“We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”
—Bryan Stevenson
JEFFERSON COUNTY COURTHOUSE, SEPTEMBER 12, 1986
When Ray found out how his name had gotten mixed up in this horror, it reminded him that love of money and a thirst for revenge could change someone from the inside out. A jealous acquaintance named Reggie worked at Quincy’s, and had said that he knew a guy who fit the description of the man who committed that robbery. Reggie said that man was Ray. For a $5,000 reward, was Reggie willing to lie in a matter of literal life and death?
Reggie didn’t look Ray in the eye while he testified under oath. Ray wondered if Reggie really understood that the State wanted to kill him. Or was he, like every other young and poor Black man in Jefferson County, just trying to get a little extra scratch to make it through? Ray couldn’t understand how a life could mean so little. They weren’t friends, but until that day, Ray had no idea he and Reggie were mortal enemies. Ray watched him on the stand, looking like he felt important, maybe for the first time in his life.
Reggie and Ray had run into each other at the beginning of July, a few weeks before Ray was arrested. They had a harmless conversation, but now Reggie was taking that little bit of truth and creating a whole drama out of it.
Reggie said Ray was outside of Quincy’s waiting for him, as if he knew Reggie would be there. He said Ray scared him so much that he reached for his gun he kept in the car. Ray could feel his legs begin to shake as Reggie testified. He was making things up. Straight-up lying under oath.
“All right, anything else?”
Then Reggie testified that Ray had asked him questions about when they closed, and about the manager, as though Ray had been planning his crimes. Complete lies. Ray figured he would have had to be both extremely stupid and a supervillain to have carried out this crime the way they were telling it.
It didn’t even make sense, and Ray hoped that his lawyer really understood that. He had told Perhacs about Reggie’s jealousy, and he waited for his lawyer to expose everything.
“Mr. White, how’re you doing?”
“How’re you doing?”
“Mr. White, you know my client. You and he used to play softball together, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not on the same team, though?”
“No, sir.”
And it went on like that, like a friendly conversation about the weather, and not about lies, and money, and murder. Not about the truth.
Ray went back to his cell every night after trial and replayed the day in his head. They had traced all the bullets—they called it chain of custody—from the victims, to the hospital, to the police, to the crime lab. The police testified about arresting him, conveniently leaving out the blank piece of paper they’d wanted him to sign or the fact that they said the gun hadn’t been fired in a long time. Any truths that didn’t make Ray out to be a killer were left out or just plain lied about. Ray’s only hope was his ballistics expert. Perhacs had hired him with the little amount of money the court provided, and he had done the tests and concluded that the bullets didn’t match the gun. Of course, Ray knew they couldn’t have, but the State’s experts said they had. They were either bad at their job or lying. Even now, it was hard for Ray to truly wrap his mind around the fact that all these people would just lie to put him to death. What had he done to them? Why? The questions kept him up all night. He thought back to when he was arrested, replaying that last afternoon over and over again in his head. Would he have walked to the porch if he had known what was going to happen? Or would he have run?
He’d always believed that innocent men don’t run. Except sometimes innocent men need to run. That was true in Alabama and everywhere. If you’re poor and Black, sometimes your best and only chance is to run. But where could he have run to? Everything he was and loved and cared about was in a few miles’ radius of that house. Would they have shot him? Probably. There was no good end to the running in his mind, but there were nights when it seemed like dying on the pavement would have been a whole lot easier than proving his innocence in a courtroom. He shouldn’t have had to prove he was innocent—they were supposed to prove he was guilty—but not in this courtroom.
Ray missed his mom and Lester, and he hated that they had to sit in the courtroom and hear the lies, day after day. Ray had broken up with his girlfriend about a year earlier—he didn’t know how long he was going to be caught up in this nightmare, and he didn’t want her caught too. He had been in this county jail for what felt like forever, and he couldn’t even begin to think about what would come next if he was found guilty. His mind would just shut down when he tried to think on it. Ray had to believe that a miracle would happen. God never fails. His mom had been telling him that since he could walk. God never fails. Ray needed them to catch the guy who had done it. The state had testimony from their firearms experts, Higgins and Yates. Ray needed his ballistics expert to get on that stand and prove that there was no way his mama’s old gun could have killed anybody.
The ballistics expert. He was Ray’s only hope.
But as it turned out, that expert, Andrew Payne, never had a chance.
He did a great job in his testimony with Perhacs, walking the jury through all the ways that the bullets used in the crimes didn’t match Ray’s mother’s gun. Payne was a bit socially awkward and nerdy, but he did his job. His findings proved that Ray was innocent, and that was what mattered. After Payne testified, Ray felt like a huge weight had been lifted off his chest. He turned and sent a quick smile to his mom and Lester. And then the moment of relief passed. It was the State’s turn to cross-examine.
The prosecutor, Mahon, started out easy—nice, almost—but it was a setup right from the get-go.
“It’s your testimony, sir, that you have used comparison microscopes in excess of a thousand times?”
“I would say yes, sir, about a thousand times.”
“And you were familiar with that comparison microscope that Mr. Yates has?”
“Well, not familiar with it. It’s the first time I’d ever used or seen an American Optical.”
“American Optical is a pretty obscure brand?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s an obscure brand but just that I had never operated one before.”
And it went downhill from there.
He’d tried to ask the State’s experts for help?! He’d dropped the bullets?! Ray looked over at Perhacs—Perhacs looked surprised, as though Payne had not told him how badly it went at the lab. How did he not know all this? At one point, Payne seemed to be whining and complaining on the stand that the other experts wouldn’t help him. Ray could only watch as a horror show played out before his eyes.
The prosecution began to wind things up. “Mr. Payne, do you have some problem with your vision?”
“Why, yes.”
“How many eyes do you have?”
“One.”
“That’s all.”
Ray could do nothing but lay his head down in his arms and cry. At that moment, he knew that the unthinkable was true: He was going to be convicted of murder. He was innocent. And his one-eyed expert had just handed the prosecution a guilty verdict.
Nothing mattered anymore.
This seems dramatic, like a television courtroom drama. Unfortunately, it’s real life and what actually happens in courtrooms isn’t anything like what is usually shown on TV—even though research shows that we may be heavily influenced by fake TV courts. In its study, “Normalizing Injustice,” Color of Change found that “The Crime TV genre, which reaches hundreds of millions of people in America and worldwide, advances debunked ideas about crime, a false hero narrative about law enforcement, and distorted representations about Black people, other people of color and women.”
Also from the report: