A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [53]
“Counsel, state yo’ names for the recud,” said the judge in a deep southern drawl rich with history and tobacco.
“Deval Patrick for the petitioner,” I said, my voice cracking.
“All right then, Mr. Patrick, hold on an’ let me hear who’s representin’ the State of Alabama.”
When the assistant attorney general of Alabama identified himself, the judge replied warmly, “Hey there, Ed, how you doin’?”
Oh, brother! I thought. I’m in trouble.
The judge opened the hearing by asking me directly, “Now then, Mr. Patrick, don’t you just think there are some people who ought to die?”
“Well, Your Honor, we all will someday,” I said. “But this proceeding is about whether his trial was fair.”
The judge granted the stay. Our client was within hours of the death chamber by then, having had his last meal and his head shaved (which avoids the unpleasant odor of burning hair at electrocution). The judge even allowed us discovery so the defense team could have access to the prosecutor’s files. There we found a sworn statement from an eyewitness positively identifying another man as the killer. Either it had been withheld from the court-appointed defense counsel or it had been disclosed and never used by counsel to build a defense. Either way, my client’s constitutional rights had been violated. His conviction and sentence were vacated, and he was granted a new trial.
I had so many cases like this one that I was finally persuaded that there are certain things the government just does not do well. Making irreversible decisions about life and death is one of them.
Voting rights cases lacked the grisly tension of a death-row case, but they were still momentous, and in my three years at LDF, no case drew more interest than a notorious voting rights trial in Selma, Alabama. The year was 1985, and President Reagan’s Justice Department accused three civil rights leaders of voting fraud. The case centered on the actions of Albert Turner, an iconic figure in the civil rights movement. He had been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s top lieutenant in Alabama in the 1960s and had helped to organize the march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965. On that fateful day, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” Turner had been on the Edmund Pettus Bridge when Alabama state troopers bludgeoned and teargassed the civil rights marchers trying to make their way to Montgomery.
Three years later, after Dr. King was killed, Turner had also been part of the funeral procession, leading one of the mules that pulled the wagon to the Atlanta gravesite.
Turner had tried to keep his mentor’s dream alive by leading a successful voter registration drive in rural Perry County. Maybe too successful. African Americans had become a strong political voting bloc in Perry County and throughout the state’s “black belt,” effectively controlling seven of the ten predominantly black counties. At issue was the casting of absentee ballots, which whites had long used and now so too were blacks using. Indeed, with so many black sharecroppers unable to get to the polls on Election Day, absentee ballots had become essential to their electoral participation and success.
The more I learned about the case, the more outraged I became. Albert Turner deserved far better. He had a degree from Alabama A&M, but he would hide that fact when reaching out to the community because he didn’t want to appear to be placing himself above less educated residents. He just wanted them to participate in their government. Most of them were elderly, some were frail, but all remembered a time in their own adult lifetimes when they had been persecuted for voting or intimidated for trying. Turner helped them to overcome those memories and urged them to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
Federal prosecutors charged Turner, his wife, Evelyn, and a friend, Spencer