Dennis Williams called me as soon as he walked through the prison gates to freedom. His voice was gruff and raspy like a fighter who’d taken too many blows over the larynx. He was excited and trying to tell me his story as if this were his only chance to convince me I should take his case. He was saying something about DNA, and that the real killer had confessed.
“I was just twenty when the cops hauled me in,” he said, “and I’d never even heard of them white kids before.”
I was having trouble putting the man’s story together, but he said he and three others had been pardoned by the governor of Illinois.
Pardoned?
Governors don’t usually pardon poor black men unless some power-laden understory is at play. I told Dennis I was going to have a lawyer by the name of Peter King, a good friend of mine, talk to him, and maybe after that we could get together.
I called Peter. He was soon to report that on October 24, 1978, Dennis Williams had been tried by an all-white jury for the murder of a young woman and her boyfriend, both white. Dennis and three other black kids, later referred to as the “Ford Heights Four,” were charged with raping the girl numerous times. Then both the girl and her boyfriend were shot in cold blood.30 Dennis had been summarily tried and convicted.
Now, after seventeen years in hell on death row in the Menard Correctional Center, where Illinois caged its most notorious killers (including John Wayne Gacy, who’d been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of thirty-three boys and young men), Dennis Williams had finally been freed, and he wanted justice.
“You need to meet Dennis,” Peter King said. “This is a good man, with a good case, and I’m bringing him to Wyoming to meet you.” And in December of 1996, there they were: Peter King, Dennis Williams, and the case they wanted me to take.
* * *
Dennis was thirty-eight years old, but he looked a couple of decades older. He was of medium build and rough on the exterior, a man with deep lines in his face and a quick, straight way of speaking. He looked at me as he spoke as if to determine whether I exhibited the faintest signs of trustworthiness, and he walked with an uncertain gait.
I’d lit a fire in my study fireplace, and we pulled up comfortable chairs. I wanted him to describe his life in prison, how he’d been treated at Menard—facts about his damages. I wanted him to tell me how it was for an innocent human being to be penned up like an animal waiting to be slaughtered—for a crime he didn’t commit.
“You get so you can get along pretty good,” Dennis said. “They learn who they can push around and who they can’t. I could take ’em on pretty good.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I had me a few incidents,” he said. “But they had me in my cell all the time down there on the row. They treated us like tomorrow we was gonna be dead anyway.” He said he lived those seventeen years on death row in a six-by-ten cell and sleeping, when he could sleep, with his head up against the toilet, as such cells had been designed by some thoughtful prison architects. He didn’t want to talk about his life on death row.
“I got rights,” he said. “They stole seventeen years of my life from me. How come them cops can take my life when they knew I was innocent, and they don’t get punished the same as any other criminal?”
“That’s a good question,” I said. “But cops and prosecutors don’t like to convict themselves.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“We have no power over Chicago cops, or the prosecutors either,” I said. “They do what they do. But they can’t stop us from suing them for your damages.” Then I asked, “If you had the money, how much would you pay to get back those seventeen years you spent on death row?”
He just looked at me for a long time. In the silence I saw his fragile inner self leak out through invading tears. He turned away and finally began to talk again, and he talked on endlessly, as if he would never be heard again. His anger was the progeny of unimaginable years of injury inflicted by those he should have been able to trust—cops, lawyers, judges, and the law itself. All had betrayed him.
* * *
Dennis’s story began when searchers found the body of Carol Schmal, a young white woman, in a falling-in, abandoned town house. She was nude from the waist down; her pants and panties had been torn from her. She was lying in a pool of blood, and a sheet of plywood had been thrown over her. Later the body of Larry Lionberg, her boyfriend, was found along a creek bed close by.
Dennis told me that a few nights after the murder, a car full of cops came to his house, woke everybody up, laughed at his mother who was vainly protesting, and without an arrest warrant took Dennis for a midnight ride to that old caved-in house.
“They cuffed my hands behind me,” Dennis said, “and then a cop pulled out his gun and stuck it to my head and said, ‘Nigger, if you don’t tell me in three seconds what happened I’m gonna splatter your damn brains on the wall like you did that girl’s.’”
I saw fear creep onto Dennis’s face as he recounted the story. “I didn’t know nothing. I’d never been anywhere near that place. Then the fat cop said to the cop with the gun, ‘What ya waiting for? Here, give me the goddamned gun. I’ll kill that son of a bitch.’ He grabbed the gun, stuck it to my head, and pulled the trigger.”
Dennis said he heard a click from the pistol. “You put in the wrong clip,” the fat cop said. “Give me the one with the bullets in it.”
Dennis said he heard the cop reloading the pistol, and once again the cop pressed the pistol against his skull. “Nigger, I’m gonna kill you,” the cop said.
“You’re gonna have to,” Dennis said. Then the first cop wrestled the gun from the fat cop, saying, “Don’t do it. No use riskin’ your career over this fuckin’ nigger.”
Charles McCraney, an unemployed black man with a spotty reputation, had his eye on the reward of a couple of thousand dollars that had been offered by the owner of the filling station where the Lionberg lad had worked, and where both he and his girlfriend had been kidnapped—and then murdered. McCraney called the cops. The filed police reports stated that on the night of the murders McCraney saw four black kids run into the abandoned town house at about three in the morning. The next day McCraney saw Dennis in the crowd that had gathered in the field around the body of Larry Lionberg. McCraney said Williams was asking people, jokingly, whether they had shot “those people.” McCraney said he overheard Dennis say, jokingly, “I saw them jump when they shot them.”
McCraney said he’d been watching a certain show on TV, Kojak, when he saw four black kids run into the old house where Carol Schmal’s body was found. But we discovered that that show ended at ten minutes before one in the morning—hours before the time of the murder.
Among other gifts to the police was McCraney’s statement he’d seen Paula Gray with the boys that night. Paula was a reportedly slow black girl from another poor family. She turned out to be the girlfriend of Kenny Adams, a member of the Ford Heights Four.
Half a dozen white male cops without a warrant took Paula Gray from her home in the middle of the night and treated her to one of their infamous midnight rides. They dragged her into the scene of this brutal murder. Carol Schmal’s blood was still drying on the floor. The cops took turns questioning Paula. Without getting the answers they sought, they took her into “protective custody,” without a parent present, without a court order or warrant, without a lawyer to protect this girl, little more than a child, who’d never spent a night away from home. They locked her in a motel for two nights, where their questioning continued until she was exhausted.
Then the cops and prosecutors dragged Paula in front of a grand jury. She ended up telling the grand jury that she witnessed the rapes and murders—she saw it all by the flame of her Bic cigarette lighter, the only light available that night in that dark, deserted house. She said the girl was raped seven times, and Dennis shot the girl twice in the head.
Under oath, and the leading questions of the prosecutor, Paula told the grand jury that the Ford Heights Four marched Larry Lionberg to the creek, where Dennis Williams shot him twice in the head and Willie Raines shot him once in the back.31 Dennis threw the gun in the creek.
I thought it wouldn’t take much of a lawyer to destroy Paula Gray’s testimony with even a halfhearted cross. One couldn’t hold a Bic cigarette lighter for even five minutes without severely burning one’s hand. And the only way Paula could have known the exact location of five different shots into the bodies on two people at two different sites was for that information to have been planted into the girl’s mind by the cops and thereafter rehearsed over and over until she knew her answers by heart. Even Howard Vanick, in charge of the investigation, didn’t believe she’d seen the boys throw the gun in the creek. “A nigger never gets rid of a gun,” he said.
Perhaps Paula wasn’t as slow as people thought. Before the case came to trial she said the cops forced her to lie, and at a pretrial hearing she insisted, “I didn’t hear nothin.’ I don’t know nothin’. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’.”
But the prosecutors knew how to fix that. They charged Paula with perjury. Remember: She testified under oath to the grand jury. So remember: If you lie because you’re forced to lie, and you later gather the strength to confess that you lied, and you try to correct it, well, you will now go to prison because you refused to continue to lie. Gotcha!
Without Paula’s testimony, the prosecutors found a jailhouse snitch who was willing to make a deal. He would testify that he heard Dennis Williams and Willie Raines admit to the crimes. The snitch later admitted he concocted the story with the assistance of the prosecutor, in exchange for leniency.
The state, of course, was required to provide these four kids with a lawyer before they hauled them off to death row. The lawyer provided, Archie Weston, also black, ended up representing three of the Ford Heights Four along with Paula Gray. Verneal Jimerson, one of the four, couldn’t be tried because Paula was the only witness who tied him to the murders, and she’d recanted her prior statements that had implicated him.
A serious and obvious conflict of interest exists when one lawyer represents more than one defendant charged with crimes arising out of the same incident. Their defenses may differ, and the mitigating circumstances offered to shield each against a death verdict are always keyed to the individual’s history. Moreover, a bad lawyer for one ought not be a bad lawyer for all. Fundamental law demanded that these kids be provided separate, competent defense attorneys. But why spend a lot of the state’s money on lawyers when everybody knew these “niggers” were all guilty, and they killed two innocent white kids?
Archie Weston failed to object to his representation of multiple defendants. Later the appeals court judges frowned slightly but held that the kids had no right to complain. Weston had waived the error by failing to raise it at the first opportunity. What did they expect of Weston, a poor man himself? He needed the money.
Then the judge, without prior notice to Archie Weston, set the trial of Dennis Williams, Willie Raines, and Kenny Adams almost immediately. Weston was shocked. He thought he’d come to court that morning for a routine pretrial hearing. Instead, the judge had called a jury to hear the case and ordered the trial to commence forthwith.
Weston complained, he cried, he even screamed that he wasn’t ready for trial. He begged that he be given sufficient time to prepare his case for four black kids, three of whom were facing the death penalty. (Paula was charged with perjury.) But the judge knew what to do with black killers. Get them to trial; get them to the pen; get them out of the pen by strapping them to the gurney; and give them the needle. What’s so difficult about that?
At trial Charles McCraney told his story to an all-white jury, the prosecution having kicked off all the prospective black jurors with their peremptory challenges, again something no competent judge would allow. And again Weston failed to object, so that error was also waived.
During his testimony McCraney let it slip that the cops had him sign a statement—standard operating procedure. But when the cops took the stand they testified they didn’t take a statement from McCraney. He was merely mistaken. Why would they bother taking a statement from a witness so pure and precise, with a memory as permanent and pristine as McCraney’s? By the time of trial, whatever statement McCraney had signed had disappeared. Nothing in writing remained that could be used by the defense to contradict his testimony, assuming Weston could have figured out how. McCraney not only grabbed the offered reward, he got himself relocated at taxpayers’ expense to a rural community about seventy-five miles southeast of Chicago, a town that provided a better living environment than the decadent slum where he’d been rotting.
By this time it had become stock knowledge in Chicago that the cops were keeping two sets of books—the official file and what they called their “street file.” The street file was secret and held the facts, especially those that might suggest any misconduct on their part. The official file that supported the case of the cops was as fictional as it needed to be.
Proving the rest of their cases against Dennis Williams, Willie Raines, and Kenny Adams was an easy job for the prosecutors. They brought to court the standard employee of the police department to give his supposed scientific opinions. Prosecutors like to give such witnesses a professional-sounding title. They’re often called “criminalists” and claim to know all about blood and hair and other physical evidence.
This “criminalist” testified that he analyzed a couple of Caucasian hairs that had been recovered from the back seat of Dennis’s car. He said they matched the hair of Carol Schmal. This alleged scientist, referring to nonexistent statistics, claimed that the chances were only 1 in 4,500 that the hair sample from Williams’s car did not match that of the victim. Hair typing is what is known as “class evidence,” and therefore an expert can only say that a given hair came from a class, not from a certain individual. Microscopic hair-comparison analysis to link a defendant to a crime has been ruled unreliable by the National Academy of Science. Then the said criminalist went on to testify that at least one of the rapists had been a “type A secretor,” a blood type that is shared by a quarter of our population. He said that both Dennis and Kenny were type A.
* * *
Now all the prosecution needed in order to shove innocent kids into the death house was for the jurors to hear, through the anguished tears of the victims’ parents, a description of their dead children, and to see photos of their once happy, living kids followed by up-close police photos that revealed a nauseating tangle of flesh, blood, and death. Why should the jurors do more than order their morning coffee, return guilty verdicts, and get on with their busy lives?
What about Paula? Less than a week after Paula had appeared before the grand jury with the story that had been grafted into her terrorized brain, she was hospitalized with an “acute schizophrenic reaction.” But that had no impact on the judge’s sentence. He knew all he needed to know to render justice against the child. He said that Paula was “streetwise” and that her “violence and cruelty” had drawn her willingly into the crime. Was she mentally disadvantaged? “In her own environment she is aware and intelligent.” He gave her fifty years for perjury.
Before the case was submitted to the jurors, the prosecutors withdrew their request for death against Kenny Adams because he hadn’t been a shooter. In fact, they offered Kenny a way out: All he had to do was testify against his friends. Kenny Adams refused. Something magical, even holy, is witnessed when such unshakable honor is revealed in the human species.
But the judge was on Kenny Adams with blinded vengeance. Here are the words that fell so easily from the judicial mouth: “He was there when violence was being contemplated. As a high school graduate he was knowledgeable that serious harm was a probability. By his inaction, he committed murder. By his silence he participated.” He gave Kenny seventy-five years.
The verdict of death that the prosecutor sought required a hearing for Dennis Williams and Willie Raines before another jury—all white, of course. Those jurors wasted no time in rendering the death penalty against Dennis. They couldn’t agree on Willie. He ended up with a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
“Do you have anything to say before I pronounce sentence?” the judge asked Dennis.
“It’s all a prefabricated lie,” Dennis replied. “They had those witnesses lie.”
“Are you ready to be sentenced?”
“I really have no choice,” Dennis replied.
“I now sentence you then, Mr. Dennis Williams, to death,” the judge said without wasting any more words.
What the judge meant by a sentence of death was death by lethal injection. Under his order Dennis would be securely strapped to a gurney—five straps, the first beginning just below the neck and the last ending at the ankles. Then needles would be inserted into both arms. In one arm, three different deadly drugs would be intravenously delivered into his helpless body.
First, on the signal of the warden, a large dose of sodium thiopental would be delivered—it’s intended to cause unconsciousness. This would be followed by pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer that paralyzes the lungs and diaphragm. Dennis’s respiration would slow. Finally, potassium chloride would be introduced into the IV. That would cause his heart to stop. Death usually occurs approximately seven minutes after the injection process begins. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the cost for the drugs used in lethal injection is $86.08. But I suspect that in Texas they buy those drugs wholesale.
Not contained in the judge’s sentence of death was that Dennis’s last vision on earth would be looking up into the faces of those who hated him. They would hate him because they believed him to be a murderer—yes, like them. They would hate him because he is black. And those who hated him would be the ones to whom he would say good-bye.
* * *
Dennis Williams’s court-appointed appellate lawyers dutifully pointed out Archie Weston’s woeful failure as a cross-examiner, his failure to object to the introduction of the hair evidence obtained in a warrantless search, and his failure to make even routine motions, including a motion for a new trial.
Poor Archie had other things on his mind. He’d been accused of mishandling the estate of an elderly woman. Later, a $23,000 judgment was entered against him that he was unable to pay, so his home was seized and sold at a sheriff’s sale. And the Illinois disciplinary officials of the bar were investigating him for unspecified misconduct and had subpoenaed his records. When he failed to comply with the subpoena, they began disbarment proceedings. Weston confessed that during Dennis’s trial he was so hard up and stressed that he couldn’t think straight.
Before the state could kill Dennis, the appellate judges were required to review the trial record. This takes years, during which Dennis would rot away in prison hoping with faint hope that one day a just system would give him a just trial. Only Justice Seymour Simon was shocked. He wrote, “The way this case was railroaded to trial embarrassed the defendant in his defense and prejudiced his rights. To force a triple capital case as complex as this one to trial under such circumstances was an abuse of judicial discretion.” But the majority on the appeals court found that the trial had been good enough and scheduled Dennis’s execution for the following November.
How must it be to sit as an appellate judge, judging not another human being but a name on the front page of a bulging, boring brief of dead legalese authored by court-appointed lawyers who themselves have never met the accused?
“They must be using form briefs these days,” one appellate judge might say to another. “Read one, you’ve read ’em all. They all holler for a new trial.”
“Right. I feel like a garbage disposal unit for the judicial system.” He laughs. Little merriment in the laughter. “How’d your golf game go yesterday afternoon, George?”
In the appeals court you might hear the defendant’s court-appointed lawyer, scared, pale, with a voice like a one-stringed banjo, arguing on behalf of his client who’s been sentenced to die. Death fills the air with its foul breath. But a couple of judges have already been lulled to the edge of sleep by the lawyer’s voice that touches nothing human in them.
Like morticians, judges get used to Death.
Important cases are waiting to be heard—corporations with multibillion-dollar issues, contract violations, patents, stockholder suits. The courts cannot clog commerce. In the real world people cheat, steal, and lie. They claim they’ve been damaged, they whine, moan, and threaten, and, yes, they kill each other. Judges hear it all. And some black killers want a new trial after they raped an innocent white girl and killed both the girl and her white fiancé?
We are told to presume the defendant’s innocence, and although such approaches the divine and is an ideal we Americans embrace with pride, it cannot displace the knowledge we’ve gained from our own experience in life. That knowledge forms our attitudes in every case, and rarely does it presume innocence.
Here’s what all but one judge held in Dennis’s case: “Although the evidence is in large part circumstantial, it does tend toward a satisfactory conclusion and produces a reasonable and moral certainty that the defendant committed the murders and rape” (my emphasis). One might wonder what that judge would say if the doctor who operated on the judge’s child reported that the operation tended to be satisfactory even though the doctor had been guilty of gross malpractice? And, of course, the moral certainty referred to in the decision depends on whose morals we’re examining.
Once in a while, when the stars are in proper alignment, a majority of the judges on an appeals court will grant a new trial—perhaps to send a message to the lower-court judges to be circumspect. Why should we have appellate judges if they don’t order a new trial once in a while? Job security.
In 1982, after four years in prison, Dennis Williams was ordered a new trial by the Illinois Supreme Court. The grounds: ineffective assistance of counsel—yes, the said Archie Weston. Here, in major part, were the grounds for the court granting a new trial: “We have concluded that his [Archie Weston’s] financial and bar problems may well have had an effect on counsel’s ability to represent his client in the trial of this capital case, and we can no longer say, with any degree of assurance, that Williams received the effective assistance of counsel guaranteed by the Constitution. We accordingly conclude that he must be given a new trial.”
Although this was Kenny Adams’s lawyer’s first jury trial, his work met the expectations of the Illinois court, and Adams’s sentence of seventy-five years was upheld.
Paula had also been decaying behind prison walls those same years. Human endurance is like shoe leather. It can walk over only so much pain and terror before the souls are worn through. Sensitive prison authorities had housed this small, defenseless girl in the women’s sex-offender wing, something like throwing a baby chick in with a pack of crazy cats. She wasn’t large enough or strong enough to physically protect herself. But her nascent need to survive taught her that if she acted out against authority, even in small ways, she’d be sent to solitary confinement, where she’d be safe, at least from the cats. Then one day the prosecutors came to her and offered her a way out of hell: Lie again, Paula. All you have to do is change your story back to your original lie, and you can go free.
At last Paula agreed to retell the original story she’d been taught by the cops. When she was asked if she’d been promised anything for her testimony, which, indeed, was perjured testimony, she quickly denied any promises, which was yet another perjury. In 1987, and based on Paula’s testimony, both Dennis and Willie were sent back to prison, Dennis still awaiting the needle. Verneal Jimerson was recharged and tried and sent to death row. But Paula finally got home.
What did these innocent victims of Paula’s testimony think of her? Unmitigated hate would be an understandable emotion. But Willie Raines felt compassion for her. “Anybody with any common sense would know they put a lot of fear into her. She did what they told her to do.”
* * *
We need to step back in time to understand the rest of our story. But for the tireless work of Professor David Protess and award-winning journalist Rob Warden, and a team of eager kids in a journalism class, the executioner’s needle would have found its mark.32 The backstory begins with Girvies Davis, known to his fellow inmates as “Preacher Man.” He was awaiting execution on death row. Those who knew Preacher Man said he was a kindly, quiet man, a “gentle soul,” some called him. He’d made an unfortunate draw of parents from the big draw box in the sky. His mother was a black prostitute in an East St. Louis slum. He never knew his father. He was a fourth-grade dropout. He learned to read and write on death row under the tutelage of Dennis Williams. Awaiting his execution, he earned a high school equivalency degree.
Students under the leadership of Professor Protess, at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, began to look into Preacher Man’s case. These students were stunned to discover that when he signed his confession he was unable to read or write, a seemingly irrelevant fact that his lawyer never bothered to mention to the judge who sentenced Preacher to death.
Preacher Man said his confession had been forced from him at gunpoint on a deserted road in the middle of the night. And the police logs confirmed that the officers had favored him with what they called a “drive-around for evidence” and that he signed the confession at four thirty in the morning. Professor Protess called it “a case of poor man’s justice.”
Rob Warden, then employed by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office as an ambassador to the city’s public interest community, was an advocate against capital punishment and had been working on Dennis Williams’s case. But as the time for Preacher Man’s execution loomed, Dennis convinced Warden to drop his efforts for Williams and try to save the Preacher Man.
Warden organized the Girvies Davis Clemency Committee in a massive effort to save Preacher Man. It consisted of sixty lawyers, academics, religious leaders, and former law enforcement officials. They distributed a hundred thousand copies of a brochure that summarized the findings of the students. They made press releases, held press conferences, and even tried to convince the governor that clemency for Preacher would not be unpopular with his supporters.
The law firm of Jenner & Block had for more than a decade provided a pro bono team of lawyers to fight for Preacher Man’s life. Their efforts went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where those lofty judges passed the buck back down to the Illinois courts and refused to take the case.
Preacher was executed at Stateville Correctional Center at Joliet, Illinois. Some mammal, claiming to be a member of the human species, stuck a needle in Preacher’s arm, and another unidentified bipedal turned on the poison, and Preacher Man died with love, along with those deadly chemicals, in his heart. He said the helicopter ride to the death house at Joliet was “fun.”
“Try not to mourn for me,” Preacher said. “I’m at peace. Move on with your lives. Just try to help people like me who get caught up in the system.” His final request was for Protess and his journalism students to fight for Dennis Williams. “I know he’s innocent,” Preacher Man said.
* * *
The first real break in Dennis Williams’s case came when Willie Raines received a call from Rene Brown, the investigator the Williams family had once hired. He’d finally been unable to continue in the case when the Williams family could no longer dig up or borrow the monies to keep him on. But he’d found a police report that intrigued him, a hospital interview of a man named Marvin Simpson. He read it to Willie Raines over the phone. Raines called Professor Protess, and Protess sent three of his journalism students to excavate for a new set of facts buried somewhere in thousands of pages of old police files.
At the bottom of the eighth box of documents, the students found three handwritten pages of a 1978 interview that had been conducted five days after Carol Schmal and Larry Lionberg had been murdered. The police had interviewed a man injured in a car accident, one Marvin Simpson, who’d told them he knew the identities of the murderers because he was with them on the night before the killings occurred. One of the officers had written by hand:
On Wednesday night, 10 May 78, at approx. 2030 hrs, Marvin, Dennis Johnson, Ira, Arthur (Red) and Johnnie were sitting around by Marvin’s mother’s crib.… Dennis Johnson started talking about doing a score.33
Simpson told the officers that Red admitted to him that they’d raped “the white broad.” Simpson mentioned a Buick Electra 225 that had been involved in the murders of Carol Schmal and Larry Lionberg, and he identified merchandise that had been taken from the filling station where Schmal and Lionberg were abducted, all facts that had been buried those many years in the cops’ secret “street files.”
A Ford Heights police officer who’d been present when Simpson was interviewed said he’d taken notes. These notes had disappeared. The police had actually seized the Buick Electra 225 shortly after their interview with Simpson. That car, too, had disappeared.
Thankfully, once again, Professor Protess and three of his journalism students, Laura Sullivan, Stacey Delo, and Stephanie Goldstein, took to the case with a frenzy. Williams’s execution date was looming. He’d probably be executed in less than a year.
Despite the students’ zeal they couldn’t find Dennis Johnson, who’d been implicated by Simpson. Turned out Dennis Johnson had died of an overdose in 1993. Eventually, with the help of Professor Protess and Rene Brown, the investigator, the students found Ira Johnson, who was serving a life term for a murder he’d committed after the murder of Carol Schmal and Larry Lionberg. Ira was Dennis Johnson’s brother. Arthur “Red” Robinson and Juan “Johnnie” Rodriguez were the other two men.
Laura Sullivan reported her first visit to Ira Johnson. She said it had been a cold day in late February 1996 when she and her student partner, Stacey Delo, found Ira Johnson in the Menard Correctional Center—the same complex in which Dennis Williams was waiting on death row. She described Ira Johnson as one who “could look right through you and dismiss you, even as you sat in front of him. He was a strange mix of danger and aloofness.… Something about him was evil.”
Laura and Stacey made repeated visits to Ira Johnson at Menard Prison. Johnson was often vile and offensive, Laura said. He played his circular games that went nowhere, and they were about to give up on him. But as they were leaving Stacey said to Johnson, “We’re giving you a chance here to do one thing right in your life. Your brother would have wanted you to take it.”
A couple of days later they received a letter from Johnson in which he admitted that “them boys didn’t do that shit” and that it was going to take some time for him “to think that shit over.” The letters between them continued, as did their visits. Finally, near the end, they learned that Johnson and his brother sold drugs to Ford Heights police officers, and he told the girls that his brother, Dennis Johnson, was one of the killers.
In the meantime Rene Brown had been working on Red Robinson. Brown told Laura and Stephanie he thought Robinson was ready to talk, and talk he did. The girls met with him and started their tape recorder. He said he was there that night when they kidnapped the people from the gas station, but that he’d run out of the town house before the two were killed. He claimed that Ira Johnson and his brother raped and shot the woman.
When the girls went back to see Ira, they told him what Red Robinson had said. At first, Ira said Red lied. He ended up confessing that the four had intended only to rob the gas station, but that Ira’s brother wanted the girl. “They couldn’t take her and leave the guy behind,” Ira said.
Laura recounted the rest of Ira’s story: The four finally drove Carol and Larry to the abandoned house, forced Carol and Larry inside, and forced Larry to watch while Dennis Johnson and Red Robinson raped her. Dennis Johnson then shot her while she was on her knees and told Robinson to shoot her, too.
Dennis Johnson was worried that one of the four would tell, so he made sure that they all took part. He told Ira and Johnnie Rodriguez to take Larry outside. Ira said, “Larry got up and started walking. He kept on walking, through the yard, through the field outside, until he reached the creek’s edge. Then he stopped.”
Continuing in her report, Laura Sullivan quoted Ira as saying, “‘Larry never said a word to Ira. He never tried to run. He never fought back. He never even turned around.’ Ira said he held up his gun and shot Larry in the back of the head. Sitting at the table, Ira was barely whispering.” She said he began to cry.
After that, Laura said, Professor Protess presented to the district attorney the confessions and “a slew of other information” that he, Brown, and the attorneys had collected. Protess had originally found courageous, caring, and competent lawyers to fight for Preacher Man, and without fee. Now they continued in their work for the Ford Heights Four: Mark Ter Molen of Mayer, Brown & Platt; lawyers from Jenner & Block; Lawrence Marshall, a Northwestern University law professor; Matthew Kennelly (soon to become a federal district court judge); and a well-known civil rights lawyer, Flint Taylor. The district attorney agreed to DNA tests, then a new science. Swabs taken from Carol Schmal exonerated the Ford Heights Four and showed that Robinson and Dennis Johnson had raped her. And the lawyers won pardons for the four from Governor George H. Ryan of Illinois.
On June 16, 1997, Ira Johnson and Red Robinson were charged with kidnapping and murder. Facing the death penalty, both pled guilty and received life in prison without parole.
We recall that Ira Johnson was serving time in Menard for another murder he’d committed before the journalism students found him there. Had Simpson’s leads not been buried, had the cops done honest work rather than cook the evidence that convicted the Ford Heights Four, Ira Johnson’s murder victim would have been saved. And the lives of innocent citizens, the Ford Heights Four, would not have been scarred and wasted.
* * *
We sued Cook County and its cops. Why didn’t we sue Scott Arthur and the other prosecutors? The law protects prosecutors from most civil suits even when they intentionally offer tainted evidence to the jury. And, as we often see, prosecutors use the police as a shield. Scott Arthur was quick to retreat to that position, asserting that prosecutors can only present the evidence the police present to them.
As for the cops: Given that the DNA evidence proved the innocence of these four kids, and Paula Gray as well, wouldn’t the police come forward and at least admit they made a mistake? After others had confessed to the crimes and after the governor had issued his pardons, the cops still took the position that they had prosecuted the guilty parties.
We took the cops’ depositions. They admitted nothing. We were finally able to corner McCraney, who suddenly had a near-total loss of memory. The only officer who was willing to freely talk to us was George Nance, the chief of police in Ford Heights. He had always thought the boys were innocent. “Not the type to commit these crimes,” he argued. None had criminal records except for Dennis, who, as a kid, took an uninvited ride on somebody’s motorcycle and got himself arrested for it.
Preparing for trial, we traveled to Menard Prison, where Dennis had been housed all those years on death row. By the time of our visit, death row had been shut down. We took a model maker with us to create a replica of the cell where Dennis had lived. Dennis came with us. When we walked past Preacher Man’s cell he stopped and teared up.
“Preacher Man was innocent, you know,” Dennis said. “They killed an innocent man, and they had to know it. All Preacher Man ever did to them was pray for them.”
I tried to move on, but Dennis lingered. “If it hadn’t been for Preacher Man I wouldn’t be here. He got Protess and his kids after the cops.”
We hired investigators and experts and tore into the records. We labored months at preparing for trial. I spent many days with Dennis. In his fifteen years on death row he’d never touched or been touched by another caring human. He felt only the hostile, hard hands that shackled him, and he spent twenty-three hours a day in that concrete cage. He ate all his meals with a metal tray on his lap. He was provided no knife with which to eat, not even a plastic one. He had to pick up the meat and tear it with his teeth.
We were to discover that some of the abuses we saw in the Ford Heights Four cases had an ignoble history in the Cook County Prosecutors’ Office, where previous prosecutors had played a game referred to as “Niggers by the Pound.” That evil sport was at last reported by the Chicago Tribune on January 11, 1999.
Over the decades, racial prejudice had obscured the first flicker of justice from the eyes of those then charged with its delivery to the citizens of Chicago.
On his first day as a prosecutor assigned to a trial courtroom at the Criminal Courts Building, Michael Goggin slid into the chair next to the judge’s chambers and his shoes struck a most unusual object—a bathroom scale.
“What’s this?” Goggin recalls asking another prosecutor.
“That’s for the Two-Ton contest,” came the response.…
There was an ongoing competition among prosecutors to be the first to convict defendants whose weight totaled 4,000 pounds. Men and women, upon conviction, were marched into the room and weighed.
Because most of the defendants were African-American, Goggin recalls now, with no small degree of discomfort, the competition was described in less sensitive terms behind closed doors— “Niggers by the Pound.”
* * *
With little delay the judge set our case for trial, and the Cook County lawyers found themselves facing what they had so ardently attempted to avoid. Now the truth would come out big-time, and the public would get the story in the media, one rotten morsel at a time. The Cook County lawyers had a sudden change of heart. They wanted to settle.
The amount of the settlement was the only issue. But how could the lives of these boys, now men headed into middle age, represent nothing more than money? No one would go to jail. No one would even say, “I’m sorry.” Again we faced the recurring problem: If we settled, the people would never know of the underlying corruption in the system because we had allowed the system to buy its way out. Dennis felt the same except in deeper reaches.
Doubt, delay, and devilish uncertainty are always the order of the day in every such case. Experiencing a trial sometimes feels like finding oneself dropped into a room filled with noisy, gibbering psychos—lawyers and even the judges—all of whom are trying to act as if they are sane. And what sane result, if any, finally emerges years later is anyone’s guess. Moreover, a delay of years is meaningless to the justice system since the system enjoys a perpetual life, while the accused, guilty or not, can die without having tasted the first morsel of justice.
Dennis had waited long enough, and he didn’t trust the system. He wanted simple things. He wanted to sleep at night in a good bed, to have decent, healthy meals, to eat his meals with a knife, fork, and spoon, and to own a home and a car. After days of negotiations we arrived at a settlement figure that we could recommend to our clients, $36 million to be divided among the Ford Heights Four. All had agreed that Dennis, who’d been on death row those many years, had suffered the most and was entitled to the largest share—$12 million. The other three divided the remaining $24 million equally. Dennis said he would gladly give every penny back if he could recapture the seventeen years of his lost life. Was justice served by this settlement? Money in a money system buys everything, even justice. Suffering, degradation, and the loss of life are measured by the only measurement available—in dollars.
Tom Decker, a dauntless, devoted trial lawyer with a loyalty to his client that would survive to his last breath, represented Paula Gray. Cook County refused to give Decker the time of day. He sued to have Paula’s record cleared, and for a court’s determination that this poor girl had been abused and tormented to the point that she became little more than a talking puppet for the prosecutors. In a three-hundred-page decision, Circuit Court Judge William D. O’Neal agreed. Paula’s good name and rights were totally restored.
Of course the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office appealed Judge O’Neal’s ruling, but the appeal was rendered moot in November of 2002 when Governor Ryan granted her a pardon based on innocence. Then and only then did the county rush in, and after more than two decades it paid Paula’s trustees $4 million for her seven years in prison, and for the loss of her life. These are the rare breed of lawyers and judges who keep our hopes alive in this notorious game of justice.
How does someone such as Dennis Williams, an innocent kid whose life was stolen with perjured testimony—how can he regain any semblance of normalcy after surviving seventeen years in hell?
Money couldn’t buy his fundamental needs. He needed a family, and friends. He needed the experiences we all encounter in a normal life. Even though he’d been innocent, the system could not return him to his original innocent self.
Peter King became Dennis’s counselor and friend and found trustworthy people to manage his money. Dennis was a warm person and had an enduring personality. He and Peter’s oldest son became like brothers. Peter and Dennis often saw each other daily. Dennis would trust few others and lived constantly under a cloud of paranoia. He was especially suspicious of women, who flocked to him after his newly acquired wealth. He was never completely free. He refused to leave home without calling someone to assure himself of an alibi if he were again wrongfully charged. He even kept his driver’s license on the car seat so if he were stopped by the police they wouldn’t shoot him as he reached for his wallet.
Dennis looked for pleasure and excitement after the bloom of youth had wilted inside prison walls. A couple of times he visited Imaging and me in Jackson. Perhaps we offered something approaching a place where he could see trusting people who cared about each other and who were trying to live meaningful lives.
He took trips on riverboats, where he liked to gamble. He told Peter he got a rush from throwing the dice. I thought that might be because his life had been like stepping up to the big craps table of fate. The bad rolls of loaded dice put him on death row—lying cops, lying witnesses, and an incompetent lawyer. But he also won the big one when good lawyers and DNA evidence proved his innocence.
How could one be deprived of one’s life and not be hardened into chronic anger? “I don’t think I could give a description to my anger,” Dennis said. “But it exists. I don’t think that anger is the answer. It’s going to hold me back. I can’t think clearly if I’m angry. Instead, I try to focus my energy on creating.” The one thing that kept him sane was immersing himself in his painting. “When I’m painting I achieve something approaching a meditative state.” He was self-taught and over the years had become a painter of some accomplishment. He was a bright man with unexplored talent.
Dennis said, “If I’d depended on the system to correct itself, I’d have been dead a long time ago. Living next to the execution chamber all those years gave me strength. I realized I didn’t have to take but a few steps and I’d be behind that door.”
After his release, Dennis worked as a counselor in a youth program on the west side of Chicago. He was a part-time student at Governors State University, and he campaigned for justice reform.
At three in the morning on March 20, 2003, the phone rang at Peter King’s home. Dennis’s fiancée was screaming over the phone. She’d found Dennis slumped over dead in his home. He’d suffered a seizure disorder and died of a brain aneurysm. He was forty-six years old. He’d been free from death row for five years and nine months.
* * *
Today, a national organization whose mission is contained in its name, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, reports these staggering statistics: “African Americans are 12 percent of the U.S. population, but 42 percent of prisoners on death row.… Of the over 18,000 executions that have taken place in this country’s history, only 42 involved a white person being punished for killing a Black person.”34
The cases against the Ford Heights Four were born of and nurtured on blatant racism. Still, one asks, what is the relevance of those tragedies today? Many claim that racism is America’s infamy of the past, that African Americans have the same and equal rights as their white neighbors.
Every night in prime time we are presented television dramas starring black performers. Many of our celebrated athletes are black. Rarely is a commercial shown that fails to include at least one black person up front, and even ads offering the most expensive automobiles and the finest apparel are populated by handsome black men and women. We see drama after drama that either supports interracial marriage or presents it as the norm. Miscegenation laws—laws criminalizing interracial marriage—that as late as 1963 were still in force in twenty-four states have been held unconstitutional by our Supreme Court. The “n-word” has become so abhorrent that blatant racists dare not use it, not even among themselves. (With exceptions: Richard Pryor, the black comedian, became famous and earned millions by shocking his audiences with constant barrages of that prohibited word.) We have a black president and a black first lady, and their family resides in the White House. How, then, Mr. Spence, can you claim we are still a racist nation?
Racism has gone underground.
Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls it “racism without racists” (and has written a book by that same title). He argues we are seeing a new way of maintaining white domination in places like Ferguson, Missouri. “The main problem nowadays is not the folks with the hoods, but the folks dressed in suits,” he told CNN. Bonilla-Silva says that “the more we assume that the problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the birthers, the Tea Party, or to the Republican Party, the less we understand that racial dominance is a collective process and we are all in this game.”35
We need new words to expose what racism has become—I call it “the hidden racism of the innocent,” another way of saying that we are racists without knowing it. Bonilla-Silva says, “Color-blind racism is the new racial music most people dance to. The ‘new racism’ is subtle, institutionalized and seemingly nonracial.”
I know that racism is alive and throbbing beneath the surface throughout America. I know it is because none of us want to talk about it, and none of us will admit to it. Speaking the “n-word” approaches the same level of contempt as defecating at the dinner table. Our personal racism is never acknowledged, not even to our closest friends, not to our spouses, not even to ourselves. Its shame is on the same level as incest.
Racism in America still stands naked except when it is hurriedly covered by white prosecutors using their ever-ready tool, the grand jury. I am thinking of the white cop who killed a black unarmed teenager in Ferguson. No charges by the grand jury. I am thinking of a Staten Island grand jury that, under the direction of the prosecutor, cleared a white NYPD cop in the chokehold death of Eric Garner during his arrest for peddling loose cigarettes. I grieve the death of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old African American boy in Cleveland who was carrying a toy gun and was shot by a white officer within two seconds of the officer’s arrival at the scene. He died the next day.
Examining FBI data between 2010 and 2012, ProPublica concludes, “Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts—21 times greater” (my emphasis). ProPublica says its risk analysis “seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population.”36
Throughout this book we have been examining America’s police state as it has existed in seedling form to the present. From our standpoint as ordinary citizens, are we still free, or is our freedom but a sly and cruel myth fed to us by Power?
Are we capable of distinguishing between our fantasy, our hope, yes, our faith that we are free on the one hand, from the alarming approach of a police state on the other? And if we discover the truth, can we bear it? Will we confront it?
* * *
None of the cops and none of the prosecutors who had stolen the lives of the Ford Heights Four and who cast innocent kids into the hell of those vile prisons were ever charged with a single crime, nor did any miss a day’s pay as discipline for the years of human suffering they imposed on these innocent citizens and their families. The irony here is that the police and prosecutors with all their power will fade away into the impenetrable shadows of history while Dennis Williams and his friends, once poor, helpless black kids, will continue to brighten our memories.