Attorneys David Hood (left) and Orzell Billingsley (center) consult with Caliph Washington at the beginning of the 1970 trial.
IN BESSEMER, FEW people were fence-sitters when it came to Caliph Washington’s guilt or innocence, and Washington’s lawyers hoped that the racial and gender makeup of the jury would bring a “not guilty” verdict. The trial began with high expectations. Following opening remarks by Harry Pickens and Orzell Billingsley, Judge Ed Ball asked the district attorney to call his first witness. It was Furman Jones. For the first time since the 1957 trial, Jones, the prosecution’s star witness, stood and walked to the front of the courtroom. With Jones having missed the 1959 trial, Bessemer officials made certain that he would testify this time. Two days before, Police Chief George Barron flew to South Carolina and brought him back.
Once Jones was sworn in, Pickens asked him to recount the first time he saw Caliph Washington and his conversations with the defendant on the Greyhound bus bound for Memphis over a dozen years earlier. “He [Caliph] said he had killed a policeman in Alabama,” Jones recalled, “and he was trying to get away.”
On cross-examination, U. W. Clemon asked Jones to be clear about what Washington told him that day on the bus: “Now, did he tell you that he had killed a policeman, or that he had murdered a policeman?” Jones said, “Killed.” At the time, Washington offered Jones no specifics as to whether the killing was an accident or intentional. “So all you know about this case is that Caliph Washington told you that he killed a policeman and you did not ask where or how and he didn’t tell you why or how?” That was all he knew, Jones testified.
The defense hoped to keep Jones around for further questioning, but Judge Ball argued that the witness had a civilian job, twelve children, and a sick wife in South Carolina. David Hood pleaded with the judge to keep the witness overnight while the defense presented evidence to contradict his testimony. Standing in front of the judge’s bench, Hood gestured to the motionless Caliph Washington and said, “After all, we have a man here being tried for his life. The life or death of this defendant is at stake.” Ball, however, excused the witness.
The next witness, former Mississippi highway patrolman J. W. Warren, recounted how he and his partner removed Caliph Washington from the bus and discovered Cowboy Clark’s .38-caliber Smith and Wesson pistol in a brown paper sack near where the defendant was sitting. Pickens introduced into evidence the paper bag and the gun.
Pickens called Jones and Warren, as out-of-town witnesses, to testify first, which made for a confusing, disjointed beginning to the trial. Orzell Billingsley objected. “We don’t know where Mr. Pickens is going,” he said. The district attorney had not established that a killing or a homicide had occurred. “This could go on and on,” Billingsley added, “and probably never prove a killing.” Judge Ball overruled but said he would reverse himself if Pickens never connected the testimony of Warren and Jones to the killing.
U. W. Clemon’s cross-examination of Warren revealed a striking generational difference between Clemon and David Hood and Orzell Billingsley. Although courageous in their own ways, the two older black attorneys were accustomed to working within the confines of the old Jim Crow legal system that led to a more genteel and deferential courtroom demeanor when questioning white witnesses. In contrast, Clemon was fearless, aggressive, and confrontational. “He spoke clearly and forcefully,” Jack Drake recalled, “and took no shit” from opposing counsel or witnesses.
Clemon tried to get Warren to admit to abusing and threatening Caliph Washington. He pressed the lawman to concede that he hit Caliph across the head with the butt of a rifle. Warren said he did not.
“Before you left Byhalia, Mississippi,” Clemon asked, “isn’t it a fact that you turned on a side street and took Caliph out of the car and started to punch him until a white man came by?”
Warren said he did not.
“Did your partner hit him?” the attorney asked.
“Not to my knowledge,” Warren answered.
Clemon peppered the witness with questions about his background: Are you a member of the Ku Klux Klan? Are you a member of the White Citizens’ Council? Have you ever killed a black person in the line of duty?
Warren responded no to each question.
On into the afternoon, the prosecution called two more witnesses: former Bank Pawn Shop employee M. F. Karr, who explained how he sold the .38 to Cowboy Clark, and retired Lipscomb police chief Thurman Avery, who recalled the bootlegger stakeout the night Clark died. After Judge Ball adjourned for the evening, the twelve-member jury was “locked up” at the Holiday Inn on the Bessemer Super Highway. That first day brought no real drama. The trial seemed scripted and artificial. “That’s what happens when you retry a case,” Jack Drake recalled. The witnesses seemed to have memorized word for word the transcript from the earlier trials. “Everyone did what the prosecutor wanted them to do,” Drake added.
WHEN THE TRIAL resumed, another packed courtroom of spectators listened to witnesses describe the death of Cowboy Clark in graphic detail. On this second day of testimony, the first witness was James “Jimmy” Thompson, the former deputy coroner, who explained to the court the autopsy procedure and the type of wound Clark received. The prosecutor showed Thompson a series of photographs of Clark’s dead body and asked him if they “reasonably and adequately” portrayed the wound—once the witness identified the photos, they were submitted as evidence and shown to the jury. This brought a strenuous objection from Clemon. The prosecution was using the graphic pictures, the attorney emphasized, to shock and “arouse the prejudice of the jury.” Judge Ball allowed one of the pictures to show proof of Clark’s death and the location of the bullet wound. “I don’t think there is any need to put four or five pictures in evidence,” Ball said. “The fact that one shows the wound is sufficient.”
On cross-examination, David Hood carefully attacked Thompson’s credibility as an expert in forensic sciences. Thompson, who was, at the time of the 1970 trial, an employee at the Continental Can Company in Fairfield, admitted that he had no college degree or any special training in forensic sciences to determine the cause of death of Cowboy Clark or any other human being. Thompson apparently received the job of deputy coroner for the Cutoff because his father was the politically powerful Bessemer commissioner of public safety, Herman Thompson.
During the autopsy, Thompson assisted pathologist Dr. L. H. Kwong, who once again testified that the sole cause of Clark’s death was from a bullet wound, which caused uncontrollable bleeding inside the abdominal cavity. “Nobody can live with a massive hemorrhage like that plus the shock he sustained,” Kwong added. He explained that the bullet entered Clark’s body at a strange angle and that he removed it from the deceased’s spine.
The state toxicologist Carl Rehling discussed the ballistics tests he made on the gun and the bullet almost thirteen years before. While questioning the toxicologist on cross-examination, David Hood was holding the gun in the direction of the judge’s bench. Ball interrupted and said, “Would you please open that gun. I don’t like it pointed at me like that.” Hood apologized and complied. The attorney tried to determine if the ballistics tests would reveal whether the pistol was fired accidentally or intentionally. “I have no idea,” Rehling answered. Nonetheless, he later emphasized that the gun was not fired while in a “personal contact struggle” between the two individuals, because of the lack of powder residue on Clark’s shirt.
But the defense lawyers, as in the previous two trials, tried to show that the lack of powder burns on the shirt did not prove that the defendant grabbed the gun, backed away, and fired at Cowboy Clark—a key argument in the prosecutor’s case. Hood contended that powder deposits could be easily dislodged by bleeding, rough handling, or improper shipping. Rehling agreed that this might have happened to Clark’s shirt. However, Clark’s shirt was lost during the appeals process and never found.
Following Rehling’s testimony, the prosecution called to the stand several sheriff’s deputies from the Cutoff and police officers from the city of Bessemer to recall the night Clark died, the capture of Caliph Washington, and the suspect’s alleged confessions. Deputy Sheriff Walter Dean explained how he wrote down Caliph Washington’s confession—a key piece of evidence in the state’s prosecution. Vast changes had occurred in American law since 1957, and U. W. Clemon wanted to discuss those in front of the court. In response, Judge Ball sent the jury out of the courtroom, while the lawyers debated the points of law.
What Clemon hoped to show was that the atmosphere and environment in which Caliph made his statement was, as Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Miranda decision, “inherently intimidating” and worked to undermine the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on self-incrimination. In the presence of the jury, Dean claimed to have told Caliph he didn’t have to make a statement if he didn’t want to and that if he did talk, his words could be used against him in a criminal proceeding. Regardless, Dean admitted that he never told Caliph he had the right to consult a lawyer, or that he could stop talking during the interrogation, or that he could call his family. Clemon showed how intimidating it was for a young black suspect to be surrounded by five white lawmen. “Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Dean,” the attorney asked, “that you told Reverend Washington on that occasion, that you would kill him and that his head would look like a tomato if he didn’t give you a statement?” Dean strongly denied the accusation.
Clemon also asked if the witness was familiar with the general atmosphere prevailing in the county at the time Caliph Washington was interrogated. Pickens, however, objected on the grounds that the question was “irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial.” Clemon argued that the basis for asking the question was to determine the “voluntariness” of the confession. “The Supreme Court and all the other courts say that where there is a general atmosphere conducive to . . . coercion, to have a confession made under those conditions does have a bearing as to whether or not the confession was voluntary.” Ball overruled Pickens’s objection and compelled the witness to answer. “At the time I took this confession,” Dean answered, “and during that day prior to the taking of the confession, there was not to my knowledge any bad atmosphere concerning this case.”
A few hours before Dean wrote down Washington’s statement in Alabama, the suspect allegedly made an oral confession after his arrest in Mississippi to Bessemer police detective Lawton “Stud” Grimes. According to Grimes, Caliph said that while Clark was leading him to the patrol car after the arrest in that dark Bessemer alley, he grabbed the officer’s gun, stepped back, and fired two or three times.
On cross-examination, Orzell Billingsley asked Grimes if he warned Caliph Washington about his right to remain silent or his right to an attorney. “I didn’t tell him nothing,” Grimes responded. “I told him he didn’t have to answer my questions if he didn’t want to.” Billingsley then asked Grimes why he pressured Washington into making a statement.
GRIMES: “I wanted to know.”
BILLINGSLEY: “Why?”
GRIMES: “I wanted to know why he killed that officer.”
BILLINGSLEY: “That is what you wanted to know?”
GRIMES: “Yes.”
BILLINGSLEY: “You couldn’t wait until you got back to Bessemer to find out?”
GRIMES: “I didn’t intend to.”
BILLINGSLEY: “You didn’t intend to wait? Why didn’t you have this statement put in writing?”
GRIMES: “I didn’t have time.”
BILLINGSLEY: “What was your rush?”
GRIMES: “Wasn’t no rush. I wasn’t going to write it down.”
BILLINGSLEY: “Well, how then do you remember it?”
GRIMES: “I just remember. I got a mind like anybody else.”
When Grimes admitted that he did not remember testifying in the second Washington trial in 1959, Billingsley wanted to know why the witness could recollect vividly what Caliph said back in the summer of 1957 on a roadside in Mississippi, but he unable to recall his more recent testimony. What else had Grimes forgotten? The lawyer inquired.
BILLINGLSEY: “Didn’t you beat Reverend Washington on the way from Mississippi to Bessemer?”
GRIMES: “I never laid a hand on him.”
BILLINGSLEY: “Didn’t you kill somebody you thought was Caliph Washington?”
GRIMES: “No.”
BILLINGSLEY: “Didn’t you tell Reverend Washington on his way back from Mississippi that you had his mother and father in jail and that he needed to talk before they could get out?”
GRIMES: “No.”
BILLINGSLEY: “Is it not true that in Adamsville there were some hogs and chickens killed while you were out there?”
Before Grimes answered, Pickens objected and Ball sustained. When Billingsley asked who authorized Grimes to follow him and David Hood during the first trial, Pickens again objected and the judge sustained. “I want to say to this court,” Billingsley continued, “that they say this confession was voluntary, but this officer [Grimes] followed the black lawyers in the trial all during the week to their homes and offices and wherever they went, and if he intimidated these lawyers in this matter, what do you think he did to this defendant?”
Judge Ball reiterated his sustain of the objection and added, “Mr. Billingsley, I don’t want to argue with you.” He then turned to the jury and told them not to consider the lawyer’s statement.
With the jury out of the room, lawyer Clemon asked the judge to strike the statement made by Grimes on the grounds that it violated the defendant’s rights, was taken without regard to the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution, and went against the Supreme Court’s Miranda and Escobedo decisions. Judge Ball, however, argued that the Miranda decision was applicable only for trials starting after June 13, 1966. The Caliph Washington trial, Ball countered, began on October 8, 1957, “many years before these cases were decided.” Clemon, however, insisted that the trial began on April 6, 1970: “This is a new trial.” His honor disagreed. “These proceedings began in October 1957, and this is not a new trial. This is a retrial of the same case.”
On day three of the trial, prosecutor Harry Pickens called several witnesses who once lived in the old Thompson Town neighborhood near the crime scene. Each testified as to what they saw the evening of the shooting of Cowboy Clark. Mary Howard said she had trouble sleeping that evening. “I couldn’t rest,” she recalled, so she sat on the edge of her bed and was looking out the window when she saw cars approaching. At first, she didn’t think much of it, because cars routinely sped down the narrow dirt road several times during the night, but when she saw the red light on top of the cars, she said, “That’s the police and they got somebody.” She woke her daughter, Ada Mae Howard, to come look, and that’s when they realized that the car being chased belonged to Doug Washington. “Yes, look,” Ada Mae said, “that’s Caliph in that car.” A few moments later, they heard a shot fired.
John Adams died since the last trial, but his onetime live-in girlfriend, sixty-eight-year-old Mary Davidson, returned to give her account of what happened that night in front of her house. When district attorney Pickens called her Mary, Orzell Billingsley objected to the prosecutor referring to her by her first name. The state should address black witnesses with appropriate courtesy titles, he argued. “I am a black person,” he added, “and I really resent it, and I don’t think it would put a member of the white race on the spot if they would call her by her proper name.” Pickens agreed and referred to her as Mrs. Davidson (although she was unmarried). She testified that she saw Caliph with the gun and that he was about twelve feet away when he fired the fatal bullet. In the previous trial, she claimed she never saw the actual shooting but just heard the gunfire. “That was all I knowed,” she said in 1957. But now she claimed that “Caliph stood there and the policeman come over and then he turned around and was going back toward his car, and the next thing I know Caliph walked out with the gun and I heard it fire. . . . I know he fired it. I didn’t see no scuffling or nothing.” She said Washington then fled into the night.
The suspect ended up at Elijah Honeycutt’s house. Honeycutt returned to testify that Caliph Washington knocked on his door and asked for a ride. “He said he wanted to see a girlfriend,” Honeycutt said. “You know how soldiers do when they come home.” He drove Washington into western Birmingham and let him out of the car. Honeycutt recalled that Caliph turned to him and said that he just killed a police officer. “I didn’t believe him, because he didn’t act like he had done such a thing, because he was smiling,” he testified. Honeycutt said to Caliph, “Oh, get off man, you didn’t do anything like that,” and he turned around and drove back to Bessemer. “I didn’t pay any attention to him.” He found out the next day at work that Washington was the suspect in the death of a Lipscomb police officer.
Following Honeycutt’s testimony and cross-examination, the state rested its case. Tensions were high as Billingsley, Clemon, Hood, and Drake prepared to make a defense of Caliph Washington. Before they could call their first witness, one of the white female jurors, Agalean Kirkland, had an “attack of nerves,” Judge Ball announced, and was replaced with an alternate, Charlie Robinson, a black male. Sitting in the jury box now were seven white women, four black men, and one black woman. They watched and listened as Clemon called the first witness in defense of Caliph Washington.
Clemon called to the stand and questioned several character witnesses on behalf of the defendant—something not done in the first two trials and reflective of another shift in the criminal justice system. Under the old Jim Crow system, most attorneys never called character witnesses on behalf of black defendants because whites considered it a foregone conclusion that most blacks possessed low morals. But in this trial, teachers, preachers, neighbors, and community leaders (Cornelia Addison, Reverend Lucius Calvin Walker, Lula Belle Johnson, Bernice Jackson, Margaret Pettaway, and Bessie Mae Johnson) all came forward to testify that the defendant was a good man of high character. Orzell Billingsley even called Asbury Howard, still Bessemer’s leading civil rights activist, to tell the court that Washington was a fine human being with a first-class temperament.
In contrast, witnesses also testified to the low moral character of Mary Davidson. “She is a public drunk,” Lula Belle Johnson said. The night of the Cowboy Clark incident, several witnesses claimed Davidson and her boyfriend were drinking, fussing, and cussing. “I knocked on the door and asked them to hush,” recalled Bessie Mae Johnson. She later saw Davidson playing with a big dog. “I knew when she played with this dog that she had been drinking. I said, ‘You had a little nip, didn’t you, Bum?’ I used to call her Bum.”
Next, Orzell Billingsley called Caliph’s court-appointed attorney, Kermit “K. C.” Edwards, to testify as an expert witness on the case. Edwards opined that he believed Clark died as a result of the accidental discharge of his weapon and that one of the bullets hit the car, ricocheted, and ripped through the officer’s body—a plausible explanation, but one that Edwards was never able to piece together for juries in 1957 and 1959. In this new trial, Edwards identified himself as an attorney by profession, but he was disbarred years earlier, along with two other lawyers, for their “conduct in domestic relations proceedings.” Nonetheless, Edwards continued to clandestinely practice law with his disbarred colleagues in a “quickie divorce mill,” where out-of-state clients paid for divorces, which were in fact invalid. The scandal became public in 1970, when investigators discovered thousands of unrecorded divorce decrees in the offices of two corrupt judges who were participating in the scheme. In 1972, Edwards and the others were convicted in federal court for using the U.S. mail in a scheme to defraud and were sentenced by Judge Clarence Allgood to three years in prison.
Following Edwards’s testimony, Clemon called witnesses to show alleged violence by white Bessemer police officers during the manhunt to find Caliph Washington. William “Burley” Merritt, Ernestine Merritt, and Hattie Cross testified that on Sunday morning, July 14, 1957, seven carloads of Bessemer police officers and sheriff’s deputies showed up at their home in Adamsville and began a house-to-house search. Burley Merritt said he would never forget the “pretty rough” beating he received all over his face with the butt of a Winchester rifle. Instead of receiving medical attention, he was taken to the Bessemer jail, where police later forced him to sign a statement—although he could not read. When the prosecution objected to this line of questioning, lawyer Clemon said, “I think this goes to show the type of police officers that were involved in trying to capture or find Mr. Washington. Their conduct out there goes to show what they might have done to Mr. Washington.”
When Jack Drake asked Hattie Cross if these police officers had beaten her and struck her mother in the head with the butt of a gun, the prosecutor objected. Judge Ed Ball sustained the request and asked Caliph’s lawyers not to pursue this line of questioning. “You know that what the officers did to her is not admissible,” he said.
Orzell Billingsley, however, explained to Ball that the defense wanted to “get these questions into the record” even if he ruled them inadmissible.
The judge sent the jury into the jury room, and he allowed Drake to state what he expected to prove by this line of questioning. Drake said:
I would like for the record to show that we had hoped to show by this witness that she was beaten and intimidated by the police from Lipscomb and Bessemer and others unknown to us; that her mother was beaten and otherwise intimidated, and that her mother later died from those injuries; that one Mr. Jessie Kyser was shot and killed in Adamsville on this date in question, and those actions and other actions to which this witness could testify to was . . . part of the general pattern and scheme and harassment engaged in by the police of the city of Bessemer, and by the city of Lipscomb . . . to locate a witness and in doing so, to intimidate every black person in Jefferson County who had ever known Caliph Washington.
The prosecutor objected to Drake’s statement as “irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial.” Well aware of Stud Grimes’s reputation, however, Judge Ball agreed to allow the defense to put these points in the record. “Anything that Mr. Grimes did out there,” Ball said. “I will let in.” After all, the judge pointed out, Stud Grimes testified that nothing happened in Adamsville.
Clemon added that the defense also hoped to show through the testimony of these witnesses the “totality of the circumstances” in which every statement and confession was made by the black folks in this case. This would reveal to the court the atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and violence that gripped society at this time and compelled the defendant to seek refuge in another state. The prosecutor pointed out that if any harassment, beating, murders, or anything else had occurred in Adamsville, then the people had the right to report it, and the “people creating those offenses” would have been indicted in 1957. In response, Jack Drake said the defense would be happy to bring forward a great many witnesses from Jefferson County who would testify that black people would not have come forward with accusations in 1957. “They were afraid to have done that,” Drake said.
With all these points in the trial records, Judge Ball brought back the jury, and Orzell Billingsley called the next witness: “We call Caliph Washington to the stand.” For the first time in over a decade, he would recount his own version of the incident with Cowboy Clark.
Washington recalled how the chase began, when he thought night riders were after him, and he explained that as soon as he realized it was a police car, he stopped. In this retelling, Cowboy Clark was much meaner and rougher than how Washington described him in 1957 and 1959. “Get out of the car, nigger,” he remembered Clark yelling. The defendant testified that the officer was looking for whiskey, and when the suspect wouldn’t confess to having any in his car, Cowboy called him a “smart nigger” and a son of a bitch. “I denied knowing anything about any whiskey,” Washington said, but Clark “kept talking about it” to the point that he grew so angry that he pulled his weapon and started to strike the suspect in the head with the butt of the gun.
Attorney Hood picked up Clark’s gun and asked Washington to hold the weapon and demonstrate how it happened, but he refused. “I can’t touch those,” Washington said, but he went on to explain that he “threw his hands up” and grabbed Clark’s hands as he was about to strike. “I was afraid,” he said. “I was trying to keep from getting hit or shot.” But the gun fired off three rapid shots, and Clark’s grip grew weak. “It must have shot him,” Washington said. “I don’t know, because I was scared.”
Judge Ball interrupted and adjourned the court until, Thursday, April 9, at 9:15 a.m. That next morning, Washington continued to testify. He explained how he fled the scene, got a ride from his friend, and stayed hidden in the woods. Caliph Washington told how his friend’s stepfather, Tommy Lee Silmon, took him to Adamsville—absent from his testimony was the story about the mysterious stranger who drove Silmon’s car. Washington described how he escaped to Mississippi. He denied ever sitting with, or even talking to, Furman Jones while on the bus. He said he fell asleep on the bus and was awakened by a woman who said there was a police roadblock ahead. Washington testified that the Mississippi lawmen took him off the bus, shook him down, beat him a little, and drove him to a service station. There, he said in this new version of the incident, the lawman put a bright light in his face, handcuffed his hands behind him, and threatened to kill him if he did not confess. When he refused to talk, they drove him to a secluded area in the woods. Caliph recounted the story from the 1959 trial:
They were still holding me in the woods and fixing to lynch me up; trying to get me to run and said they were going to give me a break, but I said I didn’t want to run, and this officer said, ‘you run,’ and he told me how he had hung a lot of black people up on a limb, and they were stringing me up on this car hood when another man came by—I don’t know his name, but he had a little boy with him and he told them to take me in.
At the Mississippi Highway Patrol station, Washington said that he refused to talk to Stud Grimes. “He slapped me because I wouldn’t talk to him,” he testified. According to Washington, Grimes then said: “We have all these niggers in jail, your mother and father, and we are going to burn all of you. I want you to tell me what happened.” Caliph refused.
Once he was back in Bessemer on July 15, 1957, he was taken to the courthouse and placed in a room, according to Washington, filled with angry cursing white lawmen with lots of guns and angry eyes. They never informed him, he recalled, that he had a right to remain silent and a right to an attorney. He could not call his family because they told him they were all in jail. Washington testified that the men forced him to answer the questions, while one of them wrote down his answers and then told him that they “would burn us all,” if he did not sign. Tired, scared, and hungry, the defendant said that he initialed each page, and then signed the confession, without ever being allowed to read the document. He was then taken to the county jail in Bessemer.
On cross-examination, Harry Pickens peppered Washington with questions. Although he talked fast (“like a machine gun”), Pickens’s tone was much more respectful and less authoritarian than that of his predecessor, Howard Sullinger. He skillfully revealed significant inconsistencies in Caliph’s testimony from the two previous trials. When Pickens pointed out these gaps, Caliph said he was too afraid to tell the whole truth in 1957 and 1959.
PICKENS: “You were in a courtroom, weren’t you?”
WASHINGTON: “But they threatened me all the time.”
PICKENS: “The judge was on the bench, wasn’t he?”
WASHINGTON: “I was afraid of all of them.”
PICKENS: “Are you under any threat right now?”
WASHINGTON: “Ever since I been locked up.”
PICKENS: “Right now?”
WASHINGTON: “Yes, sir.”
PICKENS: “By whom?”
WASHINGTON: “You and the state for fourteen years. . . . You’ve threatened my life all the time with this charge.”
PICKENS: “I have?”
WASHINGTON: “With this charge.”
PICKENS: “Are you saying I have talked with you and threatened your life?”
WASHINGTON: “Not with those words.”
PICKENS: “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
WASHINGTON: “I mean, the law; with the law.”
“You’ve been threatened with the law?” Judge Ball interjected.
“I mean,” Washington replied, “you have had me here in confinement over and over, and you have violated my rights in this case and want to try me for my life again after holding me for four or five years without giving me a fair and impartial trial.”
PICKENS: “You are getting a fair and impartial trial, aren’t you?”
WASHINGTON: “I didn’t even have a hearing when you brought me back in 1965.”
PICKENS: “Have I threatened you?”
WASHINGTON: “You didn’t turn me loose.”
PICKENS: “I haven’t threatened you, have I?”
WASHINGTON: “I am telling the truth and the record will show it.”
Pickens moved on. He asked Caliph who he thought was chasing and shooting at him.
“Some of the white boys on the south side,” he said, “used to shoot at us sometimes and throw brick and bottles.”
Pickens pressed Caliph as to why he drove down to dark Exeter Alley instead of to the well-lit police station.
“They weren’t going to protect me,” he responded, “because they never do. Wasn’t no use to go near the police station.” After he pulled the car over down in that dark alley, Caliph said that he still had no idea he was being pursued by a police officer.
“He was in a police car with the blinker light going,” Pickens said, “and he had on a gun belt with a gun hanging out of it and he had on a police shirt and a badge and you didn’t know he was a policeman, is that right?”
Caliph said it was too dark to see.
Pickens questioned Washington about the arrest. He wanted to know what happened after Cowboy Clark led him to the patrol car and opened the door.
PICKENS: “You snatched his pistol at this time. Is that right?”
WASHINGTON: “No.”
PICKENS: “Do you remember telling Mr. Grimes that you snatched this officer’s pistol and shot him three times?”
WASHINGTON: “I didn’t tell Mr. Grimes anything.”
PICKENS: “Is Mr. Grimes lying about that?”
WASHINGTON: “What do you think?”
PICKENS: “I am asking you.”
WASHINGTON: “That’s what I want to know.”
Pickens decided that his questioning was going nowhere, and he abruptly said: “All right, no further questions.”
When Judge Ball asked Caliph’s lawyers if they had any other questions, a confident David Hood proclaimed that the defense rested.
Ball seemed surprised. “You want to rest?”
The defense lawyers all agreed.
Following closing arguments by both sides, the judge gave the jury several oral charges. The jury could find Washington guilty of first- or second-degree murder, or first- or second-degree manslaughter. They could also find him not guilty. He told the jury that a lot of “extraneous matters” were injected into this trial and that as citizens they should return a verdict based upon the facts, not prejudice or bias. “This is not a race issue in this case,” Ball said, and the jury should act as if they were blind to the race of the defendant, whether he was black or white. “Do not let your judgment be swayed by any preconceived ideas of the conflict in our modern society,” he added, “or do not inject these matters into it when you are deliberating.” The jury should decide based on what they heard from witnesses and other evidence. If they found that any witness was “knowingly and corruptly” giving false statements, then they had the right to use discretion and disregard that testimony.
In addition, based on evidence and testimony in this case, Caliph Washington fled the scene of the crime, which might suggest guilt. “The law takes up the proposition that the wicked flee, while the innocent is as brave as the lion,” he said. In this case, the jury needed to ask what motivated his flight. Was it guilt? If the flight was caused by “fear for the defendant’s own life,” then a sense of guilt was not present, and it should not be considered as automatic evidence of guilt.
Judge Ball also instructed the jury not to consider the defendant’s previous trials, verdicts, and reversals or how long the defendant was imprisoned. “These are all matters of law,” he added, “and are not your concern.”
When the judge finished his oral charges, and outside the hearing of the jury, U. W. Clemon objected to Ball’s charging the jury not to consider the time Washington had been incarcerated and the number of reversals. “We think that those matters should be considered by the jury,” Clemon said, “if the jury having determined that the defendant is guilty and is choosing between the death penalty or a sentence of life imprisonment.” Ball noted the objection.
The jury retired to the jury room at 3:55 p.m. to consider Caliph Washington’s guilt or innocence in the death of Cowboy Clark. They deliberated for ninety minutes before retiring for the evening. They resumed the next morning, Friday, April 10, at 9 a.m., for more deliberation. With the jury still out, the courtroom took on a festive atmosphere as Washington’s friends and family sensed freedom coming. Speaking with a reporter, Caliph predicted that he would be found “not guilty or something like that” because he had such a strong belief in God. U. W. Clemon said that anything less than freedom for Caliph would bring an appeal.
After over two hours and thirty minutes of deliberating, word came that the jury had reached a verdict. A hush fell over the courtroom. Judge Ball warned the crowd about any emotional outbursts. The jury returned to the jury box. It was 11:30 a.m. The judge then asked Caliph Washington to rise and listen to the verdict.
The foreman of the jury, Peggy Haynes, a white office worker from Hueytown, said, “We the jury, find the defendant guilty of murder in the second degree as charged in the indictment, and we fix his punishment at forty years imprisonment in the penitentiary.”
Caliph showed little emotion.
The spectators sat stunned. A low murmuring of voices echoed through the courtroom. Sheriff’s deputies stepped forward and handcuffed Washington’s wrists behind his back and whisked him from the courtroom.
“Then suddenly,” a newspaper reporter observed, “a cry rocked the small courtroom and a bedlam of emotion broke out.” At least a dozen deputies, some with helmets and night sticks, prevented Washington’s family and friends from following him into the hallways. In a few seconds, with Caliph out of sight, the deputies allowed everyone else to leave. Most of the spectators moved into the corridor just beyond the courtroom doors and stood holding each other and weeping and shouting their opposition to the verdict. “They don’t have any heart,” cried one woman as tears coursed down her face. Another woman fainted on the marble floor and had to be carried away. Caliph’s mother collapsed and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Someone yelled, “Reverend Caliph; my God; he still ain’t dead!”
David Hood was also thankful that Washington was no longer living under the shadow the death penalty—even if this verdict were reversed and he was tried again, a jury was prohibited from sentencing him for anything more than second-degree murder. A confident Orzell Billingsley said, “There’s no doubt we’ll get it reversed. There were too many errors made by the court. It’s just a matter of appealing.”
Judge Ball, however, disagreed. “I took extreme caution to give the defendant as fair and impartial trial as is possible,” he said. “I don’t want it to be reversed and come back on me. I tried to keep it clean of any errors. This in my judgment was done.” The judge, however, seemed saddened that none of Caliph Washington’s previous time served, almost thirteen years, would count against the forty-year sentence. He told a newspaper reporter after the trial that perhaps the Alabama Pardon and Parole Board would look at the case and consider giving him parole. “I think he could probably apply for parole about eight years from now,” Ball said.
A more immediate concern for Judge Ball, however, was the issue of bail for Washington. The judge told a journalist that he believed that forty years was too lengthy a sentence to grant a person bail. Nonetheless, he pledged to set a bond amount, which, given the sentence, would be a large sum of money, but first he would need to consult the other district judges. “I’ve been very liberal with this fellow [Washington],” he said, “but after conviction, it’s a different matter.”
That Friday evening following the verdict, tensions continued to run high. Several of the black jurors reported receiving death threats. Dora Beverly Mauldin, a maid from Bessemer and the only black female on the jury, reported that a woman called and said, “We are going to get you,” and threatened to beat her for issuing that verdict. Mauldin, who endured having her Bessemer home bombed in 1957, remained unflappable. Alfonso Gaston of Fairfield also received a call from a woman who asked if he was a member of the jury that convicted Caliph Washington. When he said, yes, the caller promised to make him pay for what he had done.
On Saturday, the day after the verdict, Judge Ball announced that state law prohibited him from setting bail for Caliph Washington. “I spent the morning today and checked the state statutes,” he said, and discovered that in Alabama, anybody sentenced to more than twenty years cannot be allowed bail. Washington’s ten days of freedom seemed only to make going back to prison that much more difficult.
But Washington would not return to the Jefferson County Jail to await an appeal of the verdict. Immediately following the trial, Judge Ball signed an order transferring him to a state facility. “The court being further informed that the said defendant,” read the order, “has created a security problem . . . and it would be to the best interest of all concerned if said defendant were transferred to the Medical and Diagnostic Center, Mt. Meigs, Alabama, for safe keeping . . . [and] where he shall be confined for the duration of his sentence.”
The Mt. Meigs Medical and Diagnostic Center in Montgomery had just opened in January 1970 as part of the state’s efforts to replace the old Kilby Prison. At Mt. Meigs’s receiving center, Washington was fingerprinted, photographed, and assigned a new number, S-513. His information card listed his height as five feet eight inches and his weight as 250 pounds—seventy-five pounds more than he weighed when he went through the classification center at Kilby at age seventeen. On April 10, 1970, prison officials described the now-thirty-year-old man as having a dark complexion, black hair, brown eyes, and a “very stocky” build.
Perhaps since he was deemed a “security problem,” Mt. Meigs officials placed Caliph in a quarantine cell. On Monday, April 13, 1970, he expressed his feelings of frustration and isolation in a prayer that he wrote out in the form of a letter:
Dear Jesus, I write this letter to you, because, I am away from my beloved back home, and “oh God!” how I’ll like to be back in their presence. I miss the cheer of your spirit which worketh within each of them. Jesus, send me home with them again to stay, and to carry thou word to all that you wish for me to. I do remember the dream dear Jesus, where you showed me about this very thing, and I did not tell anyone until it happened. But I should had, because, it make people think you are not just, when you are the only true God to us all. I know Lord that you has saved me out of all of my trouble. I only fear you dear Jesus. My many praise are to you for the being so wonderful to me. I have enjoyed the short stay you given me for I know in due time it shall be long. Bless all that trust in you and are praying for your children. Help us Jesus in all we do. Set me free dear Jesus, for you said that anything I shall ask in your name you would do it. So this is my plea, and stand by me. Your beloved son and servant, Rev. Caliph Washington.
Three days later, on April 16, Washington wrote to Ralph Galt and complained about the isolation. He could not understand why they sent him to Mt. Meigs right after the trial, so far away from his family and friends. “They told me it was for safekeeping,” he wrote. “I don’t like it here at all, because, I can’t write like I want to or nothing.” He hoped that his attorneys could get him out on bond or moved back to the jail or anywhere but where he was. “But the attorneys has [sic] worked so slow on this case,” he wrote. “I only hope they shall put some speed on now.” Even so, Caliph said he had his trust in God and he had faith that “all things will work out well soon.”
On April 20, prison officials removed Washington from his quarantine and placed him in cell A-23 in the A Cellblock. The prison floor commander told the guards to not let the “subject . . . out of his cell for any reason” and to carry all meals to him in A-23. Caliph could never leave the cell unless a request was approved by warden Glen Thompson, Captain W. L. Trawick, or associate warden Joseph E. Bonnett. Ironically, in 1957, Bonnett was the guard at Kilby who processed Washington when he first came to the prison.
Even outside solitary, Caliph was unhappy with the conditions of the new facility—cold food, dirty clothing and linens, no exercise, and poor medical treatment. Mt. Meigs was a new prison, but many of the guards remained surly and cruel. He and his fellow inmates wrote a letter to state officials requesting that the board make significant changes in the procedures. “It is very difficult to eat cold grits,” they wrote, “and no one enjoys a cold meal and later a hot drink.” Associate warden Bonnett wrote that Caliph and the other inmates in this cellblock enjoyed “stirring things up” and that the prison had more than its fair share of the state’s most incorrigible prisoners. “I believe,” he added, “that there exists a ‘hard core’ of agitators” in this area. Despite these observations, Bonnett improved the living conditions in the cellblock and ensured that prisoners had hot food, clean clothes, towels, and sheets, outdoor exercise, and frequent medical visits. For Caliph it was a small civil rights victory behind the walls of an Alabama prison.
Nonetheless, while he adjusted to these new surroundings at Mt. Meigs, his lawyers filed notice of appeal with the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals—the same court that denied his habeas corpus writ in 1969.