive by leading a successful voter registration drive in rural Perry County. Maybe too successful. African Americans had become a strong political voting bloc in Perry County and throughout the state’s “black belt,” effectively controlling seven of the ten predominantly black counties. At issue was the casting of absentee ballots, which whites had long used and now so too were blacks using. Indeed, with so many black sharecroppers unable to get to the polls on Election Day, absentee ballots had become essential to their electoral participation and success.

The more I learned about the case, the more outraged I became. Albert Turner deserved far better. He had a degree from Alabama A&M, but he would hide that fact when reaching out to the community because he didn’t want to appear to be placing himself above less educated residents. He just wanted them to participate in their government. Most of them were elderly, some were frail, but all remembered a time in their own adult lifetimes when
they had been persecuted for voting or intimidated for trying. Turner helped them to overcome those memories and urged them to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

Federal prosecutors charged Turner, his wife, Evelyn, and a friend, Spencer Hogue Jr., with altering absentee ballots after they were cast or otherwise unlawfully influencing the votes. If found guilty, Turner and Hogue would receive maximum prison sentences of 115 years; Evelyn, 35 years. Huge fines would be assessed as well. After Turner was indicted, the authorities offered to place him on probation for five years, with no jail time, if he promised to stop his political activities. Turner rejected the offer. He understood what was at stake.

He told reporters, “The indictments came because blacks have gotten too well organized for political empowerment in the Black Belt of Alabama. They didn’t spend a million dollars because they think a few old folks’ ballots were changed.” Now he was to be tried for voting fraud in a courtroom whose large windows opened to a view of the very Edmund Pettus Bridge he had crossed to secure blacks’ right to vote in the first place.

Judge Emmett R. Cox, a Reagan appointee from Cottonwood, Alabama, presided over the case. Though the voting had occurred in Perry County, just outside Selma, Judge Cox empaneled a jury in Mobile and bused them several hours north to the location of the trial—a move, we felt, intended to put more whites on the jury than would have resulted from using the local pool of potential
jurors. During the trial, Judge Cox had dinner occasionally with the lead prosecutor, a conservative firebrand named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. The whole thing felt too cozy.

Lani Guinier was an exceptionally talented voting rights expert on the LDF staff, revered by junior and senior lawyers alike. She and I worked with a team of lawyers in Alabama to represent the defendants. Soon we felt as though we were really defending an entire community of black residents, mostly sharecroppers. In Perry County alone, more than fifty FBI agents sought out fifteen hundred black families, many in remote corners of the countryside; some of them couldn’t read or write. The agents’ tactics spread fear and intimidation. For many, it recalled the reign of terror they had experienced just twenty years earlier.

Our defense team, by day, prepared motions, did legal research, and filed pleadings; by night, we visited potential witnesses and those individuals whose votes were allegedly tampered with. It was hard, nerve-racking work. We drove around on unlit, unmarked dirt roads, searching for addresses by asking at the rare house where we saw lights. When we found the right home, we had to win the confidence of the occupants, most of whom were afraid to get involved. We were often followed by FBI agents, or so we presumed when we saw their familiar black Crown Victorias, covered in the same red clay dust that covered everything in the hot Perry County summers. They would
follow just far enough back so that we couldn’t see into the car and would wait with engines idling when we went into someone’s home. The next morning, an agent would appear at the house we had visited or show up in the field or shop where the witness worked and ask what we had talked about the night before. It all had its intended chilling effect.

It was tough to get people to open up to us. We were from out of town, unfamiliar in both appearance and dialect. We were lawyers. Most of the people we met did not know whom to trust anymore. The FBI had led them to believe that they themselves had done something wrong by letting Turner and his colleagues help them with their absentee ballots. Any confidence they may once have had about working together to change the political landscape in Perry County had vanished in the wake of the FBI’s intimidating tactics.

Spencer Hogue knew that he would have to ask his neighbors to trust us so we could mount his defense. He called a meeting at a church one night, a tiny, one-room wooden structure on stilts, with no insulation but with a woodstove in the corner and plenty of solid wooden pews. Spencer was a tall, dark-skinned man with dark eyes and massive callused hands—working hands. He was not very talkative and not very articulate when he did speak. He was married to a warm, friendly woman who one sensed kept up both ends of the conversation. He was well respected, the way earnest, consistently reliable men always
are. He stood alone, at once commanding and humble, in the pale light in front of the altar. But instead of speaking, he closed his eyes and began by singing in a baritone wail; he started confidently, stomping his foot rhythmically on the rough wooden floor boards and clapping his hands. The audience joined in, many singing along with each familiar verse, some waiting for the chorus, all stamping their feet on the floor and clapping their hands in perfect unison. There were no instruments, no hymnals, just the sweet medley of voices singing, feet thumping, hands slapping. You could feel the swelling confidence. The hymn was followed by Spencer’s earnest prayer. What had started as a community meeting turned into a prayer meeting. Only when that was over did we turn to the subject of the trial. But their spirituality, as well as their unity, had given them strength.

It changed everything. Word got around. We started to get the information we needed to build our defense.

Once the proceedings got under way, the trial lasted almost three weeks. It was mean and nasty, marked by angry objections, lengthy bench conferences, and heated cross-examinations. Turner’s house was burned down in the middle of it—it felt like one last attempt to intimidate a community that was regaining its voice and courage. No one was arrested. It was a sharp reminder of the cost of taking a stand.

Blessedly, there were lighter moments, too, such as when the famed black defense attorney J. R. Chestnut
cross-examined a witness who was well into his eighties and whose youngest son was twelve.

“How old did you say you were?” asked Chestnut, a wily grin on his face. The witness confirmed he was in his eighties.

“And how old is your youngest boy?” Chestnut pressed, incredulous. The witness repeated that the boy was twelve. A juror giggled nervously.

Chestnut scratched his chin and replied, “Sir, there’re a whole lot of questions I’d like to ask you, but none of ’em have anything to do with this case.” The courtroom erupted with laughter, giving us a needed break from the tension.

Each defendant was entitled to a closing argument, and Chestnut gave the one for Albert Turner. Others of us by then had reviewed the evidence in detail and poked holes in the prosecutors’ theory of the case. Chestnut talked about the man. He talked about a man who had been educated at Alabama A&M but who had never really left Perry County, about his work with Dr. King and his sacrifice on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, about his commitment to carry on Dr. King’s work by organizing the black community of Perry County, about the countless ways he had helped the witnesses who had been subpoenaed by the government to testify during the trial, about the comforts and opportunities he had given up so he could help his neighbors find a better way forward. Before he delivered every carefully constructed piece of this puzzle, he boomed
the refrain “Who
is
Albert Turner?” It was a sermon. By the time he finished, the prosecutors’ claim that this man could possibly take advantage of, let alone defraud, his own black brothers and sisters seemed absurd. I was in tears.

The jurors had only been out for a day when we were called back in. The courtroom was packed with the defendants’ friends and neighbors, the very people who initially had been too afraid to associate themselves with the trial, let alone come to the courthouse. The jurors somberly entered the hot courtroom and took their seats, unwilling to make eye contact with any of the defendants. Then the verdict was announced: not guilty on all counts. The place erupted with cheers and applause. One of the spectators yelled, “Thank you, jury!” Another started to sing a hymn of thanksgiving, and everyone joined in, just like those irrepressible old ladies of Cosmopolitan. Judge Cox tried to restore order but finally threw down his gavel and stormed off in disgust. Lani and I were in tears again. So were many of the spectators who were singing. We went out to the courthouse steps, gave a brief statement to the press, hopped in our rental car, and a made a beeline for the Montgomery airport.