Anatomy of Injustice Read online

  Then came Elizabeth Pinson, fifty-five years old.

  Have you formed an opinion about this case? Judge Burnett asked.

  Just about everyone had, she said. It was a revealing observation about the press coverage of the murder and the chances of Elmore getting a fair trial. More candor and insight followed. Do you feel like you could give Edward Lee Elmore a fair and impartial trial? Beasley asked. “I feel that I have an obligation to the people that I know real well who are terrified because of this, and I think if I were on the jury, they would expect me to feel for all of them who were close to her and who saw the situation and who—and whose lives did change because of this.”

  Did she believe in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Beasley asked.

  “I’m not a vindictive person, but I still—I feel some obligation to the little old ladies of the community.”

  Beasley argued to Judge Burnett that given these views, Mrs. Pinson could hardly be a fair and impartial juror, and asked that she be disqualified. Burnett declined to do so. Beasley exercised another preemptory challenge.

  The defense had only one left when Joseph Chalmers was called. He looked like a good juror for the defense: Methodist and one of the most educated members of the jury pool, with a BS in industrial engineering from Clemson, ’49. He lived in the fashionable Belle Meade neighborhood, a couple of miles from Melrose Terrace.

  Anderson asked him if he had read about the case.

  Yes.

  Had that caused him to form an opinion?

  His answer reinforced what Mrs. Pinson had said. “Well, the newspapers pretty much put the facts on you,” he said, “that they’d found the guilty person, and certainly I went ahead and believed that.”

  Still, Anderson accepted Chalmers for the jury; by virtue of his education and religion, he might vote for a life sentence rather than execution. Chalmers was sent off to wait while the jury selection continued.

  The process of selecting a jury had already been long and taxing when forty-seven-year-old Augustus Covington was called. Would you be prejudiced against the State of South Carolina or the solicitor because they asked for the death penalty? Judge Burnett asked Covington, as he had other potential jurors.

  “I wouldn’t be prejudiced, but I don’t approve of no death penalty,” Covington answered.

  “You do not approve of the death penalty?” Burnett repeated.

  Covington answered with a shake of his head.

  “My religion teach me, the Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

  Mere opposition to the death penalty wasn’t enough by itself to disqualify Covington from serving. In a landmark case, Witherspoon v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court held that an Illinois statute allowing the prosecution to remove a potential juror who had “conscientious scruples against capital punishment” was unconstitutional. A jury should reflect a cross-section of the community, and in every community there are individuals who oppose capital punishment, the court said. Only if a potential juror said that under no circumstances could he impose the death penalty could he be removed for cause, the court ruled.

  Judge Burnett had to probe further.

  “If the evidence in the case and the law supports the death penalty, could you bring back a recommendation of death by electrocution for this defendant?” Burnett asked Covington.

  “No, I don’t—I don’t see—I don’t approve of the death. The Bible says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

  “So, no matter what the evidence and no matter what the law is, as I understand you, you could not recommend that this defendant be sentenced to death?”

  “No, sir. My mother didn’t teach this.”

  After more questions, Judge Burnett decided that Covington should not sit on the jury. He dismissed three others because they were opposed to capital punishment.

  One juror was still to be selected when the bailiff notified Judge Burnett that Mr. Chalmers wanted to speak to him. He was brought back into the courtroom. He’d neglected to tell the court something when he’d been questioned earlier. “Selma Jones is a very close friend,” he now told Burnett. “She is my daughter’s closest friend.”

  Not only was Selma the solicitor’s daughter, but the twenty-six-year-old was right there in the courtroom, at the counsel table, sitting next to her father. She was the assistant prosecutor.

  William T. Jones didn’t think a thing like personal friendship should keep someone off the jury. “This is a small community,” he told Judge Burnett. “As a matter of fact, we all feel pretty close; even when we square off in battle we feel pretty close, Judge.” To disqualify Chalmers because of his daughter’s friendship with Selma “would be prejudicial to the state,” Jones argued. Burnett ruled that he would not disqualify Chalmers.

  It took two days to pick the jury of five men and seven women, two of whom were black. The foreman was a thirty-two-year-old assistant treasurer at Greenwood Savings and Loan, James Sherrer. He was a member of South Main Baptist Church, and agreed with the biblical injunction “an eye for an eye.” While in the army in Vietnam, he “killed five or six, I don’t know,” he said during the voir dire.

  Jury selection ended at 7:45 p.m., and SLED agents then escorted each juror to his or her home to pick up clothes and toiletries, and then to the Holiday Inn, a few miles away. Telephones and televisions were removed from the rooms.

  THE OPENING STATEMENTS

  “IS THE STATE READY?” Judge Burnett asked on Wednesday morning.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” said Jones.

  It was time for opening statements. The state goes first. It is the opportunity for the prosecution to lay out the state’s case, to alert jurors to what is coming, making it easier for them to follow the evidence as it is presented. A prosecutor has wide latitude in the opening argument, as does the defense counsel when his turn comes. He must only be careful not to promise the jury something that he does not later deliver; he has to be careful, that is, if the defense lawyer is alert.

  Jones was to the courtroom born. He was theatrical and damn good. He would cry. He would pound on the heavy wooden counsel table so hard it would jump. As would the jurors. He carried a pocketknife. While making an argument, he’d pull it out and begin cleaning his nails, glaring at the defendant, his back to the judge and jury. He limped, telling the jury that as a child his family had been so poor that his diet had been deficient in calcium and one of his legs was deformed. Even his own children weren’t sure if this was true or a bit of the lore around the man; his limp was noticeably less pronounced when he wasn’t in front of a jury.

  Jones was said to have prosecuted more cases than any man in South Carolina history. He was livid if he lost, and he rarely did. “When it came to prosecuting a case, nobody could touch William T. Jones,” the South Carolina General Assembly declared in a tribute when Jones died in 1998, at the age of seventy-six. “He will long be remembered as a master at courtroom rhetoric—many a legal opponent learned that the hard way,” the homage read. “They dreaded having to match wits and wisdom with him, and the records show why.” William Townes Jones suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease; one of the finest orators in the South lost his voice before dying.

  The courtroom was crowded as Jones gave his opening statement. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, a narrow tie, and shoes that looked like they needed a polish. The courtroom spectators were noticeably divided by race throughout the trial. On the right, behind the prosecution table, sat Mrs. Edwards’s neighbors and friends from the Episcopal church, as well as police officers and ordinary citizens, all white. They easily outnumbered Elmore’s supporters—his mother, sisters, and brothers, along with Elmore’s pastor, Rev. Emanuel Spearman, and members of his Mt. Olive Baptist Church. Some members were afraid to come to the trial, however. “The Klan is gonna blow your ass up,” a member of the congregation told him. When Spearman’s support for Elmore became known around Greenwood, the white owner of the restaurant where he had been eating breakfast regularly for more
than a year—a member of his congregation was a cook there—told him he was no longer welcome.

  An easel had been set up. It held four sketches of Mrs. Edwards’s house, drawn to scale for Jones by Susan Smith, a city employee. He walked to the easel and, using a pointer, meticulously led the jurors through the state’s case, room by room. This is the carport, this is the back step, this is the kitchen, this is the stove, this is the sink, he said, moving his pointer as he talked. He presented a blowup of the back door and kitchen. The crime had begun there, he said. He pointed to a drawing of the needle-nose pliers, of the partial denture, of the tongs sticking out of the drawer. He took that one down and put up a drawing of the bedroom. His pointer moved to the bed. “And in this area, we will attempt to show this: that there were found fifty-three hairs,” Jones told the jurors. He paused dramatically. “During this trial, may I say that I hope we’re not too timid to deal with talking about exactly what we have to talk about, such as pubic hairs, and all of that.” That gave the jurors something to anticipate—pubic hairs on the victim’s bed?

  Jones orated and exhorted for an hour, without a note.

  What a performance, thought Ed Eubanks, a young law student from nearby Abbeville who had come specifically to observe Jones. Reading the newspapers at the time of the crime and Elmore’s arrest, Eubanks had no doubt Elmore was guilty. After listening to Jones, Eubanks thought, “Hell, he could convince me that I did it.”

  Jones began calling his witnesses, starting with the policemen and SLED investigators—Holtzclaw, Cook, Owen, Johnson, Parnell, DeFreese. Collectively, they told the jury how they were called to 209 Melrose Terrace on Monday, January 18; how they had found Holloway there; how he had told them he had gone to check on his neighbor because he saw her car in the driveway when he thought she was going to be out of town. When Jimmy Holloway was on the stand, answering Jones’s questions, he verbally walked the jurors through the house, just as he physically had led the police officers: denture and needle-nose pliers on the kitchen floor, coffeemaker set for 6:00 a.m., ringing alarm clock in Mrs. Edwards’s bedroom, blood in the bathroom, Mrs. Edwards stuffed into the closet. Anderson hadn’t interviewed Holloway.

  Serologist John Barron, who had worked at SLED for eight years, was called to the stand. Answering questions from Jones, he testified that he had found only five small spots of blood on the blue jeans that had been taken from Elmore’s room. Three were type A, Mrs. Edwards’s blood type. Elmore had type B blood, Barron told the jury. He had tested scrapings from the bottle tongs: type A. He had tested scrapings from under Mrs. Edwards’s fingernails. All he found was her blood.

  When SLED agent DeFreese was on the stand, the state’s case unexpectedly headed toward a constitutional derailment. Jones asked him about the fingerprint he found at the back door and how it had been linked to Elmore. Anderson objected: DeFreese should not be permitted to testify about this because the police had not had probable cause to arrest Elmore. Judge Burnett sent the jury out.

  Jones was in trouble. It was arguable that a single fingerprint and a canceled check did not constitute probable cause to arrest Elmore, given that he had worked for Mrs. Edwards. Jones explained there was more. “Your Honor, I would like to state for the record for the edification of counsel for the defense that I was in court on the nineteenth when Captain Coursey came to me.” Coursey told him that Dr. Conradi had found “Negroid hair” on the victim’s body, Jones went on. “Putting all that together, I gave the advice to Captain Coursey that he had sufficient grounds for probable cause to issue the warrant against Edward L. Elmore.” Coursey had never mentioned this “Negroid hair” when he had sought an arrest warrant from the magistrate.

  Jones did not introduce it into evidence. In reaching its verdict, a jury may only consider matters that have been admitted into evidence by the judge. This requires the introducing party to demonstrate the item’s authenticity and establish that it has not been tampered with. In this case, Jones would have had to have Dr. Conradi testify that she had in fact found a “Negroid hair,” that she had placed it in a baggie of some kind, and that the baggie Jones was seeking to introduce was that one. Jones was spared having to do any of this, because Anderson did not ask to see the “Negroid hair.”

  Burnett was satisfied there had been probable cause to arrest Elmore, and the jury was called back in.

  The jury was now arranged differently. All the women jurors were in the second row. Those who had been in the front row had asked to be moved. They didn’t want to sit so close to Jones; they had been frightened by his dramatic outbursts. Once, he kicked his briefcase.

  DeFreese was still on the stand. Jones asked him about the fingerprints he had found at the scene. None were found on the needle-nose pliers, or on the chipped ashtray, or on the paring knife, or on the bottle tongs. Altogether, he testified, he had found six fingerprints, only three of which had enough ridge detail for comparison purposes: one of these was found by the back door and was Elmore’s; a second was on the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room, and that belonged to Mrs. Edwards; and the third, a palm print, was found on the top of the toilet.

  Strikingly few for a crime scene, DeFreese agreed. The only explanation was that “Mrs. Edwards, or whoever kept her house, was a very meticulous housekeeper. The place was extremely clean and extremely neat.”

  Jones finished with DeFreese. Anderson’s cross-examination was brief, mostly about the method DeFreese had used to lift and compare the prints. Even if Mrs. Edwards had cleaned before the perpetrator arrived, the house would certainly not have been “extremely clean and extremely neat,” with so few fingerprints, after the struggle that had ensued. And how did she manage to remove the fingerprints from the tongs in the kitchen drawer, from the coffeemaker, and from all the doors, walls, and other surfaces she surely would have touched while trying to escape?

  It was early evening when DeFreese stepped off the stand. It had been a long day, but Burnett wanted to keep going. After a ten-minute recess, Jones called Dr. Conradi. She had reached Greenwood after a harrowing journey from Charleston, where she taught at the Medical University of South Carolina. A SLED agent had picked her up, and even before they were out of the parking lot, he turned on his siren as well as the blue light on top of the car. Soon they were hurtling along at a hundred miles an hour. When they had to go through towns, he drove on sidewalks to get around traffic. Apparently, it was all for show: when they reached Newberry, thirty miles east of Greenwood, the SLED agent said he was hungry and they stopped at McDonald’s.

  THE PATHOLOGIST

  TELL THE JURY what a forensic pathologist is, Jones began his questioning of Conradi. “A forensic pathologist is really a medical-slash-legal pathologist, who examines bodies that died of unnatural types of death,” she answered. A smallish woman, forty-four years old, Conradi was a transplanted New Yorker who had moved to South Carolina with her doctor husband in 1973. Jones asked her to describe the injuries that had been inflicted on Mrs. Edwards. Anderson objected. Dr. Conradi should simply state the cause of death. The gruesome detail about the injuries was solely intended to arouse the passion of the jury, he argued. Judge Burnett said Jones could go on.

  Conradi was clinical. “There was, involving her lower left leg, bruising at the knee in an area one point two by point eight inch in dimension, and there was patchy bruising of the inner aspect of the left calf, also blue in color, in an area two by two inches. Examination of the right leg revealed bruising of the right knee and the right lower leg, bluish and reddish purple in color, and medial, or in the inner aspect of the right knee, and also the right lower leg. On the front of the shin of the right lower leg was a cut, or laceration, measuring a third of an inch in length, and lateral to that on the outer aspect of that, about a half inch additional abrading, which is scraping away of the skin, with a band of intervening superficial purplish abrading. In other words, between the cut, or laceration, and the abrasion was an initial abrasion. And those, bas
ically, were the injuries to the legs.”

  Mrs. Edwards had thirty-three wounds on her chest, abdomen, and back, Conradi testified. Two-thirds “were red-based and were obviously a premortem injury,” she said.

  “So you are saying that approximately twenty-two of them were administered before death and approximately eleven of them after death?” Jones said, reinforcing to jurors the notion of how vicious Elmore was to keep beating her after she was dead. Jones was playing to the jurors’ guts and emotions, not their intellects. He was looking ahead. Confident the jury would convict Elmore, Jones was implanting the horror of what had happened, the brutality, so that the jury would impose the death penalty. It was the strategy of any good prosecutor.

  “Your Honor, I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Anderson said, rising. “It’s plainly calculated to inflame the jury.”

  Overruled. It was relevant to the issue of malice, Burnett said. As a legal matter, in order for Elmore to be convicted of murder, and therefore subject to the death penalty, Jones would have to prove that Elmore had acted with malice; the killing of a person without malice is the lesser crime of manslaughter.

  Thirteen of Mrs. Edwards’s ribs had been broken, Dr. Conradi told the jury. There were two stab wounds behind the left ear, made with a sharp instrument, such as a knife. “Or even pointed-nose, needle-nose pliers could have produced injuries such as that,” she said. Mrs. Edwards had thirty-three “small injuries” on her chest and abdomen, she testified. “By small, I mean up to two point five inches in length, but generally about a third of an inch in length.”

  On the back of the body there were nineteen injuries, again most of them one-third of an inch. None of the stabs hit an artery or vein. Altogether, there were fifty-two wounds, most of them no more than a third of an inch deep. That was curious, since most killers slashed their victims, leaving long, deep gashes. This did not sound like the work of a person who had gone to rob, rape, and murder Mrs. Edwards. What’s more, most of the injuries had been inflicted by the bottle tongs, which measured slightly over a third of an inch in width, according to Dr. Conradi. The killer, whoever it was, seemed to have an obsession with the tongs. He used them to kill the victim and then carefully put them in the kitchen drawer after cleaning them of fingerprints. That, too, was odd.