As survivors struggled to find meaning in their madness, the Hebrew Scriptures sprang to life.

In Lamentations, we see the first step in the process — a bewildered outpouring of honest pain. In Jeremiah, we see a link between religion and social justice forged. Now we come to Ezekiel.

Marvin Tate, one of my seminary professors, introduced Ezekiel as “the weirdo of the Old Testament.” Ezekiel was weird. He built a little model of Jerusalem, complete with siegeworks, to demonstrate what was in store for the Holy City. Then, he spent more than a year laying on his left side to signify the 390 years of Israel’s sin; then he laid on his right side to dramatize the 40 years of Judah’s apostasy.

Weird religion

Ezekiel’s brand of religion also was weird. He started out a temple priest in Jerusalem, one of the sons of Zadok who were trained from birth in a priestly tradition that, to modern ears, sounds pretty weird.

But Ezekiel’s priestly responsibilities ended when the Babylonians breached the walls of Jerusalem in 597 BCE. King Jehoiachin and his royal retinue were bundled off to Babylon, a fate shared by the sons of Zadok. Separated from their precious temple, Zadokites like Ezekiel were out of work.

Then Yahweh gave him a new job, standing on the walls of Jerusalem, scanning the horizon for signs of danger. But how could a man in Babylonian exile stand sentinel on the walls of Jerusalem?

This is where the visions come in. As Ezekiel sat with his fellow exiles by the river Chebar, he was transported in the Spirit to the Holy City. There he saw a fiery throne-chariot of Yahweh, the one with the faces and the whirling wheels “way up in the middle of the air.” As Ezekiel looked on aghast, Yahweh rode his chariot-throne out of the temple and away from Jerusalem. It was Ichabod time. The glory had departed.

From that point on, Ezekiel lived a double life. Physically, he was with the exiles in Babylon; but his spiritual habitation was on the walls of Jerusalem, standing as a watchman, or sentinel.

The Babylonian army eventually withdrew from Jerusalem, leaving a small force behind to keep order. Life quickly returned to normal. Solomon’s temple was still standing, and the Levites (formerly temple servants) assumed the role of the exiled Zadokites. Word had it that the Babylonian army was gone for good.

Ezekiel knew better. Since Yahweh had vacated the premises, nothing stood between the Holy City and unmitigated disaster. Ezekiel preached but no one listened. Why should they? Everyone knew Ezekiel was a weirdo.

So, Yahweh confined his prophet to quarters. The prophet didn’t utter another word until a fugitive from Jerusalem arrived with the awful news, “The city has fallen.”

Suddenly, Ezekiel’s tongue was loosed. A glorious future lay ahead, the prophet declared, but there would be no going back to the old ways. In the old temple, the sacrifices offered to the cruel gods of the surrounding nations had turned the hearts of the people to stone. But Yahweh was about to gather all his exiled people, from Babylon, from the old Assyrian Empire, and from Egypt. Yahweh, the thoracic surgeon, would “remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.”

Then things got even weirder. Ezekiel was scooped up by the hand of the Lord and plopped down in a valley of dry bones representing “the whole house of Israel.” All Yahweh’s exile children were like Hebrew slaves wandering in the desert. But Yahweh was about to reunite the 12 tribes of Israel.

Yahweh is going back to square one. New bodies, new hearts, new spirit, new creation.

In the final section of Ezekiel, the priest-prophet is carried off to a high mountain where, weirdly, he is introduced to the city where Yahweh dwells. A tour guide-angel familiarizes the prophet with every inch of Yahweh’s temple in the clouds. We tend to find these passages tedious (and weird), but the priest-prophet can’t get enough of this stuff.

Then Ezekiel notices a tiny rivulet of water trickling under the temple door. As Ezekiel and his angel guide move east from the temple, the water gets progressively deeper, until the prophet is swimming in a mighty river. When the river of life reaches the Dead Sea, the lifeless lake brims with sea creatures. And wherever the river flows, a desiccated landscape blossoms.

If stony hearts turned Eden into a wasteland; people with hearts of flesh are agents of healing.

What would Ezekiel say to us?

Imagine that Ezekiel was standing sentinel on the walls of America. What would he see, and what would he say?

Would he tell us that our headlong pursuit of a high-tech Eden is trashing God’s good creation?

I just finished reading Brian McLaren’s Life After Doom, a book about faith and the climate crisis. Although McLaren isn’t sure what our planet’s immediate future will look like, all the potential scenarios he lays out are bleak.

Unlike America’s other moral failures, global warming is a relatively recent phenomenon. The human saga will stagger forward whether or not we address ancient sins like racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia. But misreading the climate crisis is like misreading the threat posed by Babylon — it has the power to end our story for good.

The United States of America is currently drilling, consuming and exporting more fossil fuel than at any time in history. But conservative politicians insist it’s not enough. The Trump campaign wants to scrap renewable energy projects and sees drill-baby-drill as the path to American greatness. Disturbing stuff.

And then I flip on a podcast and hear a progressive policy wonk advocating more oil production so, with gas prices low, Joe Biden will have a better shot in November.

In short, nobody in Washington is taking the climate crisis seriously. Are you? Climate scientists are alarmed, and advocacy groups are issuing dire projections, but they aren’t the people making policy decisions. Shifting to renewable forms of energy, electric cars and battery-operated lawnmowers (the kind of measures Biden supports) are steps in the right direction, but these changes will not, by themselves, stave off catastrophe. Our way of life is unsustainable.

But wouldn’t Ezekiel come up with something more spiritual than climate science?

No, he wouldn’t.

First, we must remember that biblical prophets make no distinction between economic sin and false worship. For them, it’s all of a piece.

Second, the contemporary equivalent of Nebuchadnezzar’s army is the climate crisis. Reduced to its simplest terms, we have released so much carbon dioxide into the air in our pursuit of economic growth and creature comforts that the survival of our race is at risk. Our addiction to prosperity is killing us.

Ezekiel would tell us that idolatry (the worship of prosperity) has turned our hearts to stone. He would call us to bow down before the Creator of all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.

How would we respond? Like ancient Judah, we would call Ezekiel a weirdo and go about our business. We would glue his tongue to the roof of his mouth until the day our city falls. Only then would he be able to prophesy over our dry bones.

When Solomon’s temple was reduced to rubble, the people of Judah were finally ready to listen to their weird prophet. The game was over and everyone knew it.

By contrast, climate change creeps upon us imperceptibly. Every year is hotter than the last. Extreme climate events become more common. But we have AC, and sometimes the weather cooperates. Even if Greta Thunberg is right, we tell ourselves, the worst won’t come until after we’re gone. How bad do things have to get before preachers climb up on the wall with Ezekiel?

Ezekiel realized his weirdo status came with his calling. It still does. Preachers are cautious creatures, and for good reason. But imagine that 20 pastors in your town climbed up on the wall with Ezekiel and started speaking honestly about the threats we face. And imagine that their congregations found the courage to listen. Can’t you see those tiny trickles of living water merging into a healing river?

Sounds weird, I know. But the truth always has a weird ring to it.

On August 3, 2023, David Black experienced his first taste of freedom in 26 years.  David was convicted in December of 1997 of accidently killing a 78-year-old Asian woman on K Street in Washington, DC.  According to the government, Black’s real target was his friend, James (“June Bug”) Smith.  If David committed such a heinous crime, twenty-six years in prison sounds about right.  Many would argue that such a criminally dangerous individual should never return to society.

David Black owes his freedom to the Second Look Amendment Act of 2019 (officially known as the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, or IRAA).  Criminal justice advocates have long argued that offenders who commit crimes in their teens and early twenties deserve a second look because it has been conclusively demonstrated that the male brain doesn’t mature until 24 or 25 years of age. 

It’s true.  Criminal activity rises sharply during from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties, then drops like a rock.  Most criminal careers end well before the age of thirty.  If incarceration is viewed as a form of rehabilitation, many young offenders who have spent two decades in prison no longer pose a serious threat to society.  If the draconian sentences they received back in the day are far from over, a reduced sentence is appropriate so long as candidates are carefully screened. 

If you see incarceration primarily as a form of punishment (which prosecutors tend to do) the case for early release is easily dismissed.  The fact that an inmate has a relatively clean disciplinary record, has taken advantage of educational opportunities, and is highly regarded by prison staff, matters little to do-the-crime-do-the-time conservatives.

Felony crimes committed in the nation’s capital are prosecuted in the federal system, and the Second Look program is limited to this single jurisdiction.  Like David Black, most of the offenders being considered for early release were convicted of horrendous crimes of violence.  Attorneys representing the government appear to resent the Second Look process.  If a jury believed a crime deserved forty-years-to-life, they reason, that verdict should stand.  Without exception, government attorneys oppose early release applications regardless of circumstance.

When Mr. Black got his day in court, attorneys representing the government argued he should spend another five years behind bars before being considered for parole.  David’s disciplinary record was exemplary, but he had been convicted of a terrible crime.  Moreover, he has proclaimed his innocence from the day he was arrested in March of 1997.  From a prosecutorial perspective, anyone who claims innocence after being arrested, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced is accusing the government of major malfeasance. They take it as an insult.

But the Second Look Act was framed by criminal justice reform advocates, people who believe the system can break down.  Men and women are wrongfully convicted every day.   And every wrongful conviction represents a perfect storm of incompetence and indifference.  There’s no polite way to put it.

When David called me up a few days ago, he wasn’t giddy with excitement.  He was having a hard time celebrating his freedom, he said, because, in the eyes of the world, he was still the guy who mowed down an elderly Asian community activist in broad daylight.  “I can’t breathe easy,” he told me, “until I clear my name.  You can’t imagine what it’s like sitting there in the courtroom hearing all these people lying about you.  And then you have to sit in a prison cell for twenty-six years knowing that you didn’t do the crime.  My goal has never been to get out of prison; I want to prove my innocence.  That’s what I’m thinking about when I go to bed, and that’s my first thought when I wake up in the morning.”

To date, I have published eight posts related to the wrongful conviction of David Black.  If you want to take a deep dive into the details, you can find it all here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  In this piece, I will just be hitting the high points.  In conclusion, I will address the elephant in the room: if David didn’t shoot Alice Chow, who did?

Doubling down on a mistake

Our earliest account of what happened at approximately 2 pm on February 2, 1997 comes from the Washington Post.  Immediately after the sound of gunfire shattered a pleasant Sunday afternoon, eye witnesses saw a Black man chasing another Black man across K Street.  Having little else to work with, investigators took hold of this morsel of information and built a case around it.  There was a shooter and a runner; and the shooter must have been aiming at the runner.  All the police had to do to solve the crime was to identify the shooter and the runner.  Simple as that.

Moments after the shooting, and at trial, street witnesses told a simple story.  It was quickly determined that the runner was Darrell Haskell, a disabled military veteran, wearing his old military fatigues, who had been running errands for elderly residents.  The man chasing Haskell was Christopher Stargill, an assistant pastor with the Lilly Memorial Baptist Church.  The story never changed.  Haskell crossed K street and ran into the parking lot behind the Museum One Apartments, a high-rise complex dominating the corner of 4^th and K Streets (you’ll see a diagram in a minute or two). 

When Reverend Stargill realized that police officers were on the scene, he abandoned his chase and told them everything he knew.  He had heard a shot, he saw a man fleeing the scene, he gave chase.  A few moments later, Darrell Haskell was apprehended in an apartment on the third floor of the Museum One apartment complex.  After several hours of interrogation at police headquarters, investigators concluded that Haskell had no connection to the shooting.  He was released.

Yet the shooter-runner story lived on.

A complete disconnect between theory and testimony

According to the theory of the crime advanced at trial, the incident began with David Black and James (“June Bug”) Smith shouting at each other on K Street.  They were standing on the driver’s side of a blue compact car that was parked immediately across the street from Lilly Memorial Baptist Church.  Jurors learned that when June Bug took off running, Black ran to the passenger’s door of the car, took a pistol from the glove compartment, and fired two shots in the general direction of a fleeing June Bug.  One of these shots struck Alice Chow as she crossed K street on her way home from church. 

Jurors also heard from three women who were standing on the sidewalk just across from where the raucous argument between Black and June Bug was supposedly taking place.  They didn’t see a blue car.  They didn’t see David Black.  They didn’t see June Bug running even though, if the government’s story had him passing within ten feet of them.  This diagram should give you a feel for the crime scene. The building that borders 4th and K Streets is the Museum One apartment complex.

n this diagram, the blue circle represents the position of the blue car from where, the fatal shot was allegedly fired.  The large arrow illustrates the direction of June Bug’s flight.  The blue star marks the position of the three women who were standing outside the Baptist church.  The thin arrow at the crosswalk shows where Darrell Haskell crossed K Street (and where, according to the government’s theory of the crime, Alice Chow was located when the bullet struck her).  The blue X shows were street witnesses and police officer testimony placed Ms. Chow at the time of death.  Finally, the  symbol (upper right) marks the position of apartment 305 where Darrell Haskell was eventually apprehended.  (Notice that the Museum One building borders both K and 4^th Streets.)

At trial, the three women standing outside Lilly Memorial Church, and all the police officers who witnessed the crime scene, insisted that Ms. Chow fell approximately 30 feet from where the women were conversing, at least 200 feet from where the official account placed her.

The prosecutor told the jury that the victim was crossing at the crosswalk.  It was the only way to explain how a bullet fired from the victim’s right side could enter the left side of her chest.  When a prosecutor ignores the unanimous testimony of his own witnesses to make his theory of the crime work, we have a problem.  When Ms. Chow died, the worship service she attended that morning had been over for an hour and a half.  She wasn’t walking home from church; she was walking to the community center.  We know this because she went there every day.  This explains why the street witnesses all have her walking west toward 5^th street. 

David Black becomes a suspect

James “June Bug” Smith told a grand jury that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime on February 2^nd.  Therefore, he couldn’t have been beefing with David Black.  At the moment he learned David Black had been arrested, June Bug told the prosecutor, he realized a terrible mistake had been made.  David Black and June Bug both lived in Sursum Corda, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood located a couple of blocks east of the crime scene.  Early in the investigation, police had asked June Bug if he knew anyone who drove a blue compact car.  He mentioned a guy who went by the nickname “Black”.  That was his nickname, not his surname.  June Bug explained to the prosecutor that he definitely wasn’t referring to David Black.

When investigators searched their database for a guy living in Sursum Corda named “Black”, David’s name popped up.  Most of the young men from that neighborhood passed through a phase when they were either using crack cocaine, selling it, or both.  David was a seller; June Bug was a user.  This helps explain why investigators weren’t bending over backwards to protect David’s civil rights.  It also explains why they didn’t apologize when, in a failed attempt to arrest David, they broke down the door of the wrong home.  A woman who was terrorized by the incident sued the police department, but the case was dismissed.  Apparently, no one who lived in Sursum Corda deserved an apology.

The prosecutor ignored June Bug’s clarification.  Everyone knew that residents of Sursum Corda couldn’t be trusted.  Which is why neither the prosecutor nor the jury believed David’s family members when they testified that David had been at a birthday party when the shooting happened. 

Once the police had identified both the runner and the shooter, they just needed to find eye witnesses, and that’s where the investigation really went off the rails.

A police-generated story

Eventually, the lead investigator in the case found two witnesses who were willing to identify James “June Bug” Smith as the runner and David Black as the shooter.  Larry Johnson and Barbara Marshall both testified at trial that they had seen Rob (David’s nickname) and June Bug beefing across the street from Lilly Memorial Baptist Church.  Both witnesses saw June Bug take off running, and watched as Rob fetched a pistol from the blue car and fired it in June Bug’s direction.  Five minutes later, Black got into the blue car and drove away.

Neither Larry Johnson nor Barbara Marshall volunteered this information to the police.  Instead, the police described the scene for their witnesses and simply asked Larry and Barbara to corroborate their theory.

Both witnesses had lived in and around Sursum Corda for several years.  Court documents make clear that Larry and Barbara were both crack users.  Larry’s erratic behavior got him banned from the Museum One Apartments several days before the incident.  This meant he was in the building illegally.  In addition, Larry was facing a laundry list of criminal charges and had missed a series of court dates.  Records indicate that Larry Johnson approached the police in the immediate wake of the crime.  His motivation is obvious.  He was hoping to swap information for lenient treatment. 

Unfortunately, Larry had nothing of substance to offer the police.  Realizing that the police had already bought into the runner-shooter theory, Larry identified June Bug as the runner. On the day of the crime, he fingered Darrell Haskell (the man in military fatigues who was running errands) as the shooter.  But when the police decided Haskell wasn’t their man, Larry Johnson placed the gun in the hands of several other Sursum Corda residents.  Police weren’t having it.

Although their sole witness was a wanted criminal who couldn’t open his mouth without telling another lie, the chief investigator in the case kept him out of jail.  Instead, Larry was placed in a halfway house designed for inmates serving the final months of their sentences.   Larry spent every evening in the halfway house, but was free to wander during the day. In theory, this was so Larry could spend his days digging up useful information.

Just as the chief investigator was about to cut Larry loose, June Bug told the police about a guy named “Black” who drove a blue car.  When David Black was arrested in March, the investigator placed his picture into a photo array and asked Larry Johnson to identify the shooter. David Black was the only resident of Sursum Corda in the array; the other faces were complete strangers.  Larry didn’t know David by name, but he had seen him around the neighborhood.  So Larry pointed to David’s picture. 

When two police officers showed up at Barbara Marshall’s Museum One apartment, she said she hadn’t seen anything.  Larry Johnson had spent the night with her and, when she saw all the police officers swarming the property, she panicked.  She knew Larry had been banned from the building.  She knew he was facing felony charges.  So she escorted him to the elevator.  

The day after Larry identified David Black as the shooter, Barbara Marshall was escorted to police headquarters.  During an interrogation that stretched from morning to evening, Marshall stuck to her original story.  Finally, the lead investigator showed her a picture of David Black and a picture of June Bug and asked her if she had seen person A shoot at person B.  Realizing she wouldn’t be going home until she corroborated the official story, Barbara eventually explained, she caved to pressure. 

Radically unreliable witnesses

On the first day of David’s trial, Barbara Marshall told an investigator working for the defense that she had lied to the police.  About everything.  She knew David from Sursum Corda, but hadn’t seen him the day of the crime.  She had escorted Larry to the elevator and retreated to her apartment, remaining there until the police arrived.  After signing a statement to this effect, Barbara left the courthouse.  She had to be located, arrested, and hauled to the courthouse to testify.

Larry Johnson’s behavior was equally bizarre.  In April of 1997, on the verge of his scheduled grand jury testimony, he went AWOL from the halfway house.  Upon arrest, Larry was escorted to the courthouse to testify before the grand jury.  Returned to the halfway house to await trial, Larry escaped custody a second time.  Only then was he taken to a proper jail. 

When David’s trial began in December of 1997, Larry struggled to keep his story straight.  He couldn’t remember David’s name.  He testified that he was inside apartment 305 when the shots were fired and didn’t see who fired the gun.  Threatened with perjury charges, he tried to return to the official story, but couldn’t remember what it was until reminded by the prosecutor.

Barbara’s testimony followed a similar pattern.  When the defense attorney asked if she had recanted her testimony, she admitted that she had.  But she recanted her recantation when the prosecutor threatened to charge her with perjury.

James “June Bug” Smith had been subpoenaed to testify for the defense, but was never called.  It is likely that the defense attorney doubted anyone would believe a confessed drug addict from Sursum Corda. 

The government’s case is destroyed by one simple fact

On the first day of David’s trial, Barbara Marshall told an investigator working for the defense that she had lied to the police.  About everything.  She knew David from Sursum Corda, but hadn’t seen him the day of the crime.  She had escorted Larry to the elevator and retreated to her apartment, remaining there until the police arrived.  After signing a statement to this effect, Barbara left the courthouse.  She had to be located, arrested, and hauled to the courthouse to testify.

Larry Johnson’s behavior was equally bizarre.  In April of 1997, on the verge of his scheduled grand jury testimony, he went AWOL from the halfway house.  Upon arrest, Larry was escorted to the courthouse to testify before the grand jury.  Returned to the halfway house to await trial, Larry escaped custody a second time.  Only then was he taken to a proper jail. 

When David’s trial began in December of 1997, Larry struggled to keep his story straight.  He couldn’t remember David’s name.  He testified that he was inside apartment 305 when the shots were fired and didn’t see who fired the gun.  Threatened with perjury charges, he tried to return to the official story, but couldn’t remember what it was until reminded by the prosecutor.

Barbara’s testimony followed a similar pattern.  When the defense attorney asked if she had recanted her testimony, she admitted that she had.  But she recanted her recantation when the prosecutor threatened to charge her with perjury.

James “June Bug” Smith had been subpoenaed to testify for the defense, but was never called.  It is likely that the defense attorney doubted anyone would believe a confessed drug addict from Sursum Corda. 

Ineffective assistance of counsel

Everything I have told you about the case can be discerned from official documents that were available to defense counsel prior to trial.  But it took me over two hundred hours of careful investigation to dissect this legal trainwreck.  If David’s defense attorney had invested that kind of time in this case, the government’s case would have been reduced to a smoking ruin.  But he didn’t.

The transcript of a pre-trial hearing held days before trial, shows David’s attorney leafing through discovery materials he was seeing for the first time.  The documents had likely been in his possession for weeks, but he had been too busy to give them any attention.  Defense attorneys survive by taking as many cases as possible and negotiating plea bargains as quickly as possible.  In the unusual event that a case goes to trial, there is no time left over for a proper investigation. 

That said, it’s difficult to understand why James “June Bug” Smith wasn’t called to the witness stand.  Sure, the prosecutor would have asked all the embarrassing questions about June Bug’s drug use and criminal history, but at least the jury would have heard someone take issue with the heart of the government’s theory of the crime.  June Bug had no reason to lie on the defendant’s behalf?  If someone tried to murder me, I want to see them behind bars for as long as possible.  If the government’s theory was legitimate, June Bug would have been the prosecutor’s star witness.

Unable to attain a unanimous verdict, David’s jury informed the judge that they were hopelessly deadlocked.  Told to keep deliberating, they eventually voted to convict.  Would June Bug’s testimony have tilted the jury in the opposite direction?  I suspect so, but we will never know.

If David Black didn’t pull the trigger, who did?

A few days after Alice Chow died, a young Asian woman was beaten and robbed just around the corner from where Ms. Chow fell.   Brad “Dirty Reds” Cummings was arrested for the crime.  While in custody, Cummings was also indicted for the murder of Chow Yung Ng. A couple of months before the Chow murder, Cummings entered a Chinese restaurant and asked for a glass of water.  Mr. Ng graciously escorted his customer to a table whereupon Cummings pulled out a knife and stabbed Ng to death. 

Does this prove that Cummings was the gunman?  Not at all.  But he had committed two violent crimes in Chinatown, both against persons of Asian descent, before and after the killing of Alice Chow.  Unlike David Black, Brad “Dirty Reds” Cummings was capable of senseless and wanton violence.

This theory of the crime is strengthened by the fact that there was a vacant lot just to the left of where Alice Chow was walking.  When we remember that the bullet entered her left armpit as she approached the church, it is virtually certain that a hidden assailant fired two shots from this vacant lot, then calmly sauntered away. 

Was Cummings ever considered in connection with the murder of Alice Chow?  There is no evidence that he was.  The chief investigator was too busy looking for a runner and a shooter to consider other possibilities.

The quest continues

David Black survived over a quarter-century of prison life.  He grew up by growing up and lived smart.  In time, he became a wise soul; the kind of man that can talk sense to young offenders looking for trouble.  David’s primary goal has never been to get out of prison; he wants the government of these United States to own up to the cynical indifference that robbed him of his liberty.

Back in the Free World

On August 3, 2023, David Black experienced his first taste of freedom in 26 years.  David was convicted in December of 1997 of accidently killing a 78-year-old Asian woman on K Street in Washington, DC.  According to the government, Black’s real target was his friend, James (“June Bug”) Smith.  If David committed such a heinous crime, twenty-six years in prison sounds about right.  Many would argue that such a criminally dangerous individual should never return to society.

David Black owes his freedom to the Second Look Amendment Act of 2019 (officially known as the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, or IRAA).  Criminal justice advocates have long argued that offenders who commit crimes in their teens and early twenties deserve a second look because it has been conclusively demonstrated that the male brain doesn’t mature until 24 or 25 years of age. 

It’s true.  Criminal activity rises sharply  from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties, then drops like a rock.  Most criminal careers end well before the age of thirty.  If incarceration is viewed as a form of rehabilitation, many young offenders who have spent two decades in prison no longer pose a serious threat to society.  If the draconian sentences they received back in the day are far from over, a reduced sentence is appropriate so long as candidates are carefully screened. 

If you see incarceration primarily as a form of punishment (which prosecutors tend to do) the case for early release is easily dismissed.  The fact that an inmate has a relatively clean disciplinary record, has taken advantage of educational opportunities, and is highly regarded by prison staff, matters little to do-the-crime-do-the-time conservatives.

Felony crimes committed in the nation’s capital are prosecuted in the federal system, and the Second Look program is limited to this single jurisdiction.  Like David Black, most of the offenders being considered for early release were convicted of horrendous crimes of violence.  Attorneys representing the government appear to resent the Second Look process.  If a jury believed a crime deserved forty-years-to-life, they reason, that verdict should stand.  Without exception, government attorneys oppose early release applications regardless of circumstance.

When Mr. Black got his day in court, attorneys representing the government argued he should spend another five years behind bars before being considered for parole.  David’s disciplinary record was exemplary, but he had been convicted of a terrible crime.  Moreover, he has proclaimed his innocence from the day he was arrested in March of 1997.  From a prosecutorial perspective, anyone who claims innocence after being arrested, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced is accusing the government of major malfeasance. They take it as an insult.

But the Second Look Act was framed by criminal justice reform advocates, people who believe the system can break down. 

Men and women are wrongfully convicted every day.   And every wrongful conviction represents a perfect storm of incompetence and indifference.  There’s no polite way to put it.

When David called me up a few days ago, he wasn’t giddy with excitement.  He was having a hard time celebrating his freedom, he said, because, in the eyes of the world, he was still the guy who mowed down an elderly Asian community activist in broad daylight.  “I can’t breathe easy,” he told me, “until I clear my name.  You can’t imagine what it’s like sitting there in the courtroom hearing all these people lying about you.  And then you have to sit in a prison cell for twenty-six years knowing that you didn’t do the crime.  My goal has never been to get out of prison; I want to prove my innocence.  That’s what I’m thinking about when I go to bed, and that’s my first thought when I wake up in the morning.”

To date, I have published eight posts related to the wrongful conviction of David Black.  If you want to take a deep dive into the details, you can find it all here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  In this piece, I will just be hitting the high points.  In conclusion, I will address the elephant in the room: if David didn’t shoot Alice Chow, who did?

Building on a mistake

Our earliest account of what happened at approximately 2 pm on February 2, 1997 comes from the Washington Post.  Immediately after the sound of gunfire shattered a pleasant Sunday afternoon, eye witnesses saw a Black man chasing another Black man across K Street.  Having little else to work with, investigators took hold of this morsel of information and built a case around it.  There was a shooter and a runner; and the shooter must have been aiming at the runner.  All the police had to do to solve the crime was to identify the shooter and the runner.  Simple as that.

Moments after the shooting, and at trial, street witnesses told a simple story.  It was quickly determined that the runner was Darrell Haskell, a disabled military veteran, wearing his old military fatigues, who had been running errands for elderly residents.  The man chasing Haskell was Christopher Stargill, an assistant pastor at the Lilly Memorial Baptist Church.  The story never changed.  Haskell crossed K street and ran into the parking lot behind the Museum One Apartments, a high-rise complex dominating the corner of 4th and K Streets (you’ll see a diagram in a minute or two). 

When Reverend Stargill realized that police officers were on the scene, he abandoned his chase and told them everything he knew.  He had heard a shot, he saw a man fleeing the scene, he gave chase.  A few moments later, Darrell Haskell was apprehended in an apartment on the third floor of the Museum One apartment complex.  After several hours of interrogation at police headquarters, investigators concluded that Haskell had no connection to the shooting.  He was released.

Yet the shooter-runner story lived on.

A complete disconnect between theory and testimony

According to the theory of the crime advanced at trial, the incident began with David Black and James (“June Bug”) Smith shouting at each other on K Street.  They were standing on the driver’s side of a blue compact car that was parked immediately across the street from Lilly Memorial Baptist Church.  Jurors learned that when June Bug took off running, Black ran to the passenger’s door of the car, took a pistol from the glove compartment, and fired two shots in the general direction of a fleeing June Bug.  One of these shots struck Alice Chow as she crossed K street on her way home from church. 

Jurors also heard from three women who were standing on the sidewalk just across from where the raucous argument between Black and June Bug was supposedly taking place.  They didn’t see a blue car.  They didn’t see David Black.  They didn’t see June Bug running even though the government’s story had him passing within ten feet of them.  This diagram should give you a feel for the crime scene. The building that borders 4th and K Streets is the Museum One apartment complex.

In this diagram, the blue circle represents the position of the blue car from where the fatal shot was allegedly fired.  The large arrow illustrates the direction of June Bug’s flight. The blue star marks the position of the three women who were standing outside the Baptist church. The thin arrow at the crosswalk shows where Darrell Haskell crossed K Street (and where, according to the government’s theory of the crime, Alice Chow was located when the bullet struck her).  The blue X shows were street witnesses and police officer testimony placed Ms. Chow at the time of death.  Finally, the

 symbol (upper right) marks the position of apartment 305, where Darrell Haskell was eventually apprehended.  (Notice that the Museum One building borders both K and 4th streets.)

At trial, the three women standing outside Lilly Memorial Church, and all the police officers who witnessed the crime scene, insisted that Ms. Chow fell approximately 30 feet from where the women were conversing, at least 200 feet from where the official account placed her.

The prosecutor told the jury that the victim was crossing at the crosswalk.  It was the only way to explain how a bullet fired from the victim’s right side could enter the left side of her chest.  When a prosecutor ignores the unanimous testimony of his own witnesses to make his theory of the crime work, we have a problem.  When Ms. Chow died, the worship service she attended that morning had been over for an hour and a half.  She wasn’t walking home from church; she was walking to the community center.  We know this because she went there every day.  This explains why the street witnesses all have her walking west toward 5^th street. 

How David Black became a suspect

James “June Bug” Smith told a grand jury that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime on February 2^nd.  Therefore, he couldn’t have been beefing with David Black.  At the moment he learned David Black had been arrested, June Bug told the prosecutor, he realized a terrible mistake had been made.  David Black and June Bug both lived in Sursum Corda, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood located a couple of blocks east of the crime scene.  Early in the investigation, police had asked June Bug if he knew anyone who drove a blue compact car.  He mentioned a guy who went by the nickname “Black”.  That was his nickname, not his surname.  June Bug explained to the prosecutor that he definitely wasn’t referring to David Black.

When investigators searched their database for a guy living in Sursum Corda named “Black”, David’s name popped up.  Most of the young men from that neighborhood passed through a phase when they were either using crack cocaine, selling it, or both.  David was a seller; June Bug was a user.  This helps explain why investigators weren’t bending over backwards to protect David’s civil rights.  It also explains why they didn’t apologize when, in a failed attempt to arrest David, they broke down the door of the wrong home.  A woman who was terrorized by the incident sued the police department, but the case was dismissed.  Apparently, no one who lived in Sursum Corda deserved an apology.

The prosecutor ignored June Bug’s clarification.  Everyone knew that residents of Sursum Corda couldn’t be trusted.  Which is why neither the prosecutor nor the jury believed David’s family members when they testified that David had been at a birthday party when the shooting happened. 

Once the police had identified both the runner and the shooter, they just needed to find eye witnesses, and that’s where the investigation really went off the rails.

A police-generated crime theory

Eventually, the lead investigator in the case found two witnesses who were willing to identify James “June Bug” Smith as the runner and David Black as the shooter.  Larry Johnson and Barbara Marshall both testified at trial that they had seen Rob (David’s nickname) and June Bug beefing across the street from Lilly Memorial Baptist Church.  Both witnesses saw June Bug take off running, and watched as Rob fetched a pistol from the blue car and fired it in June Bug’s direction.  Five minutes later, Black got into the blue car and drove away.

Neither Larry Johnson nor Barbara Marshall volunteered this information to the police.  Instead, the police described the scene for their witnesses and simply asked Larry and Barbara to corroborate their theory.

Both witnesses had lived in and around Sursum Corda for several years.  Court documents make clear that Larry and Barbara were both crack users.  Larry’s erratic behavior got him banned from the Museum One Apartments several days before the incident.  This meant he was in the building illegally.  In addition, Larry was facing a laundry list of criminal charges and had missed a series of court dates.  Records indicate that Larry Johnson approached the police in the immediate wake of the crime.  His motivation is obvious.  He was hoping to swap information for lenient treatment. 

Unfortunately, Larry had nothing of substance to offer the police.  Realizing that the police had already bought into the runner-shooter theory, Larry identified June Bug as the runner. On the day of the crime, he fingered Darrell Haskell (the man in military fatigues who was running errands) as the shooter.  But when the police decided Haskell wasn’t their man, Larry Johnson placed the gun in the hands of several other Sursum Corda residents.  Police weren’t having it.

Although their sole witness was a wanted criminal who couldn’t open his mouth without telling another lie, the chief investigator in the case kept him out of jail.  Instead, Larry was placed in a halfway house designed for inmates serving the final months of their sentences.   Larry spent every evening in the halfway house, but was free to wander during the day. In theory, this was so Larry could spend his days digging up useful information.

Just as the chief investigator was about to cut Larry loose, June Bug told the police about a guy named “Black” who drove a blue car.  When David Black was arrested in March, the investigator placed his picture into a photo array and asked Larry Johnson to identify the shooter. David Black was the only resident of Sursum Corda in the array; the other faces were complete strangers.  Larry didn’t know David by name, but he had seen him around the neighborhood.  So Larry pointed to David’s picture. 

When two police officers showed up at Barbara Marshall’s Museum One apartment, she said she hadn’t seen anything.  Larry Johnson had spent the night with her and, when she saw all the police officers swarming the property, she panicked.  She knew Larry had been banned from the building.  She knew he was facing felony charges.  So she escorted him to the elevator.  

The day after Larry identified David Black as the shooter, Barbara Marshall was escorted to police headquarters.  During an interrogation that stretched from morning to evening, Marshall stuck to her original story.  Finally, the lead investigator showed her a picture of David Black and a picture of June Bug and asked her if she had seen person A shoot at person B.  Realizing she wouldn’t be going home until she corroborated the official story, Barbara eventually explained, she caved to pressure. 

Witnesses that define “unreliable”

On the first day of David’s trial, Barbara Marshall told an investigator working for the defense that she had lied to the police.  About everything.  She knew David from Sursum Corda, but hadn’t seen him the day of the crime.  She had escorted Larry to the elevator and retreated to her apartment, remaining there until the police arrived.  After signing a statement to this effect, Barbara left the courthouse.  She had to be located, arrested, and hauled to the courthouse to testify.

Larry Johnson’s behavior was equally bizarre.  In April of 1997, on the verge of his scheduled grand jury testimony, he went AWOL from the halfway house.  Upon arrest, Larry was escorted to the courthouse to testify before the grand jury.  Returned to the halfway house to await trial, Larry escaped custody a second time.  Only then was he taken to a proper jail. 

When David’s trial began in December of 1997, Larry struggled to keep his story straight.  He couldn’t remember David’s name.  He testified that he was inside apartment 305 when the shots were fired and didn’t see who fired the gun.  Threatened with perjury charges, he tried to return to the official story, but couldn’t remember what it was until reminded by the prosecutor.

Barbara’s testimony followed a similar pattern.  When the defense attorney asked if she had recanted her testimony, she admitted that she had.  But she recanted her recantation when the prosecutor threatened to charge her with perjury.

James “June Bug” Smith had been subpoenaed to testify for the defense, but was never called.  It is likely that the defense attorney doubted anyone would believe a confessed drug addict from Sursum Corda. 

A stake through the heart of the government’s case

When I started my research, I assumed that apartment 305 (from which Larry claims to have seen David and June Bug fighting) and apartment 611 (where Barbara lived) were both located on the K Street side of the Museum One building. 

The Museum One apartment complex is composed of two wings, one parallel to 4^th Street NW, and the other parallel to K Street NW.  Barbara Marshall claimed to have heard a commotion as she stood in the hall outside of apartment 611 (represented by the pointed cross).  Larry Johnson testified that he saw David and June Bug beefing on the street when he looked out the window of apartment 305 (marked by the crossed circle).  I had always assumed that apartments 305 and 611 were located on the K Street side of the complex. 

But when I Googled both addresses, the cursor was on the 4^th Street side of the building.  Sure that Google Maps had hit a glitch, I called up the operator and asked if 305 and 611 were located on the K Street side or the 4^th Street side.  “They’re both on the 4^th Street side,” she answered without hesitation.  When I asked if that would have been true back in 1997, the operator assured me that the apartment numbering hadn’t changed since the building was first constructed.

If this is true, residents of the 4^th Street side of the building couldn’t have heard or seen anything happening on the 4^th Street side of the building.  If the witnesses had wandered to the west end of the K Street side, they may have been able to see two men fighting.  Even then, however, the distance would have rendered facial recognition impossible.  But residents on the 4^th Street side of the building would not have been alerted to an altercation unfolding on the K Street side.

This new piece of information invalidates the testimony of Larry Johnson and Barbara Marshall.  It gets worse. Court documents reveal that police officers visited Ms. Marshall at her apartment on more than one occasion.  This means they realized that apartments 305 and 611 were on the 4^th Street side of the Museum One complex.  When Barbara told them she had seen and heard nothing, she had to be telling the truth. The official story is a physical impossibility.

Ineffective Assistance of Counsel

Everything I have told you about the case can be discerned from official documents that were available to defense counsel prior to trial.  But it took me over two hundred hours of careful investigation to dissect this legal trainwreck.  If David’s defense attorney had invested that kind of time in this case, the government’s case would have been reduced to a smoking ruin.  But he didn’t.

The transcript of a pre-trial hearing held days before trial, shows David’s attorney leafing through discovery materials he was seeing for the first time.  The documents had likely been in his possession for weeks, but he had been too busy to give them any attention.  Defense attorneys survive by taking as many cases as possible and negotiating plea bargains as quickly as possible.  In the unusual event that a case goes to trial, there is no time left over for a proper investigation. 

That said, it’s difficult to understand why James “June Bug” Smith wasn’t called to the witness stand.  Sure, the prosecutor would have asked all the embarrassing questions about June Bug’s drug use and criminal history, but at least the jury would have heard someone take issue with the heart of the government’s theory of the crime.  June Bug had no reason to lie on the defendant’s behalf?  If someone tried to murder me, I want to see them behind bars for as long as possible.  If the government’s theory was legitimate, June Bug would have been the prosecutor’s star witness.

Unable to attain a unanimous verdict, David’s jury informed the judge that they were hopelessly deadlocked.  Told to keep deliberating, they eventually voted to convict.  Would June Bug’s testimony have tilted the jury in the opposite direction?  I suspect so, but we will never know.

If David Black didn’t pull the trigger, who did?

A few days after Alice Chow died, a young Asian woman was beaten and robbed just around the corner from where Ms. Chow fell.   Brad “Dirty Reds” Cummings was arrested for the crime.  While in custody, Cummings was also indicted for the murder of Chow Yung Ng. A couple of months before the Chow murder, Cummings entered a Chinese restaurant and asked for a glass of water.  Mr. Ng graciously escorted his customer to a table whereupon Cummings pulled out a knife and stabbed Ng to death. 

Does this prove that Cummings was the gunman?  Not at all.  But he had committed two violent crimes in Chinatown, both against persons of Asian descent, before and after the killing of Alice Chow.  Unlike David Black, Brad “Dirty Reds” Cummings was capable of senseless and wanton violence.

This theory of the crime is strengthened by the fact that there was a vacant lot just to the left of where Alice Chow was walking.  When we remember that the bullet entered her left armpit as she approached the church, it is virtually certain that a hidden assailant fired two shots from this vacant lot, then calmly sauntered away. 

Was Cummings ever considered in connection with the murder of Alice Chow?  There is no evidence that he was.  The chief investigator was too busy looking for a runner and a shooter to consider other possibilities.

A quest for justice continues

David Black survived over a quarter-century of prison life.  He grew up by growing up and lived smart.  In time, he became a wise soul; the kind of man that can talk sense to young offenders looking for trouble.  David’s primary goal has never been to get out of prison; he wants the government of these United States to own up to the cynical indifference that robbed him of his liberty.

She couldn’t.  At least, she didn’t.

Mandel says she had a brain freeze.  She has taken a lot of abuse from the left, she says, and was fighting off a panic attack as the interview unfolded.

I buy that explanation. Soldiers on the frontlines of America’s increasingly toxic culture war are bound to be traumatized.

But Mandel would have struggled to define  “woke” even if she had been fielding softballs from Sean Hannity.  That’s because the word is being used in two distinctly different ways.

The term “woke” emerged in Black culture to describe those who are aware of social injustice, in general, and of America’s shameful racial history, in particular.  Woke people get what’s going on.  They understand how we got here.  They know that systemic racism is firmly entrenched in American culture and conduct themselves accordingly.

But when conservative opinion leaders like Bethany Mandel decry woke ideology, the word takes on a very different meaning. 

In this more expansive understanding, woke ideology divides the world into oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressed are people of color, women, undocumented immigrants, people with disabilities, those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, and, most significantly, members of the LGBTQIA+ community.  (If you add “QIA+” to LGBT, you are definitely woke.)

According to this more expansive definition of wokeness, the great moral challenge of the day is to combat oppression wherever it is found, and that means getting in the face of oppressors (especially affluent, straight, cis gendered, white men) whenever possible.  Oppressors hurt vulnerable people.  And when the sons of privilege are allowed to live in peace, injustice proliferates, it metastasizes. 

The only solution to this nightmarish reality, the woke believe, is to abolish oppression from the face of the earth.  That means educating children and re-educating adults.  Since all forms of oppression cohere in a seamless web of iniquity, the battle against oppression must be waged on all fronts at once.

This second understanding of wokeness is often denounced as “illiberal” because it is held to be in tension with the principles of democracy and mutual tolerance that make life in a diverse society possible.  The woke reject the goal of gradual, incremental progress in favor of immediate top-to-bottom revolution.  For the woke, all forms of over-under hierarchy must be immediately abolished, and anyone who says otherwise is the enemy. Or so say the decidedly un-woke critics of wokeness

Wokeness, thus defined, becomes the enemy of established institutions like churches, the NFL, and public schools.  Since oppression is built into the DNA of all institutions, the woke are said to believe, all social structures must be raised to the ground and built anew.

Bethany Mandel is an Orthodox Jew determined to raise her children in accordance with the ancient wisdom of her adopted faith. So, you can see why wokeness, defined in this second sense, would be deeply threatening to her.

But there are big problems with this second understanding of wokeness.  Although you can find plenty of people on the left calling for a jihad against oppression in all its myriad forms, most of these people teach in the humanities departments of major universities.  In a highly diluted form, their influence filters down to social media, but has little meaningful impact on the political and cultural life of the nation.

Although the principle of intersectionality (the idea that all oppressions are intimately connected) is frequently invoked, in the real world, activists pursue extremely narrow goals related to highly specific problems. Many who demand civil rights for their particular tribe show little concern for other interest groups.

Most people on the political left work within traditional institutions. They participate in the give-and-take of democratic politics.  They value diversity and aren’t trying to silence the opposition.

Even as they work for reform, most progressive faith leaders reflect a deep appreciation for the tradition that nurtured their faith.

But there is a second, more insidious problem with the conservative critique of wokeness.  In the popular mind, the term is vague and ill-defined.  Conservative pundits, preachers, and politicians realize that any evocation of social injustice is unpopular with the base. Most conservative voters, congregants, and consumers of cable news don’t want to hear about the LGBTQ community, the rights of women, the plight of refugees, the scourge of police misconduct, or the tragic racial history of America.

By decrying wokeness, conservative personalities signal that they share this widespread impatience with social justice talk.  But, on those rare occasions when they are challenged to define wokeness, they can say they were only referring to liberal intolerance.

In other words, by trashing wokeness, conservative leaders are able to counter calls for social justice with plausible deniability.

Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump want the luxury of being overtly anti-woman, anti-civil rights, and anti-gay without having to defend their bigotry.  Woke-bashing allows them to have their poisonous cake and eat it, too.

As a creature of the conservative media world, Bethany Mandel was trying to current denunciation of all things woke. She may not have realized the sleight of hand she was working until she was forced to define her terms. Instinctively, she realized that most members of her conservative audience would be unfamiliar with the second, more ideological definition of wokeness. She either had to define “woke” in the traditional way (a keen awareness of social injustice) or make it clear that she was talking about something else. She didn’t want to come right out and trash social justice advocates, but she knew that’s exactly what most people on the right thought she was doing. Mandel was perfectly capable of distinguishing between legitimate social justice advocacy and the rarified fringe ideology she dissected in her book. But, if she had made that distinction, the conservative audience she writes for would have lost interest. Unsure how to answer the question, she ended up looking like a deer in the headlights.

Hopefully, the next time a conservative leader like Trump or DeSantis bloviates about wokeness, they will be challenged to define their terms.

Born on a farm in the Texas Panhandle during the depression and dust bowl, I am an unlikely candidate to be considered privileged. We did not have indoor plumbing until I was 13 years old. I did my homework by the dim light of a kerosene lamp until FDR and the REA brought us electricity. I did barnyard chores morning and evening, cleaned out the chicken house on Saturdays, and went to school at a two teacher country school. The quality of our education depended on whether we had an excellent, good, mediocre, or downright sorry teacher any particular school year. I had some of each category.

Studies show a wide disparity between the net worth of white families and families of people of color. One study shows a median wealth of white families as about $184,000,  Black families about $23,000, and non-white Hispanics $38,000. That means black families have about 12 cents, and non-white Hispanics about 21 cents where whites have a dollar, and where whites have a dollar.

A major contributor to wealth is real estate, including the family home. After World War II many returning veterans purchased small homes on the GI bill. Red lining by real estate agents and lending companies relegated Blacks and other people of color to homes in less desirable neighborhoods, and many could not buy anywhere. Real Estate consistently appreciated so that those who bought homes in good neighborhoods sold and bought new homes after a few years, and by the time those returning veterans retired they had accumulated considerable net worth, which was passed on to their descendants. No real estate meant no accumulated wealth from appreciation.

And by the way, the freed slaves never got their forty acres and a mule!

“White Privilege? Who, Me?” I’m going to get personal. How am I, in 2023, privileged above my brothers and sisters of color? For the next several paragraphs I’m going on a little genealogical and chronological journey, taking us back from the eighteenth century to the present time.

My great-great grandfather George Adam Keicher was born of German immigrant parents in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1754, before there was a United States of America. By 1776 he was 22 years old, old enough to fight in the Revolutionary army. Which he did. After the war he moved, along with other people of German descent, from Pennsylvania to North Carolina.

In 1791 his son Charles Kiker, my great grandfather, was born. He was old enough to fight in the War of 1812. Which he did. Family lore has it that Charles received a tract of land in Mecklenburg County as mustering out pay for his services.

In the early 1800s, the Cherokee Nation occupied much of North Georgia. White settlers wanted that land. The Supreme Court ruled that the State of Georgia had no jurisdiction over lands occupied by the Cherokee. Reportedly, President Andrew Jackson said, in effect, “Let the Supreme Court enforce their ruling.” They did not, and President Jackson signed The Indian Removal Act,  and native peoples went on a forced march westward on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma Territory.

North Georgia was now open for white settlers at the expense of the Cherokees
Great-great grandfather George Adam and great grandfather Charles left North Carolina and settled on formerly Cherokee land in what is now Gordon County Georgia.

The Kikers were not wealthy, but they had land, and land is wealth. White Kikers had land. Red Cherokees did not.  White privilege.

My branch of the Kikers lived in North Georgia, not cotton country, so they were not major slaveowners. But they did own slaves. The 1860 Federal Census Slave Schedule for Gordon County, Georgia shows three slaves in the household of Charles Postell Kiker, my grand uncle and son of my great grandfather Charles Kiker, who died in 1859. My great grandmother Amelia Minyard Kiker was a resident of the 1860 Charles Kiker household, so that household may have effectively been  the actual household of great grandmother Amelia, but in 1860 women were not often listed as heads of household.

The three slaves in that household, listed by age, color, and gender, were a 25 year old black female, a five year old mulatto male, and a 5 month old black male. Why was that little boy a mulatto in the Kiker household? 

My paternal grandmother was a Wesson from Laurens County, South Carolina, and her ancestors had more slaves. Deed records from Laurens County show that triple great grandfather Henry Wesson deeded in 1821 an approximately thirteen year old slave girl called (not named) Fanny to his favored son Edward “to have and to hold.”

George Adam died in 1844, and Charles in 1859. My grandfather George Kiker and his family still lived in Gordon County. When the Civil War came along grandfather George’s son, Robert Postell Kiker (my Uncle Bob) born in 1844, was old enough to fight. And he did. But he didn’t wear a gray coat. He dressed in Blue. He was a Union patriot, but a Confederate traitor.
Unfortunately wars come; fortunately they go. When this one went, it left a bitter taste. Not everyone in Gordon County was happy that Uncle Bob had been a Union soldier. 

My father, James Watt Kiker, was born in Gordon County in 1866. When he was a little boy, Grandfather George divested himself of his land in Gordon County, and moved to DeKalb County in NE Alabama. Deed records show that they were able to purchase land there. They didn’t stay long in DeKalb County, and moved to Kennedale in Tarrant County, Texas in the 1870s. They were not wealthy, but they had a small farm, and land is wealth.

Grandfather George died in 1883, when my father was just 17 years old. Census records for 1890 were destroyed by fire, so I am not sure where James Watt was in 1890, but by 1900 he showed up in the census in Throckmorton County, Texas as James Riker, but the given names of his wife and children indicate that the name Riker was a misreading of the handwritten script. In Throckmorton County, he was a farmer and cattleman. By 1902, James Watt decided to go west to Swisher County, where he was able to purchase a section of land NE of Tulia.

Just 28 years earlier, General Ranald McKenzie surprised an encampment of Comanche Indians in Palo Duro Canyon. The Indians escaped, but McKenzie captured their horses and drove them 20 miles south to Tule Canyon, where he had his soldiers shoot the horses and left the Comanches to walk back to Fort Sill, a miniature Trail of Tears. McKenzie had accomplished his mission of clearing the Comanches out of Texas, and opening the Panhandle for settlers. Once again, land hungry whites benefited at the expense of the Red Man.

In 1902, the First National Bank of Tulia was chartered. James Watt Kiker was a charter depositor. He walked in, made a small deposit, and got First National Bank help to purchase that section of land. I wonder what would have happened if a Black man had walked through those doors in 1902.

My father got his section of land. I grew up there. We were not wealthy, but land is wealth. We took care of the land, and the land took care of us. That section of land contributed to my well-being.

White Privilege? Who, me? Yes, me! That’s my story. And many of my generation and our descendants could tell a similar story. We are not responsible FOR the wrongs done by our white ancestors to people of color: Native Americans, Black slaves, and defrauded Hispanics. But we are responsible TO their descendants who have played on an unlevel playing field.

Reparations are in order. A bill simply to study reparations has long languished in the US House of Representatives. In California, there is a  commission to study reparations, and the City Council in Boston has approved a similar commission. Public support of those efforts is in order.

It is not enough to acknowledge white privilege. Centuries of slavery, Manifest Destiny, and Jim Crow have rendered the playing field unfairly tipped so that people of color are always playing uphill.  We must level the playing field, or even tip it a bit in the other direction, to help make amends for centuries of an unlevel field!

Let’s consider reparations–repair to the aforementioned disparity in wealth. 
Two major factors contribute to accumulation of wealth: education and owning real estate, including a family home. 

In 2002, my wife Patricia and I were privileged to spend a few months in interim ministry on the Crow Reservation in Montana. We were privileged to teach and learn and to love and be loved by the Crow people. Our experience there has influenced us to make regular contributions to a school in Southeast Montana for Crow and Northern Cheyenne children.

But individual reparations will not suffice. Affirmative action has fallen out of favor with SCOTUS and many state legislatures. Concerted public efforts can usher it back in.

Let’s now consider reparations in the area of real estate ownership to address wealth inequality.

Following emancipation, there were sporadic efforts for “Forty Acres and a Mule.” The only Civil War reparations were compensating former slave owners for the loss of their human property.
Following World War II, the GI Bill made it possible for veterans to purchase homes with little or no down payment. FHA loans were available to veterans and non veterans alike. But redlining on the part of real estate companies and lending institutions meant that these loans were effectively for whites only. 

Section 8 rental subsidies were available to some. Subsidized rent provides housing but does nothing toward relieving poverty. Private non-profit Habitat for Humanity makes home ownership available to some low income people on a relatively small scale. I envision a Section 9 home purchase program, with provisions to forbid racial discrimination, to make home ownership possible to lower income people. 

The current political climate is not favorable for public reparations. Faith-based, justice-focussed organizations preaching and singing and marching can change the climate. 

The hour is late, the time is right to be awake to the admonition to do justice and love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.

Charles Kiker is a retired American Baptist Church USA minister, a former member of the Board of Directors of ACLU Texas, and a founding member of Friends ofJustice. He and his wife Patricia currently reside in Arlington, Texas,.They are members of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth.

Schon is the only original member of Journey, the arena rock band he founded in 1973. In its early years, Journey won a small but devoted fan base in the San Francisco Bay area playing jazz-influenced progressive rock. But when the golden-throated Steve Perry signed on as the band’s lead singer in 1980 and Jonathan Cain took over the keyboards a year later, Journey was ready for the big time. To appeal to a mass audience, you needed a sound that appealed to as wide a swath of listeners as possible.

“Don’t Stop Believin’” began as a word of encouragement from Jonathan Cain’s father. Steve Perry helped maximize the song’s appeal by imaging a small-town girl and a boy from South Detroit who both “took a midnight train going anywhere.” The midnight train appears to be whatever allows you to “hang on to that feelin’.”

The midnight train is what theologian Paul Tillich called an “ultimate concern.” It is Cicero’s summum bonum, the highest good. The midnight train is what Anselm defined as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” It is Gollum’s “precious.”

The midnight train could be God but is more likely to be a squalid substitute. And once you climb aboard you will ride that train until you die or the train runs off the rails. Like the song says, “it goes on, and on, and on, and on.”

“Don’t Stop Believin’” established the template for a monster 1980s hit factory. But as arena rock was gradually eclipsed by grunge, hip-hop and synthesizer music, groups like Journey were edged off center stage. The fans still came out to hear the old hits, but their new music was largely ignored.

Then David Chase, producer of The Sopranos, decided to use an old pop song as background music for the final scene of the final episode. It had to be something a guy like Tony Soprano would like. And it had to be a song that produced a strong visceral response (positive or negative). When Chase said he was considering “Don’t Stop Believin’” his crew groaned and begged him to pick a different song. Chase knew he had his number.

“Don’t Stop Believin’” is now the most downloaded song produced in the 20th century, drawing more attention than anything the Beatles or the Stones produced. That being the case, you can understand why Neal Schon’s soul ached as he watched a video of his bandmate performing the song for the crowd at Mar-a-Lago.

Newt Gingrich

The first person to appear in the video was Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House of Representatives in the mid-nineties. Prior to Gingrich, politicians in both parties played to the base during primary season, then went after the widest possible audience in the run-up to the general election. It was like Journey’s shift from niche music to corporate rock.

But Gingrich taught that to win elections you appeal to the base and forget everyone else. You pour gasoline on simmering coals of racial, regional and religious resentment. You associate “liberals” with crime-ridden big cities, socialism and godless secularism. Then, when the faithful are mad with rage, you sell yourself as the midnight train going anywhere.

In the course of a political career stretching back to 1978, the thrice-divorced Gingrich repeatedly was accused of marital infidelity. According to a close associate, he asked his second wife for an open marriage, then divorced her because “she’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the president. And besides, she has cancer.” So long as he was bludgeoning his opponents, nobody cared. In 2012, when a debate question alluded to his marital track record, Gingrich earned a standing ovation by feigning outrage.

Like everyone in attendance, Gingrich bought his ticket to the exclusive Mar-a-Lago event by endorsing Trump’s Big Lie. In the video, Gingrich tries to engage the host in conversation, but Trump’s attention appears to be locked on the stage where Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kimberley Gilfoyle are impersonating the Supremes, all three auditioning for the role of Diana Ross. Swaying seductively, they’re belting out the chorus to “Don’t Stop Believin’” as if their very lives depended on it, which, in a way, they did.

Kari Lake

Kari Lake is one of the Trump-backed candidates who underperformed in the November election. But like her mentor, Lake is claiming election fraud. Do Trump and Lake believe it? It doesn’t matter. The outcome feels rigged because they lost. This boundless sense of entitlement is their midnight train to anywhere.

Lake wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t that long ago, her friends say, that she identified as Buddhist and was smitten with Barack Obama. Her transformation began in her days as a reporter at the Phoenix Fox affiliate. Her audience, she gradually discovered, possessed an infinite appetite for outlandish and controversial stories. As she developed a hard-right, attack-dog persona on social media, the response was electric, particularly when she signaled her unqualified support for Donald Trump in 2015. The more “fringy” her posts, the greater the response. It was addictive. When Lake decided to run for governor, she ignored her Republican opponents, focusing all her fire on her Democratic opponent, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

Adopting a “God, Guns and Glory” campaign mantra, Lake’s assault on Hobbs grew more extreme by the day.

“We cannot let (Hobbs) win this race,” Lake told the crowd at one of her rallies. “Frankly, I think she should be locked up.”

After four years of Trump, the audience response was predictable: “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”

When Hobbs declined to debate her media-savvy opponent, a Lake victory seemed all but assured. But as the vote trickled in over three agonizing days, Hobbs maintained a slim but unsurmountable lead. In 2020, Lake had been at the forefront of Arizona’s “stop-the-steal” campaign. But when she applied the same tactic to her own campaign, few rallied to her side.

However, at Mar-a-Lago she was sure to receive aid and comfort. Once on the midnight train going anywhere, there is no easy way to disembark.

Kimberley Guilfoyle

Kimberley Guilfoyle, one of the women sharing the mic with Lake, had experienced a similar transformation on her way to MAGA celebrity. Guilfoyle was working as a prosecutor in San Francisco when she first met Gavin Newson in 1995. Two years after their 2001 marriage, she worked on Newsom’s successful mayoral campaign in San Francisco and Slate was calling them “the new liberal power couple.”

But when Guilfoyle’s career as a CNN legal analyst forced her to spend most of her time on the East Coast, the marriage began to crumble. Newsom ascended to the governorship in 2011, a position he still holds. After moving from CNN to Fox in 2006, Guilfoyle’s political views lurched rightward. She had found her midnight train.

In 2016, when Gretchen Carlson accused Fox CEO Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, Guilfoyle leapt to her boss’s defense. But Guilfoyle’s tenure at Fox ended in 2018 when her female assistant accused her of the same offense. Among other things, the Fox celebrity was accused of forcing her assistant to view “junk pics” of Guilfoyle’s sex partners. The lurid accusations never were adjudicated in court but, following a months-long internal investigation, Fox News quietly dropped Guilfoyle from their roster and paid her accuser $4 million in compensation.

By this time, Guilfoyle was dating Donald Trump Jr., an old friend who was estranged from his wife, Vanessa. The move from Fox News to the Trump family was a matter of moving from one car on the MAGA’s midnight train to another. Guilfoyle was named Trump’s unofficial ambassador to Catholics, a position she relished due to her deep adoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

After marrying in 1995 and giving birth to three children, Marjorie Taylor Greene had lived a thoroughly apolitical life. Raised in a Catholic family, she was baptized into a non-denominational megachurch in 2011.

When her interest in religion began to flag, Greene was drawn to the rigors of CrossFit training, eventually opening her own center. After two lengthy affairs with men in the CrossFit community came to light, her husband filed for divorce, but the couple eventually reconciled.

Then Donald Trump descended his golden escalator, and Greene was mesmerized. Shortly after Trump’s election, she clicked on a #SavetheChildren hashtag that led her to a QAnon site. To her horror, she learned of a Democrat-run pedophilia ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza shop. She discovered Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy Jr., and that Hillary had murdered a child with her bare hands so she could use the blood in a satanic ritual.

If this stuff was true (and Greene knew in her heart it was) she had found her calling.

“Have you guys been following 4chan? Q? Any of that stuff?” Greene said in a Nov. 2017 social media post.

“Q is a patriot,” she assured her rapidly growing online community. “He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump.”

In 2020, with vocal backing from GOP officials like Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, Greene ran for Congress and won in a landslide. When her colleagues picked up on past statements in which she embraced 9-11 conspiracy theories and denied school shootings had actually occurred, she was immediately stripped of her committee assignments.

It didn’t matter. With each new tweet, her following grew. Trump’s approval was all she cared about because it was all that mattered to her base. The momentum behind the midnight train she was riding seemed infinite.

Jonathan Cain and Paula White-Cain

The last few seconds of the Mar-a-Lago video are dominated by a beaming Jonathan Cain. In 2014, the Journey keyboardist met Christian television star Paula White on a Southwest Airlines flight. A year later, Paula and Jon divorced their partners, joined hands and jumped on a midnight train going anywhere.

Three years later, Neal Schon was horrified to see publicity shots of Cain and two of his Journey bandmates being feted at the White House. Cain’s photogenic wife had delivered the invocation at Trump’s inauguration and, by the time of her husband’s White House visit, she was effectively running  Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Council.

White’s ascendency was no accident. In 2002, Trump had invited White to visit him at Trump Tower after seeing her perform on television. She had the “it factor,” he said. She knew how to work a crowd.

Most of the high-profile preachers on Trump’s advisory council viewed women preachers with suspicion. But if they wanted access to the White House, these men had no choice but to work with Paula White. Like Journey in 1980, she was making a strategic move from a niche market to the MAGA big time.

In 2019, confident that Trump would be re-elected the following year, White announced that Brad Knight, her son, and his wife, Sarah, would be taking over as pastor of her Florida church. Recovering from the shock that her conduit to the White House had evaporated, White quickly switched course. Check out the congregation’s website these days and it’s all Paula White-Cain and her rock star husband.

Although he still identifies as Journey’s keyboardist, Jonathan Cain has emerged as an artist in the contemporary Christian music field. At every opportunity, he lets it be known that all the big hits he co-wrote with Journey were dictated, word-for-word, by the Holy Spirit. Which is why Neal Schon was so disturbed to see “Don’t Stop Believin’”associated with a form of political religion which, although wildly popular with the MAGA faithful, is anathema to most Journey fans.

In late December 2022, Schon fired off a cease-and-desist order demanding Cain stop using the band’s iconic song in political and religious settings.

With Journey’s 50th Anniversary Tour scheduled to begin in late January, fans are wondering how, with the rancor between them at fever pitch, Schon and Cain could possibly stand to share a stage. But the two men have been feuding over much the same issue ever since Cain and White blended their personas in 2015.

On New Year’s Eve, the two men were at Times Square performing “Don’t Stop Believin’” at “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest.” Having hopped on the same midnight train 43 years earlier, they have little choice but to keep riding. Like the song says, “it goes on, and on, and on, and on.”

The unsavory fact is that all the folks featured on the Mar-a-Lago video (together with white American evangelicalism, and the Republican Party) have clambered aboard Donald Trump’s midnight train and are destined to ride that train until, in the fulness of time, it hurtles off the rails.

JeJuan Cooks has spent the past thirteen years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.  The jury that convicted him weren’t sure of the appropriate sentence: should it be 99 years or life in prison?  Effectively, it makes little difference.  Barring some dramatic development, Mr. Cooks will be an old man when he next sets foot in the free world.

And at this late date, the only person who can help JeJuan Cooks is the man who put him in prison, Chris White.  Mr. White was a Sheriff’s Deputy when he encountered Mr. Cooks in 2009.  He was elevated to the Sheriff’s desk in 2018, resigned that post in 2021, and recently became the police chief in West, Texas (just up the road from Waco).  This post was written with Chief White in mind.  I’m not sure it will change his mind about what happened, and what didn’t happen, a little over thirteen years ago; but my prayer is that he will read, reconsider, and respond.

By now, of course, you want to know the basic facts of the case.  (I have written extensively on this case and will be providing links to my earlier work for those who want more detail.)  In the early hours of December 20, 2009, JeJuan Cooks was driving between Temple and Hearne, two towns in East Central Texas.  With him was his girlfriend, Brandi Acosta (the owner of the Mercedes JeJuan was driving), Brandi’s younger sister, and, riding in a car seat in the back, her one-year-old child.  JeJuan was traveling to Hearne to see his mother.   The story begins in earnest when he was pulled over at the intersection of Highways 485 and 77 (see map below).

JeJuan Cooks was cooperating with Sheriff’s Deputy Chris White until he was asked for his driver’s license.  Then he panicked.  He had missed a court hearing a few days earlier, so he was subject to arrest.  He hit the gas.

If you are inclined to believe that every drug dealer is worthy of a death sentence, or, at the very least, life in prison, you will likely want to stop reading at this point.  I hope you don’t.  At the time of arrest, JeJuan Cooks was dealing drugs.  He had been looking for work that was less dangerous and stressful, but legit jobs were scarce.  Most of his trade was in Hearne, but he was living in Temple, an hour to the west, and that meant a lot of back-and-forth travel on Highway 485.  He never transported drugs between Hearne and Temple.  It was far too risky.  And he didn’t own a gun.  Having done prison time as a juvenile, being found in possession of a firearm meant an automatic trip to the big house.  JeJuan Cooks stayed out of prison by being smart.  The police pulled him over all the time and always came up empty.  You can find more on Mr. Cooks’ early life here.

But that was before a police informant asked for a ride from Hearne to Temple.  The car was stopped, the man had drugs in his gym bag, and charges were filed.  His attorney hadn’t informed him of the hearing he missed, but that wouldn’t matter to the law.  So, he panicked.  He ran.  He has been paying for that mistake for the past thirteen years with no end in sight.

I am biased.  I freely admit it.  JeJuan got married last year.  I was present when he stretched his hand through a small hole in the wire mesh cage and exchanged vows with the woman who is now his wife.  The couple was not allowed to embrace.  Prison is psychological hell.  Mr. Cooks has matured.  He has mellowed.  He longs for freedom.  And that’s why, for me, he can never be just another criminal.  For me, this stuff is personal.

What happened next: Two conflicting stories

After a high-speed chase at speeds in excess of 110 MPH, Cooks stopped his girlfriend’s Mercedes, and ran across the cultivated field that separated Highway 485 and County Road 260.  Deputy White pursued Cooks in his police car, stopping inches from the fence.   This map will give you some idea of the scene.

As JeJuan attempted to climb the fence, he felt a sudden jolt in the small of his back, his knees buckled and he fell to the ground.  He heard shots behind him, and could see the flashing lights from the police car.  The sound of gunfire made him fear that he would be shot.  He felt an overwhelming urge to remove himself from this danger, but couldn’t move.  Every few seconds, he would recover the use of his legs, but after a few strides, another jolt would drive him to the ground.  Eventually, a gun was placed at the back of his head, a voice (he thought it was the deputy) told him that, if he moved, he would die, and cuffs were fastened around his wrists.  He lay in this position for what seemed an eternity (it was probably just a few minutes).  Eventually, two police officers dragged him across the field (his still couldn’t walk) to a Hearne Police Department vehicle where he was searched and questioned.  An EMT was summoned to remove a Taser barb from his back.  He was transferred to a second Hearne PD vehicle, and driven to the County Jail in nearby Cameron, the seat of Milam County.

Deputy Chris White’s version of the story is remarkably different.  In part, this is because of perspective.  Cooks was facedown in the mud; White was standing over him.  The version of the story related at trial assumed that, although White fired his Taser, it had no effect.  Instead, when White commanded the suspect to show him his hands, Cooks, jerked and appeared to roll from his back to his front.  Although White never saw a gun, he says that, as he fled the scene, he could hear two shots fired at him. 

Here’s the odd thing: White didn’t remember having fired his Taser.  As he passed between the fence and the hood of his car, he saw the wires dangling from the Taser in his hand. 

There are two distinct segments to the official story: the initial encounter (in which Cooks fired two shots as White fled behind his vehicle), and a second scene in which, while crouched behind his car, White saw Cooks on the run, retracing his steps across the field toward the Mercedes.  According to this account, White fired twice (which is why two shell casings from his .45 caliber sidearm were found at the scene) and Cooks collapsed, lying motionless on the ground until Shawn Sayers, a Hearne PD officer, arrived to make the actual arrest.

With Cooks firmly ensconced in a Hearne PD vehicle, and officers from several different agencies arrived on the scene, White told them that he saw a gun, he fired his Taser, then “the shots started coming”.  At trial, he admitted that he had been confused.  He never saw the gun; he just heard the shots.

The dozen-or-so officers gathered in the field spent the next forty-five minutes trying to find Cooks’ gun.  If two shots had been fired, there had to be a weapon, but even when bright headlights illuminated the scene, no weapon was discovered.

White insists that the Taser had no effect on Cooks. If it had, he says, the suspect would have been unable to turn and fire two shots.  Nor, in the second segment of the official story, would Cooks have been able to race back across the field.  

You might think this issue could easily be resolved.  If an EMT had removed a Taser barb from Cooks’ back, and if two officers had been forced to drag him to a Hearne PD vehicle because he couldn’t walk, the official story could be disproved.  Right?

Unfortunately, none of the officers who made the arrest or directed Cooks to the police car were ever questioned.  Presumably, they all filed incident reports, but, when I sent out FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, I was informed that, due to a computer crash, all incident reports filed prior to 2020 have been lost.  Similarly, no EMT agency in the vicinity has records dating back to 2009.

My quest for information wasn’t a complete bust, however.  Responding to an email, Shawn Sayers, the Hearne PD officer who made the actual arrest, called me one morning while I was preparing the family breakfast.  He told me that Chris White was a standup officer and JeJuan Cooks was a notorious trouble maker, so, whatever White told me about his encounter with Cooks, I could take it to the bank.  But when I gave Sayers a brief summary of the official story, he told me to hold up.  “That’s not the way it happened,” he told me.

Sayers and a fellow officer had laid tack strips at the Port Sullivan Bridge, a couple of miles east of the Cooks-White altercation.  When they got White’s call for backup, they raced to the scene.  As Sayers exited his vehicle, Shaun Cooks wasn’t lying facedown in the mud; he was up and running along the fence line.  Then, for no apparent reason, the suspect took a “swan dive” into the dirt. 

When I asked if Chris White had fired his weapon at the fleeing suspect, Sayers replied in the negative.  The shooting, he insisted, was all over by that point. 

Sayers says he raced after the suspect, placed his gun to his head, and warned him not to move.  Then, just as in Cooks’ account, he snapped on the cuffs.  Without realizing it, Sayers had corroborated Cooks’ version of the encounter down to the last detail. 

How do we explain the radical disconnect between Sayers’ account and White’s memory of the same encounter? 

It is possible, of course, that White is lying; but it’s highly unlikely.  White has a well-earned reputation as a straight shooter.  On the witness stand, he freely admitted that he never saw a gun in Cooks’ hand.  He admitted that he had no memory of firing his Taser.  He couldn’t even remember who eventually found the gun.  Liars don’t admit they were wrong, especially when no one can prove otherwise.

A gun was found at the scene.  Lying up against the fence.  In plain sight.  In the exact location that a dozen curious police officers, aided by headlights and flashlights, had searched diligently for forty-five minutes.  The incident took place at approximately 1:00 am.  Jay Beathard, the man tasked with investigating the matter, wasn’t awakened until 1:30, and didn’t arrive on the scene until a few minutes after 2:00 am. 

Fortunately, the dashcam in White’s vehicle kept running until Beathard collected it as evidence, which means that much of the conversation between the officers on the scene was captured on that VHS tape.  Unfortunately, the existence of this longer tape wasn’t disclosed to Cooks until the verge of trial.  At that point, the District Attorney argued that only the first few minutes (the part that recorded gunfire) should be preserved for trial.  The judge concurred.  JeJuan Cooks was never allowed to hear that tape. Now, I am told, the recording no longer exists.

Still worse, the short version of the tape had been transferred from VHS to a digital format, a process susceptible to endless manipulation.  The tape records two bursts of gunfire separated by exactly thirteen seconds.  The camera captured nothing except officer White crossing in front of the vehicle, four seconds after the initial shots were fired.  Nine seconds later, two more shots are heard. 

Here’s the problem.  In the official story, White fires his weapon twice, Cooks falls and lies motionless.  White keeps his gun trained on Cooks, radios for assistance, then waits for backup to arrive.  In Sayers’ version, there is no gunfire, Cooks runs, he falls, he is immediately arrested.  In Sayers’ version, White is completely passive and therefore incidental to the arrest.   

Brain Science sharpens a blurry picture

Adrenaline is a wonderful memory enhancer.  That’s why we have particularly vivid memories of events charged with emotion.  But if a traumatic encounter floods the mind with too much adrenaline, the conscious memory is so overwhelmed it shuts down.  And when that happens, memory is no longer linear or sequential (one thing after another).  All we remember are impressions, emotions and odd details (like seeing the Taser wires in the headlights).  The order of events, and a sense of who did what to whom, is lost.  There is no clear one-thing-after-another sequence. 

Two aspects of a police officer’s life experience are particularly likely to play havoc with memory: high-speed chases and an encounter with a possibly-armed suspect.  Put the two back-to-back and the potential for what is called “dissociative amnesia” is particularly great.  That’s why we speak of PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder.

According to Bessell van der Kolk, author of the bestselling The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, describes two areas of the human brain that, under conditions, work together to preserve memories.  The first area “provides a sense of time and perspective”; the second “integrates the images, sounds, and sensations of trauma into a coherent story.”

When the parts of the brain that controls sequence is knocked out, van der Kolk, says, “you experience something not as an event with a beginning, a middle, and an end but in fragments of sensations, images, and emotions.”  Or, as Michael Bricker puts it, “Trauma can shutdown episodic memory and fragment the sequence of events.”  The technical term for this loss and distortion of memory is “dissociative amnesia”.

Eventually, large portions of a traumatic event may be recovered, but often in a highly unreliable form that is subject to distortion. Deryn Strane and Melanie Takarangi express the scholarly consensus when they warn that the accuracy of recovered traumatic memories are always open to question because “people may inadvertently generate additional imagery relating to those traces that fits the experienced event.”  In other words, we remember what we think must have happened.   “Those non-experienced thoughts and images,” the authors assert, “may become just as familiar as those that were experienced.”

This is important because, if Chris White eventually recovered a connected memory of what happened on December 20^th, 2009, it would feel like an accurate memory even if all he was “remembering” was the sequence of events that he and agent Beathard worked out after the fact.  In his work with PTSD patients, Bessell van der Kolk isn’t too worried about the accuracy of recovered memory so long as they allow a patient to identify a traumatic recollection as a past event that doesn’t have to determine present reality.  But when a false memory puts an innocent man in prison for life, accuracy is essential.

The PTSD diagnosis is appropriate for only 8% of the American population, and most of those suffering from PTSD do not experience dissociative amnesia.  Soldiers and police officers are particularly prone to severe memory disruption, however, due to the unusually stressful, and frequently traumatic nature of their experience.  Since police officers are often called to testify in court, this creates a problem that has rarely been addressed. 

Dissociative Amnesia can put innocent people in prison

Chris White couldn’t remember firing his Taser.  Suppose he had drawn his .45 and fired two warning shots immediately after exiting his vehicle.  Would he have remembered doing so?  No.  If he was suffering from dissociative amnesia, he would only remember the sound of gunfire and the feeling of dread; he wouldn’t remember the source of the sound, the sequence of events, or who did what to whom. 

If Shawn Sayers is correct, Chris White’s belief that he fired two shots after a fleeing suspect is incorrect.  Sayers’ memory is sharp because it was accompanied by a rush of adrenaline strong enough to enhance recall, but not strong enough to scramble and disconnect memory.  As Bessell van der Kolk explains in The Body Keeps the Score, “The imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations.”

The police officers who testified at Cooks’ trial (all members of the Milam County Sheriff’s Department) noted that White appeared to be coming down from “an adrenaline dump”.  In other words, he appeared confused.  For instance, he immediately reported seeing a gun, only to realize, upon reflection, that he hadn’t.  He experienced an overwhelming sense of threat, violation, and imminent danger and shifted into fight-or-flight mode.  His rational mind shut down, his “lizard brain” fired up, and he ran for his life.  This is not a sign of cowardice.  In fact, he had no conscious control over the process.

There can be no doubt that JeJuan Cooks was temporarily incapacitated by White’s Taser.  Even the version of the story related at trial describes a young and athletic Cooks inexplicably folding up like a cheap card table on two separate occasions.  At trial, White recalled that he kept pulling the trigger on his Taser while he was behind his vehicle.  A Taser incapacitates for approximately five seconds, but every time the trigger is pulled, another jolt of electricity courses through the wires.  And remember, only 13 seconds separated the initial confrontation from Cooks’ final “swan dive”. 

Cooks reports that White fired his Taser immediately after stepping out of his car.  This would account for the first collapse White related at trial.  It wasn’t as if White’s memory of the encounter was entirely blank; the problem is that some details dropped out entirely while others became hopelessly disjointed. 

Was the gun planted?

Maybe not, but it’s the only theory that makes sense. 

There are two phases to White’s account: what happened before he dashed behind his patrol car, and what happened after.  If White didn’t discharge his weapon after running behind his vehicle, he must have fired it before his dash for safety.  

As a young black ex-offender who sold illegal drugs for a living, JeJuan Cooks was used to getting pulled over and searched.  It was a regular occurrence.  So, why would he be carrying a gun on the evening in question?  And why, after he fell to the ground, would he turn and fire two shots at a police officer at pointblank range?  His long-term chances of escape were nil, and he knew it.  Secondly, shooting at a cop means life in prison. He knew that too.

And if JeJuan did fire his gun at a man standing three feet away, how could he possibly miss?  He might have missed once, but twice?  When the first officers arrived on the scene, White immediately asked to be examined for gunshot wounds.  He honestly believed that Cooks had fired his weapon.  He didn’t just believe it, he knew it!  And at that range, nobody misses twice.  He didn’t feel anything; but he knew from experience how adrenaline masks pain. 

It is also troubling that none of the forensic protocols police officers typically employ after shooting events were followed.  Neither Cooks nor his alleged weapon were tested for gunshot residue (GSR) or fingerprints.  The gun wasn’t traced to Cooks but to an unrelated Hearne resident.  No attempt was made to trace the weapon any further.  

But here’s the huge problem.  None of the Hearne PD officers involved in the arrest were interviewed or subpoenaed to testify at trial.  Hearne is located on the east side of the Brazos River, in Robertson County. The deputies who did testify worked for the Milam County Sheriffs Department, they arrived late at the scene, and they had no direct knowledge of the White-Cooks encounter.  No independent firearms expert was asked to evaluate the evidence. The officer that arrested Cooks, the officers who dragged him to a Hearne PD police car, the officers who initially questioned and searched Cooks, and the officer who drove him to Cameron were never interviewed about the incident.  Could it be that, like Shawn Sayers, they would have contradicted large swathes of the official story?  Almost certainly.

The official story presented at trial explained why Cooks stopped firing.  A shell casing hadn’t been expelled properly creating what is called a “stovepipe jam”.  In a classic stovepipe jam, the shell casing sticks straight up like a stovepipe.  Moreover, Jay Beathard testified that a new round was been chambered and ready to fire; something highly unlikely, perhaps impossible, since a jam would have prevented the next bullet from being properly seated in the chamber.  This video explains the mechanics involved.

The origins of the official story

In the absence of corroborating testimony from Hearne PD officers, Jay Beathard had only Chris White’s disjointed recollections to work with.  White could remember “images, sounds, and physical sensations,” but had few solid facts to offer.

But an incident report had to be written, to White and Beathard pieced together what probably happened.  White couldn’t remember firing his Taser, but he must have done so.  He couldn’t remember seeing a gun, but Cooks must have been armed.  Cooks was up and running just before his arrest, so he couldn’t have been incapacitated.

We know White and Beathard created, then scrapped, a rough draft of the official story.  In this account, Cooks didn’t shoot at White while lying on the ground; the shots came while Cooks was running across the field toward the parked Mercedes.  This version of the story appeared the next day in the Bryan Eagle:

While running, Cooks fired two shots from a pistol, authorities said. The Milam County deputy returned fire, investigators said. Neither the deputy nor Cooks was hit in the exchange, but Cooks fell to the ground and was arrested.  

The telltale phrases are “authorities said” and “investigators said.” The news story was a verbatim quote from a press release composed by Jay Beathard and Chris White.  The detail about Cooks firing on the run was quickly dropped, however, likely because Shawn Sayers, who had witnessed that part of the action, might take issue.  So the shots allegedly fired by Cooks were pushed back to the part of the story before White made his dash for safety.

This created its own share of problems.  If Cooks rolled in White’s direction, and if White responded by firing his Taser, how could he have missed seeing the gun?  It’s very hard to imagine how the official sequence of events unfolded.  If an officer thinks a suspect is armed, he may pull his Taser, but not before he has unholstered his firearm.  You keep your eyes glued on the suspect.  Under no circumstances would you turn your back.

Still, with no one but a disreputable drug dealer to contradict the story, the official story was reasonably secure.

But if a gun was planted, we must ask by whom, and why?  The officers gathered at the scene didn’t understand how PTSD can mess with memory.  In particular, they weren’t reckoning with the possibility of dissociative amnesia.  All they knew was that a trusted officer believed two shots were fired at him, and he ought to know.  This explains the intense search for the weapon—it had to be somewhere.  The possibility that White’s memory had been dismantled by what they called “adrenaline dump” wasn’t part of the conversation.

And this is where things get interesting.  Imagine the anger the officers at the scene were feeling toward JeJuan Cooks.  The man is a notorious drug dealer who, for years has been frustrating every attempt to bring him down.  He showed defiance and disrespect by driving away from a police stop.  He had endangered the lives of two young women and a tiny child.  He was a black man out late with white women.  Worst of all, he just tried to kill one of their own.  White worked for the Hearne PD early in career and was on a first-name basis with most of the officers at the scene. 

Then comes the brutal realization: if we can’t find the damn gun, attempted murder charges are off the table. 

Whoever planted the gun didn’t believe that he or she was framing an innocent man; they were simply ensuring that a bad actor got what was coming to him.  Cooks tells me that, as he was being dragged to the police car, one officer on the scene said, “You’re lucky.  If I had made the arrest, you’d still be lying in that field.”  I suspect there were dozens of statements along that line captured by the device in White’s car.  Just another reason for ensuring that the longer tape was never played at trial.

It is entirely possible that Chris White ever questioned the legitimacy of the gun Jay Beathard found moments after arriving on the scene.  White believed (and likely still believes) that shots had been fired at him, so there had to be a gun somewhere.

Recent Developments

At the time of his encounter with JeJuan Cooks in 2009, Chris White was an investigator with the Milam County Sheriff’s Department.  When David Greene died in 2018, white became Sheriff.  He stood for re-election in 2020, winning in a landslide.  Then, on March 1, 2021, White walked into the Milam County Sheriff’s Office and, without a word of explanation, turned in his gun and his badge.  He didn’t give a month’s notice.  He didn’t give a week’s notice.  He quit on the spot.  The press release sent to local media attributed White’s sudden resignation to unspecified “personal reasons”.  

There had been no signs of sexual or financial impropriety, the sort of issues that typically crash a lawman’s career.  White’s decision inspired a lot of head scratching.

White went into a temporary retirement, even erasing his once-substantial social media presence.  Then, after a twenty-one-month sabbatical, he signed on as the new police chief of West, Texas, population, 2,531, in mid-November, 2023.

It wasn’t long before false reports were circulating on social media.  According to an extensive article produced by KWTX News in Waco, “Rumors abound that White is not a certified peace officer and is under investigation by the Texas Rangers and investigators from the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement. There also have been posts that seasoned officers have quit because of White and that a West City Council member resigned over White’s actions since taking office.”

The motivation behind these malicious rumors is difficult to pinpoint, but White’s long stretch of unemployment encouraged speculation.  People wanted to know why a man would trade in a job as a Texas Sheriff responsible for 40 officers, to become a police chief in a small town overseeing a staff one-tenth the size? 

“I left to focus on my family because I had neglected my family” White told the KWTX reporter. “You can be married or you can be sheriff. I chose to be married.”

This is a reasonable explanation. So far as it goes.  Police work of any kind takes a toll on a marriage, although some argue this is no more true of police work than of other forms of high-stress work.  But if White didn’t want to be Sheriff, why didn’t he simply refuse to stand for re-election?  And why not provide the department with a brief transition period?

In all likelihood, White abruptly stepped away from law enforcement because he was simply unable to continue. In his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, therapist Resmaa Menakem describes a series of training sessions he led for the Minneapolis Police Department that were designed “to reduce and avoid unnecessary stress, both on and off the job; and to deliberately settle their bodies under a wide range of circumstances.” He quickly discovered that the men he was working with had never received help with these issues.  They were on their own.

“In their work, Menakem says, “many police officers experience moral injury or have witnessed it in their coworkers. Unfortunately, very few manage to metabolize this shame and trauma; few are even aware of it, let alone of what they need to do to metabolize it; and still fewer receive encouragement or support from their coworkers, superiors, or organizational structures.”

As a consequence, he says, when White officers confront a suspect from a poverty-stricken Black neighborhood, “it is often a case of repeatedly traumatized bodies confronting other repeatedly traumatized bodies.” 

We all know the stories about White officers shooting Black suspects with little or no provocation. “Something triggers a person’s trauma;” Menakem writes, “his or her lizard brain instantly launches a fight response; and the person physically or emotionally harms whomever is nearby.” But what if the officer’s “lizard brain” triggers a flight response?  That’s what happened to Chris White.  Fearful that the Tazed man lying at his feet was holding a gun, White likely fired warning shots, then fled for safety.  He couldn’t remember discharging his firearm any more than he recalled firing his Taser.  But he remembered the sound of gunfire coupled with the emotion of deep dread.

Convinced that the Black suspect really had fired two shots at Chris White, and unable to find the weapon, somebody produced what police officers call a “throw down gun”.  Next, Jay Beathard and White recreated the scene as it must have happened.  But there are signs that they were uncomfortable with the gun produced at trial.  That’s why neither the suspect nor the gun was tested for GSR.  That’s why no great effort was made to recover the shell casings from the suspect’s 9mm.   And Beathard and White feared that crucial aspects of their recreated version of events might get pushback from first responders who remembered differently, which is why men like Shawn Sayers were never interviewed after the fact or subpoenaed to testify.

The case against JeJuan Cooks was never intended to go to trial.  A plea agreement of 15 years was proposed, and both Beathard and White dropped by Cooks’ cell, urging him to take the deal.  The officers at the heart of this story had good reason to fear a trial.  First, Cooks was almost certain to be found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.  They wanted him to suffer serious consequences, but they didn’t intend to derail his life.  Second, they feared that defense counsel might ask the obvious questions or, still worse, interview the Hearne PD officers and subpoena them to testify.    

If JeJuan Cooks really had fired two shots at Chris White, he would have embraced the plea offer with joy and gladness.  Instead, against the protestations of two defense attorneys (the one Cooks fired and the one who took over on the verge of trial), the defendant insisted on his day in court. 

Had he taken the deal, Cooks would now be out on parole.  Instead, he faces a lifetime behind bars.  Some police officers manufacture bogus prosecution without a twinge of conscience; Chris White is not that kind of officer.  If he knew the case against Cooks was deeply flawed, or if he simply feared it might be, his uneasiness would grow with the passing years.

I have described what I know or strongly suspect.  But there is much I don’t know.  Chris White might already have been suffering from PTSD long before his encounter with Cooks in 2009.  It is also possible that that the trauma associated with the Cooks-White encounter was just one in a series of morally ambiguous episodes that piled up over the years like driftwood on the shore.  We can be reasonably sure that White didn’t resign simply because he had neglected his family. 

Officers suffering from PTSD are typically haunted by memories so intense, they feel like present reality.  In order to cope, most often drink heavily, or get hooked on pain pills, gambling, sexual misadventure.  A devout Christian with high personal standards, White may have dodged those bullets.  But the moral injury at the heart of PTSD will always interfere with basic human functioning. 

How this played out in White’s life, I can’t say.  But PTSD symptoms inevitably impact friends, co-workers and intimate relationships.  And, when it got so bad he couldn’t abide one more second of torment, White suddenly stepped away from the stress.  There was no other choice.  He had hit a wall.  As he says, he could maintain a marriage or he could be Sheriff; he couldn’t do both. 

Where from Here?

I have made a strong case that JeJuan Cooks didn’t attempt to murder Chris White in the early hours of December 20^th, 2009.  The evidence strongly suggests that Chris White had no reliable memory of what took place that night.  The narrative Beathard and White cobbled together simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Tragically, it was never subjected to careful scrutiny where it counts—in a court of law.  And once the judge’s gavel rang down, it became frightfully difficult to fix what was broken.  That is especially true now that most of the meaningful evidence has been destroyed.  As noted previously, I have tried to access the longer version of the audio recording, and relevant incident reports, and EMS records.  I have come up empty.

As a consequence, the only person with the power to release JeJuan Cooks from prison is Chris White himself.  I realize that’s a hard sell.  None of us like to be second-guessed, and I have been second-guessing Chris White for well over two years now.  To complicate matters, White is currently being bombarded by a wide range of conspiracy theories untethered from reality.  It would be all too easy to dismiss my theory of this case as just one more crank revealing his ignorance.

When police officers and prosecutors are questioned about past cases, the typical response is some variation of “the jury heard the evidence and handed down their verdict.  It’s out of my hands.”  On the surface, this sounds sensible.  All things being equal, jury verdicts should be final.

But what if all things aren’t equal?  What if the none of the evidence that could have reduced the state’s case to a pile of rubble was presented at trial?  Tragically, that is the reality we are dealing with.

JeJuan Cooks fired Rick Guzman, his first attorney, on the verge of trial because he refused to argue that Cooks didn’t have a gun. Cooks attempted to fire his second attorney, Clyde Chandler, for the same reason, a request that was refused. It wasn’t so much that Guzman and Chandler thought their client was lying; they simply refused to intimate to a deep-red Milam County jury that a sheriff’s deputy might be lying. At trial, Chandler stressed his close working relationship with the district attorney and deputies White and Beathard. Since he failed to make a case for innocence, Chandler might might as well have argued that his client was guilty as charged.

The appeals process followed a similar pattern. Bill Torrey, the attorney appointed to file Mr. Cooks’ appeal, was running for district attorney on a law-and-order platform. Torrey simply filed an Anders brief to the Texas Court of Criminal appeals stating that there were no non-frivolous grounds for appeal. Having reviewed the trial transcript, the appeals court agreed. Since Cooks’ attorney had failed to attack the state’s case in the slightest particular, this was not surprising. The Texas appeals court is elected in a partisan process and leans hard right. As I write, all nine members of the court are Republican.

Tom Abate, the next attorney on the scene, initially agreed to argue that Cooks was unarmed, but mysteriously withdrew that argument at the last moment. When Cooks asked for an explanation, Abate refused to speak with him.

That’s the bleak legal reality JeJuan Cooks is up against. Which is why only Chris White can provide meaningful assistance, however unlikely that may appear.

I have only one request for Mr. White.  Read what I have written.  And if you think I might be right, call me up or shoot me a text or email.  I would happily drive the eighty-four miles to West, Texas in order to talk things out over a cup of coffee.  Or, if you prefer, just call up Bill Torrey and tell him you believe a tragic mistake has been made. The Milam DA won’t listen to me (he was, after all, the attorney who filed the Anders brief). But he will listen to you. I await your response.

Returning from this year’s Christmas Eve service (which I thoroughly enjoyed despite my longstanding complaint about the abandonment of archaic language) I tapped out a curmudgeonly complaint on Facebook. The post was intentionally phrased in dogmatic language. I was hinting that I wasn’t really serious, even though, on an emotional level, I must confess to powerful feelings of personal rectitude on the subject.

The response, as I feared, was not universally warm. Some clearly didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was driving at. Others pointed out that, regardless of translation, the Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke can’t be harmonized. And, naturally, the biblically literate informed me that the King James Version is highly inaccurate and, as the language evolves, increasingly incomprehensible.

All of this is true, but it misses my point. Since I made no attempt to explain my visceral reaction to the use of contemporary translations of the Christmas story in public worship, I thought I should give the matter some thought.

Bill Leonard, a professor of church history I first encountered at Southern Seminary in 1975, responded to my King James-only rant with the simple observation. He noted that he has committed the Christmas story to memory (although humility prevented him from proving it).

I too can recite the Christmas story from memory, and often did so as a pastor and hospice chaplain. So have many of you. And it is virtually certain that the version of the ancient tradition you have branded into your brain is the much-abused King James account. This is because, prior to the late 1970s, what was once called “the Authorized Veresion” (or the Revised Standard Version which sticks closely to the KJV) dominated the public reading of Scripture.

And if Handel’s Messiah has been an indispensable part of your life soundtrack, the Elizabethan cadences of the KJV have been even more deeply chiseled into your subconscious, the seat of emotion.

Which is why, when you hear the “glorious song of old” translated into standard English, the emotional oxygen is sucked out of the room. It’s as if an overly-clever English teacher decided to translate Shakespeare into modern idiom so it wouldn’t be such a challenge for her students. People do that sort of thing all the time, of course, but it doesn’t work. The very strangeness, the peculiarity of the language is part of the appeal. More importantly, when you have a piece of poetry committed to memory, it will never sound right when half the words are changed. “And they were frightened,” can’t compete with “and they were sore afraid”.

This gets at why Christmas is so important for so many of us. We know, intellectually, that Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th. And we realize, if we’ve given the matter much thought, that Matthew and Luke are more interested in theology than in strict historical accuracy. Matthew and Luke were theologians and poets; and the two vocations are indistinguishable. They produced theological poetry and poetic theology. They spin webs of words and invite us to entangle ourselves.

The precise wording of a story if you are looking for historical information. But if you are entangled in a magical web of words, the phrasing, the cadence, the rhythm all matter. We know the story word-for-word, and if somebody changes and rearranges those words, the spell is broken.

For people who grew up listening to the Christmas story communicated in the language of the New International Version, or the New Revised Standard Version, or The Message, the King James iteration of the story may not resonate at all. It may even be off-putting. I get that. And yet I would still argue for a return to the King James Version in particular instances: the 23rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer, Isaiah 40, and, most urgently, the Christmas story. We shouldn’t just give the KJV language preferential treatment on these occasions, we should explain why we are doing it just as, when introducing students to literature rendered in archaic English, we explain why we are sticking with the original. Traditional Christmas carols function in the same way.

Still through the cloven skies they come
with peaceful wings unfurled,
and still their heavenly music floats
o’er all the weary world;
above its sad and lowly plains,
they bend on hovering wing,
and ever o’er its Babel sounds
the blessed angels sing.

That wasn’t written in 1611 (the year the KJV came to birth); it’s from 1849, and sounds like it. We don’t speak that way anymore and are thus incapable of producing that kind of prose. But the song has become part of our collective memory. It is a gift from a lost dimension. It can’t be replicated; it can only be gratefully received as gift.

Preaching and teaching the story is another matter, of course. There is a place for rendering the text in language that is both simple and recognizable, just as there is a place for digging behind the English translation to the Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic original.

But worship is primarily a left-brain activity; properly understood, it is far more emotional than cognitive. It’s about passing along the old, old story of Jesus and his love in whatever language connects with the heart. We didn’t invent the story. It is an inheritance, passed from one generation to the other. And nothing reinforces our dependence on tradition more effectively than an occasional return to the glorious phrasing of the King James Version.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Friends of Justice, the organization I lead, has been in existence for twenty-two years.  In that time, I have never attempted to compress the full scope of our work into one presentation. But I’m going to try it today.  Or, I will come as close to telling the complete story as is humanly possible.  I will be oversimplifying complex matters and leaving out a lot of important information.  I will confine myself to just four cases we have impacted.  This isn’t just about what happened in Tulia, Texas, Jena, Louisiana, or Winona Mississippi; the legal train wrecks I will be describing are symptomatic of a systemic problem.

At root, the problem is theological.  According to Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, “The prophetic tasks of the church are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial, and express hope in a society that lives in despair.”

Brueggemann isn’t saying that there are bad people out there who live in illusion, who practice denial, and who, consequently, live in despair.  He is saying we’re all like that.  Criminals are like that, sheriffs and district attorneys are like that, judges and jurors are like that, and religious people who show up for church every Sunday are like that.

We tend to think of court rooms and church sanctuaries as places where good people confront bad people.  The criminal justice system assumes that police officers, prosecutors, judges and jurors can be trusted to act in good faith, to exercise sound judgement, and to dispense clear-eyed justice.  But if Brueggemann is right, we should expect our courtrooms (and our churches) to be staggering under the weight of illusion, denial and despair.  And, if that’s true, justice will elude us as often as not.

Early in my work with Friends of Justice, I concluded that white racial resentment is the most powerful force in American politics, American religion, and the American criminal justice system.  I’m not saying that white racial resentment is the only factor in play; it is simply the most powerful.  

John Grisham started out as a Mississippi lawyer, but quickly realized he could make a lot more money churning out legal thrillers.

“I grew up in the Jim Crow South,” Grisham recently told the New York Times. “A very segregated, racist society was almost in my DNA . . . The Baptist Church was that way too back then. I’ve come a long way. I have a lot of friends and even kinfolk who never tried to move beyond the racism. But I try every day. It’s been an ongoing, gradual transformation.”

Grisham went on to say that, until he understood the culture of his raising, he couldn’t understand what was happening in the courtroom.  The same could be said about our churches.

Tulia

Friends of Justice came into being quite by accident.  In 1999, law enforcement announced that forty-seven men and women had been arrested in the Texas Panhandle town of Tulia.

The local newspaper called the defendants “a cancer on the community”.  The headline read, “Tulia’s streets cleared of garbage”. 

I had moved to Tulia a year earlier with my wife, Nancy.  Our daughter, Lydia was entering college; our son Adam was in High school while Amos was in Junior High.  Tulia was Nancy’s home town.

We were soon followed by Nancy’s parents, Charles and Patricia Kiker.  They too had grown up in the countryside around Tulia and had decided to retire there.  Nancy and I came along for the ride.

Our initial concern with the drug sting was theological.  We assumed that everyone was guilty as charged, but, as the saying goes, “God don’t make no garbage!”  Referring to the defendants as human trash and “scumbags” was offensive to us.

It was also clear that the newspaper editor didn’t know any more about the men and women arrested in the drug bust than we did.  But he thought he knew them.  And if he thought that, so did everybody else in town.

So, we did a little poking around.  The names and addresses of the defendants were all listed in the newspaper, so we decided to talk to their families.  And that’s when we encountered a counter-narrative.  Many of the people arrested said they had never met the undercover officer in question.  Others, suspicious that the skinny stranger was “the law”, had run him off when he kept asking for drugs. 

It was quickly apparent that the defendants were either Black or were immersed in the local Black community.

Then we talked to a sympathetic defense attorney.  He told us the undercover officer had been arrested in the middle of the eighteen-month operation by the very sheriff who had hired him.  It seemed he had left his last job in law enforcement owing local merchants over $10,000.  When the undercover man told the sheriff in Swisher County that he had “taken care of it” he was sent back to the streets, no questions asked.

Finally, we learned that nothing connected the defendants to the little baggies of drugs displayed at trial but the uncorroborated word of the undercover cop. 

The cases quickly went to trial.  Juries handed down the maximum sentences allowed by law: twenty-five years, forty-five years, sixty years, ninety years.  One man was given six consecutive ninety-nine-year sentences.  After that, people started lining up for plea bargains.

No one was surprised when Senator John Cornyn named Tom Coleman “Texas Lawman of the Year.”

Friends of Justice began as the Beans, the Kikers, a four-hundred-pound farmer, and several dozen family members of the accused, people like Freddie Brookins, who lost a son and Thelma Johnson, who was related to half the accused in one way or another.  We met at the Beans home every Sunday night, singing spirituals, reading letters from prison and plotting our response.

The big question was why anyone with a lick of sense would believe the dim-witted undercover agent.  Even when juries learned of his legal problems, they hung on his every word.

When people see the world through a racist lens, they will approach every criminal case with certain pre-conceptions which, taken together, constitute a false narrative.  If the accused is guilty as charged, a false narrative can double a sentence.  If the accused is innocent, the false narrative issues in a wrongful conviction. 

In Tulia, the false narrative went something like this.  There was a time when people worked hard for a living, but nowadays everybody’s just looking for a handout, especially young Black males.  They’re too lazy to work, so they mess around with white girls and they sell drugs for easy money.  And nobody does anything about it.

Friends of Justice counters false narratives with counter-narratives that tell the truth, grieve with those who grieve, and point the way to hope. 

I am NOT a lawyer.  By training and experience, I am a pastor, a hospice chaplain and a church historian.  The work Friends of Justice does is no substitute for skilled legal representation.  But a good counter-narrative takes hundreds of hours of investigation, research and reflection, and few lawyers have time for that.  Even if they did, courtroom protocol places strict limits on the kind of story you can tell.

A good counter-narrative requires researching the racial history of the community (facts that are considered legally irrelevant).  Tulia was a largely monochrome community until irrigated agriculture revolutionized the economy at mid-century.   A sudden need for field labor brought share croppers from East Texas.  They lived in abandoned shacks and railway cars and subsisted in third-world conditions across the tracks in a ramshackle community white folks called the Sunset Addition (when they were feeling polite). 

When agriculture was automated and the irrigation water began to recede, the need for farm labor plummeted.  Young people tried to find greener pastures, but many remained.  Tulia was all they knew.  Many were celebrated for their exploits on the football field and the basketball court, but after graduation, they were instantly regarded as potential criminals.  Those who couldn’t make it in the city, returned, bouncing from one part-time seasonal job to the next. 

Then came the war on drugs.  Tulia received a grant from the narcotics task force in Amarillo and hired the only man who interviewed for the $17,000 yearly salary. 

We mailed our counter-narrative to the Texas Observer and waited.  A reporter, fresh out of journalism school, wrote a feature-length article.  Two sisters from Manhattan worked our narrative into a brief documentary.  Vanita Gupta, now the associate Attorney General, had just graduated from law school when she viewed the documentary.  Vanita came to Tulia and returned to New York with a suitcase-full of evidence which she shared with the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP.  Then Bob Herbert, a columnist with the New York Times wrote sixteen separate columns on the story. 

Before it was over, two of the most prestigious law firms in America were working for the Tulia defendants on pro bono basis.

While all this was going on, Nancy and I welcomed three school-age children, orphaned by the drug sting, into our home.  Friends of Justice made repeated trips to Austin to lobby for criminal justice reform, once with a Greyhound bus full of Tulia children.  We sang all the way to the capitol.  

On the second anniversary of the drug sting, we held a Never Again rally in Tulia.  At midnight, 300 people from all over America prayed on the courthouse steps in Tulia.

At the conclusion of a week-long evidentiary hearing at the Swisher County Courthouse, visiting Judge Ron Chapman found that undercover agent Tom Coleman was “not credible under oath.”  

In an event covered by a wide range of media outlets, the Tulia defendants were released and paid $5 million in compensation.   Tom Coleman was indicted for perjury.

A few weeks later, I accompanied three of the defendants to a reception with the Congressional Black Caucus.  The highlight was watching these young men dancing with Maxine Waters.

By the time the national media latched onto the story, nobody knew about Friends of Justice.  And yet, had we not created a credible counter-narrative, nothing would have happened.  Tom Coleman would still be 1999’s Texas Lawman of the Year.  This is a predictable pattern.  The counter-narratives we create are best understood as a foundation for other builders.  In most cases, overturning a wrongful conviction requires national media attention, dedicated pro bono legal work, and some good luck.  And when the media people and the attorneys have played their part in the process, they are credited with victory.  When the house is built, nobody comments on the foundation.  Learning to work without recognition is a prerequisite for the work we do.  The first time our efforts were overlooked, it really stung.  Now, we see it as an unavoidable part of the process.

Church Point

After six years of struggle in Tulia, I was ready to get back to my normal life, when I received a call from Ann Colomb.  Ann and three of her sons had been charged with running a multi-million-dollar drug operation out of their modest FHA bungalow in Church Point, a community just north of Lafayette, Louisiana.

Since Nancy and I were attending a conference in New Orleans, we arranged to meet there.  While Nancy played with two-year-old Mariah, I visited with Ann and her daughter, Jennifer. 

The story they told had a familiar ring.  Ann’s sons, Edward and Danny, appeared to be the primary targets.  Danny had set school records as a running back a few years earlier, while Edward had excelled at basketball.  Both boys were at the center of a large social circle of white and Black students, and in a highly segregated town, this made them dangerous. 

In subsequent visits to Church Point, I visited with some of the girls Anne’s sons had dated back in the day.  They told me how their parents threatened to disown them.  One girl was placed in a Catholic school in a neighboring town so she couldn’t date Black boys. 

The police harassment had been unremitting.   On several occasions, Edward and Danny had been arrested and charged with drug-related crimes.  Defense attorneys told the boys to accept plea bargains, but Anne wouldn’t have it.  Eventually, charges would be dropped for lack of evidence; local officials had been bluffing.

All the evidence in the case came from thirty-one federal prison inmates scattered throughout Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.  They had once been part of a massive Houston drug ring that controlled the crack cocaine traffic in the Lafayette area, and were serving multi-decade sentences without parole.  But they could cut their sentences by providing information the government could use to bust other dealers. 

Anne’s sons came to the attention of the feds when Brett Grayson, an assistant US Attorney in Lafayette, hired a retired police officer who once worked in Church Point.  Grayson was on the lookout for easy targets (narcotics conspiracy cases are easy to prosecute once you get the hang of it).  His assistant told him about Anne Colomb and her sons.  The two men travelled to a string of federal prisons asking inmates if they had anything on Anne’s boys.

Because this was a federal case, the government had to furnish defense counsel with all the letters that changed hands between inmates.  Two things were clear as I read this correspondence: first, none of these men possessed real knowledge of Anne’s boys.  Second, they intended to remedy that problem.

In these letters, inmates asked one another for information that would enable them to cobble together a believable story. They were sharing dates and times so their accounts would harmonize.

The judge in the case, Tucker Melancon, didn’t want this kind of testimony in his courtroom; but he was overruled by a panel of fifth circuit judges.   The government promised to drop the charges against Anne if her sons would take a plea bargain.  True to character, she refused the deal.

I told Anne that a case this insanely weak would never go before a jury.  But one morning, Anne called, her voice shaking with emotion.  “We’re going to trial in two days,” she said.  I jumped in the car and headed for Louisiana.

The trial unfolded over ten days.  If the witnesses were all telling the truth, the Colomb family would have raked in at least five million dollars from their nefarious activities.  Yet, to cite just one example, Danny was driving a car during this period that was so old his friends had to push him before it would start.  Danny was working construction during the day and going to trade school at night: hardly the M.O. of a drug kingpin.

I had been blogging about the case for months, but had been unable to stir up much media interest. So,   when court adjourned for the day, I would drive to the downtown library and tap out a report on one of their computers.  After a couple of days, the online edition of the Lafayette newspaper started linking to my posts and a lively online debate ensued.  Most readers were certain that everyone was guilty as charged because, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be on trial.

Danny and Edward were both married, and their wives and children sat stoically in the courtroom fearing the worst.  Danny, a devout Catholic, began each day in prayer at the church down the street from the courthouse.  They were staying brave for one another, but the sense of desperation was growing.

Midway through the parade of inmate witnesses, the prosecutor received a letter from Quinn Alex, a Texas inmate.  Alex was angry.  Working through his girlfriend in the free world, he had paid another inmate $2200 for information about the Colombs.  But his cellmate had been transferred without providing any information, so Quinn Alex hadn’t been able to testify.  He wanted his money back.

In accordance with legal protocol, Quinn Alex’s letter was shared with defense counsel.  They moved for a mistrial.  The judge, certain that the Fifth Circuit would overrule him, demanded that Quinn Alex be brought to Lafayette, but he allowed the trial to continue.

The night before the verdict, just as I was ready to nod off, I was gripped by the painful realization that Anne and her sons were doomed.  I felt it in my bones.  Slipping out of Anne’s guest bed, I knelt on the carpeted floor and prayed.  The next morning, Anne got herself dressed for court, and we drove to the federal courthouse in Lafayette.  There was little conversation.

 All four defendants were found guilty and sentenced to between ten and twenty years without parole.  The prosecutor announced that, because the Colomb home had been the center of a massive drug ring, he intended to seize it.  A collective gasp, followed by a groan, filled the courtroom.  Wives, husbands and children were glued to one another in grief.

I spent the rest of that night shuttling from home to home.  The grief was palpable.  We were praying for a miracle.

Quinn Alex, the federal inmate who had been cheated out of $2200, remained in custody in Lafayette.  When he expressed curiosity about the trial, someone printed off my blog posts.  Then Danny invited him to an impromptu Bible study. 

“I don’t think you’re no drug dealer,” Alex told Danny, “And I can’t believe your mama is either.”

Returning to his cell, Quinn Alex wrote a letter to Danny’s defense attorney describing secret gatherings in which inmates shared information.  He admitted that neither he, nor any of the government’s witnesses, had any first-hand knowledge of Anne and her boys. 

A hearing into the matter took place August 31, 2006.  The government and defense counsel both had their say.  The judge asked the prosecutor if he thought his witnesses were credible.   The prosecutor said he didn’t worry too much about witness credibility; that was for the jury to assess.  Judge Melancon ordered Anne, Danny, Edward and Sammie released immediately. 

Natasha Colomb embraced her Edward and Elizabeth Davis rushed to her Danny.  Elizabeth, who was carrying Danny’s child, hadn’t been able to stay in the house Danny had built for her while he was locked up. Now she took the ring she had been wearing close to her heart and placed it back on Danny’s finger where it belonged.    

“Hey y’all,” Danny called out, “we need to thank God for this miracle.” Thirty men, women, and children joined hands in a big circle. Danny led us in a short, workingman’s prayer followed by the familiar words, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .”

A few days later, Judge Melancon released his written ruling. “Occurrences in this case,” he said, “suggest that a systemic problem may exist within the penal facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In the view of the trial judge, the issues raised herein are so substantial and grave that those who have the power and the authority to do so need to address them.”

The case never attracted much media interest.  Radley Balko, then with Reason magazine, now with the Washington Post, wrote a feature story.  More significantly, the case attracted considerable attention in the legal world.  In 2018, Alexandra Natapoff, a nationally recognized authority on inmate testimony, used the Colomb case as a chilling illustration of how things can go wrong.  “The Colomb case,” she wrote, “is just one example of how the use of criminal informants, and jailhouse informants in particular, distorts large swaths of our criminal justice process.

Jena

On the same day Anne Colomb and her boys were vindicated, a routine school assembly unfolded at the high school in Jena, Louisiana.  In accordance with local custom, Black students sat on one side of the school auditorium; white students on the other.  When the principal asked if the students had any questions, a freshman asked if it was okay for Black students like him to sit under the tree on the white side of the quad during lunch hour.  Since there was no formal rule designating the tree in question as a “white tree”, the principal said, “of course”.

The following day, September 1, 2006, three nooses were found hanging from the tree in the quad.  Two of the nooses were black and one was gold: the Jena High School colors.

On Tuesday night, September 5, 2006, a group of black parents convened at the L&A Missionary Baptist Church in Jena to discuss their response to what they considered a hate crime and an act of intimidation.

When Black students staged an impromptu protest under the tree on Wednesday, September 6, 2006, a school assembly was hastily convened.  Flanked by police officers, District Attorney Reed Walters warned Black students that additional unrest would be treated as a criminal matter.  According to multiple witnesses, the District Attorney warned the student protestors that, “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.” 

On Thursday, September 7^th, police officers patrolled the halls of Jena High School and on Friday, September 8^th, the school was placed on full lockdown.  Confrontations between Black and white students went off-campus as sporadic fights broke out between Black football players and members of the all-white rodeo team.

The tension in the community ratcheted up in late November when, late one Thursday night, someone set fire to the academic wing of the school.   In the white community, it was widely believed (wrongly, it turned out) that Black students were the culprits. 

During the weekend, a white student threatened several Black football players with a sawed-off shotgun.  On another occasion, a Black student attempting to enter a community dance was assaulted by white students wielding beer bottles.  He was punched and kicked before adults broke up the fight.  

When classes resumed the following Monday, the atmosphere was toxic.  Shortly after the lunch hour, Justin Barker, a white student from the same social circle that hung the nooses at the beginning of the school year, was knocked to the ground and, witnesses said, kicked and stomped by several Black students.

Within an hour, six Black males had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit second-degree murder—charges carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison. 

It was at this point that Friends of Justice was asked to investigate.  I told the attorney who called me that I wouldn’t be intruding into the situation unless the parents of the accused students asked me directly.  Within five minutes, they were on the phone, begging me to come to Jena.

Upon arrival, I made a tour of the white community, asking the editor of the Jena Times, the pastor of First Baptist Church, and anyone else I could find to give me their understanding of the situation.  They were convinced that the defendants were all guilty as charged.

I dropped by the courthouse and asked for court records on the case which, to my delight, included all the hand-written eye witness accounts taken from the students and teachers who witnessed the scene.  I paid an exorbitant price for photocopies and went to my motel room.  Some of the witnesses named one or more of the accused, but several other Black students were named, and many witnesses said it happened so quickly they had no idea who was responsible.

Justin Barker, though badly bruised, was examined and released from the hospital the same day. 

In the Black community, the defendants were already being called “the Jena 6”.  They all denied involvement. 

Having read the eye witness statements, I had no opinion as to guilt or innocence.  What concerned me was that the assault on Justin Barker was being considered in pristine isolation from the toxic environment in which it occurred.  It was as if the Black students just decided to pick on a randomly-selected white student for the fun of it.

The more I learned from Black parents and students, the more convinced I became that the failure of white school officials to take the concerns of the Black community seriously had precipitated a dangerous social situation.  If guilt could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, I felt, the defendants should be punished; but they certainly didn’t deserve charges which, if sustained, would place them in prison for a quarter century without parole.

I composed a counter-narrative titled “Responding to the Crisis in Jena, Louisiana” and sent it to journalists who had written seriously about racial justice.  Next, I called up the Southern Poverty Law Center and asked if they would foot the bill for a first-rate civil rights attorney.  As word spread through the advocacy community, other attorneys asked to get involved.  Before long, each defendant had first-rate legal representation and a coordinated legal strategy was in the works.  Working with the local Black community, I organized bi-weekly protest meetings at a local Black Baptist church and travelled to Baton Rouge to meet with the Louisiana NAACP, then organized a local chapter in Jena.

Then Howard Witt, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, called me up.  He had read my account, he said, and would like to do a story.  Witt flew to the central Louisiana town of 3,000, conducted a round of interviews, and wrote a story which closely followed my initial account.  He would file a dozen additional stories before he was done.  With a compelling counter-narrative on the table, DA Reed Walters was forced to scale back the charges against the Jena 6 again and again.

Then my narrative hit the Black blogosphere.  The story seemed to capture the imagination of Black churches and college students across the nation.  People could relate to the plight of the Jena 6 because something similar had happened to a brother, a boyfriend, a cousin, or a close associate. 

On September 20, 2007, fifty thousand people riding in buses descended on tiny little Jena.  So many people flocked to the town that highways were jammed for miles around.  Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were there, as were a list of Black rappers and media celebrities I had never heard of.  Most protesters wore black T-shirts emblazoned with graphic portrayals of the school yard tree.  The event, though chaotic at times, was completely non-violent.

Overwhelmed by the publicity, the DA stipulated that if the defendants would apologize to Justin Barker and pay his modest medical bills, he would drop the charges.  Defense attorneys told their clients to take the deal.  Instead of wasting away in prison, the students known as the Jena 6 went on to college and are now working as college football coaches, teachers, off shore oil workers and trainers.  One young man, Theo Shaw, is now practicing law in Washington DC. 

The Jena 6 story became an issue in the 2008 Democratic primary as both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama released statements of concern.  “When a noose hangs from a schoolyard tree in the 21st century,” Obama said, “and young men are treated in a way that is not equal nor just, it is not just an offense to the people of Jena or to the African-American community, it is an offense to the ideals we hold as Americans. I renew my call for the District Attorney to drop the excessive charges filed in this case, and I will continue my decades-long fight against injustice and division as President.”

Winona

After giving a presentation on the Jena 6 at a legal conference in New Orleans, an attorney asked me if I would mind looking into the case of a young man from Winona, Mississippi.  Curtis Flowers stood accused of murdering four innocent people at a furniture store back in 1996.  He had been to trial five times on the same charges.  Winona, the attorney informed me, was the town where civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten half to death back in 1963.

All-white juries quickly convicted Curtis, but the Mississippi Supreme Court vacated two convictions because Evans broke the rules to keep people of color off the jury.

Then a jury was selected comprised of five Blacks and seven whites.  All five Black jurors voted to acquit; all seven white jurors voted to convict. 

In the fifth trial in 2008, James Bibbs, a Black school principal, was the only hold-out against conviction.  The DA was so incensed, he hauled Bibbs in front of the judge and accused him of perjury.  The charges were eventually thrown out, but Winona’s Black community got the message.

Curtis Flowers had worked at Tardy Furniture for three days, but was replaced when he didn’t return for work after the July 4^th weekend.  According to the state’s theory of the crime, Flowers was so incensed by this news that he stole a handgun from the glove compartment of a car, walked half a mile to the scene of the crime, murdered four people in cold blood, then returned home by a different route.

The state’s case against Flowers consisted of a dozen witnesses who claimed to have seen him on the morning of the murder walking to or from the crime scene.  In addition, an inmate at Parchman prison testified that Curtis had admitted to the crime while the two men were locked up together.  He recanted this testimony, apologizing to the Flowers family, then returned to his original story.

Only later did we learn that investigators had gone door-to-door along the suspected route, holding a picture of Curtis Flowers in one hand, and a leaflet promising $30,000 dollars for information leading to a conviction in the other. 

After spending several weeks reading five lengthy trial transcripts, interviewing family members, local media, neighbors, and defense counsel, I was convinced that Curtis was innocent.  Whoever committed this dreadful crime, I concluded, was a broken soul who killed because he liked it.

 A good-natured gospel singer from a devout family, Curtis Flowers didn’t fit the cold-killer profile, but only the Black community knew that.  White residents easily concluded that Flowers was just another one of those Black thugs they had seen on television.

When Curtis went to trial for the sixth time in June of 2010, seating was divided along racial lines and the atmosphere was tense.

I had traveled to Winona with my daughter, Lydia (then a sociology professor at Baylor) and we were joined by Lili Ibarra, a young attorney from Boston who had helped us with the Tulia case.  We stayed at the Holiday Inn until Lola Flowers insisted we stay with her.

 I had been able to interest CNN in the case, so Lola and Archie Flowers and the victims’ families were allowed to give statements to a national audience.   The sight of a CNN truck parked outside the courthouse, I was told, had unnerved the judge and prosecutor.  Still, when a jury of eleven whites was seated, I knew the outcome.  I had seen this movie before. 

Every night, I wrote a blog post describing the drama inside the courtroom.  A young Black attorney working with the defense was stopped by police as she drove to the courthouse.  Apparently, a professionally-dressed Black woman made the officer nervous.  When she complained to the judge, he accused her of inventing the incident for the media. 

I could tell from the nasty comments that some of the victims’ families were reading my stuff.  One man, accompanied by two of his sons, started questioning my motives to my face.  He referred to Lydia and Lilly as my harem.  He had the luxury of venting; I did not. 

Lola and Archie Flowers had been visiting Curtis every two weeks (as often as Parchman prison allowed), and, when Curtis was convicted and led from the courtroom, they continued this practice. Moments after the trial ended, the local sheriff approached me.  “If I was you,” he drawled, “I’d get out of town as quickly as possible.”  Lydia and I complied. 

An increasingly conservative Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the case entered the federal appeals arena.  Now Curtis was being represented by some of the best legal minds in the business.  They researched the case by reading trial transcripts supplemented by my counter-narrative.

I kept writing about the case, eventually producing over thirty lengthy blog posts about the social and historical context of the case.  I saw what happened to Curtis as an extension of the civil rights struggle in the Mississippi Delta. 

Then, in late 2016, I received a call from Madelleine Baron.  She and her team had produced a highly-regarded podcast called In the Dark.  They had read everything I had written on the case and were planning to devote an entire season to the Flowers saga.  They spent two full days with me in Arlington, plying me with questions. 

A team of four investigators camped out in Winona for the better part of a year.  They interviewed and re-interviewed all the witnesses, family members of the victims, and dozens of people on both sides of racial divide.  They followed my narrative, arriving at conclusions that were obvious to anyone who had examined the story closely.  

Eventually, one of the state’s eye witnesses recanted, then another.  They told the police they weren’t sure if they saw Curtis on the morning of the crime, but after repeated interviews, they had caved to pressure.  Once their names were signed to a witness statement, they were threatened with perjury if they changed the story.

In the end, even the jailhouse snitch admitted that he concocted a false narrative in exchange for lenient treatment.

By the time In the Dark was through, virtually every eye witness had recanted their testimony.  Twenty episodes had been downloaded by an astounding 40 million listeners and In the Dark was the recipient of the prestigious Peabody award. 

The Supreme Court reversed Flowers’ conviction on the basis of racial bias. “The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals,” the majority opinion read, “strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury.”

Eventually, a beleaguered Doug Evans kicked the case over to the Mississippi Attorney General, all charges were dropped and, twenty-one years after his initial arrest, Curtis Flowers was a free man.

Only then did the national media take an interest.  Suddenly, every venue from Sixty Minutes to the New York Times wanted a piece of the action.

Tragically, Lola Flowers died just days after the Supreme Court ruling.  I talked to her by phone on the last night of her life.  She was in pain, she told me, “But I know Curtis is coming home, and that’s all that matters.”  The state of Mississippi wouldn’t allow Mr. Flowers to attend his mothers’ funeral.  But he’s back in the free world, adjusting to cell phones, and spending as much time fishing as he can spare.  “It relaxes me,” he told me in mid-June.  “It keeps my mind off my troubles.”

In 2021, Curtis Flowers sued prosecutor Doug Evans.  In November of 2022, Evans ran for County Judge but was soundly defeated.

Conclusion

There is a tendency to blame what happened in Tulia, Church Point, Jena and Winona on villainous prosecutors, but it takes a village to convict an innocent man.  It is tempting to believe these communities are isolated pools of vestigial racism, backwater throwbacks to an era that is mercifully dead and gone.  But these cases, and recent Supreme Court decisions, speak to the social sickness of this present moment. 

Yes, our churches should pay more attention to the criminal justice system.  No question.  But we will never do that until we acknowledge our own brokenness. “The Church must come out of its stagnation,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a gestapo prison cell. “We must move out again into the open air of intellectual discussion with the world, and risk saying controversial things, if we are to get down to the serious problems of life.” 

We are not the solution; the gospel of Jesus Christ is the solution.  And so, I leave you with Brother Brueggemann’s prophetic tasks of the church: “to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial, and express hope in a society that lives in despair.”

As head of Friends of Justice, I have spent the past two decades overturning wrongful convictions.  Working with friends and family of the accused, dedicated attorneys, resourceful journalists and podcasters, and motivated non-profit organizations, we have accomplished amazing things.  Our role is foundational.  We explain how an innocent person (or persons) ended up behind bars.   

I have already written six posts, beginning with an introduction, explaining how the case against David Black evolved.  Now we come to the actual trial.  Don’t be concerned if David’s story is new to you.  I’ll bring you up to speed as we go.  If you want more detail, you find it here, here, here, here and here.

The case against David Black rested on the testimony of two compromised witnesses.

The government’s theory of the crime is quite simple.  The drama played out on February 2^nd, 1997, in the 400 block of K Street in Washington D.C., less than a mile from the National Mall.  At approximately one-thirty in the afternoon, Alice Chow, a beloved 78- year-old member of Washington’s Chinese community, was walking on the southside of K Street, headed for 5^th Street, when a bullet entered her left armpit and exited her right armpit.  She died on the way to the hospital.  (If you are having trouble picturing this tragic event, have no fear, there will be lots of maps below).

Two witnesses, Larry Johnson and Barbara Marshall, explained how Ms. Chow died.  Two Black men, David Black (known to the witnesses as “Rob”) and James Smith (known as “June Bug”) were arguing on the north side of K Street, near the hood of a small blue car.  As Larry and Barbara looked on, June Bug fled from Rob.  Rob circled the blue car, opened the passenger door, pulled out a handgun, sprawled across the roof of the car, and fired two shots.  According to the official story, one of those shots killed Alice Chow. 

If Larry and Barbara are credible, Rob stayed at the scene for five minutes, then drove away in the blue car.

On all these points, Larry and Barbara were agreed.

Three different Stories

The harder you look at the evidence presented at David Black’s trial, the more confusing the official story becomes.  In fact, the jury heard three contradictory stories.  Unfortunately, the facts were presented in a hopeless jumble.  Let’s sort things out.

Each story presented to the jury possessed three positioinal elements: the position of Alice Chow, the position of Rob (the alleged shooter), and the position of June Bug (the runner).  From the prosecution’s perspective, each story possessed certain strengths and weaknesses. 

Barbara’s Story

In Barbara’s story, the fight took place directly across the street from Lilly Memorial Baptist Church and June Bug ran down K Street in the direction of “they alley” (the green arrow on the map below).  Barbara testified that she didn’t see Alice Chow at all.

Strengths:

• Since, in all three stories, there is a four or five second lapse between June Bug running and Rob shooting, Barbara’s story provided plenty of time for Rob to fetch a gun from the passenger’s side of the car and fire.

Weaknesses:

• A bullet fired from this position could not have hit Alice Chow (the blue arrow above marks her position according to street witnesses).
• If the bullet did hit Ms. Chow, it would have struck her in the right side, not the left.
• Facial recognition is impossible at 150 feet and Barbara’s story places her 200-250 feet from the shooter.

Larry’s Story:

In the course of his trial testimony, Larry was never asked to describe the position of the various actors, but his grand jury testimony was clear. Alice Chow was in the crosswalk walking toward the apartment building (yellow dot below), June Bug was in the alley running toward Ms. Chow (red dot), and Rob (blue dot) was positioned within five feet of the window where Larry stood watching (green dot).

Strengths:

• Larry’s story brings the action right under Larry’s observation point where faces could be recognized.
• In this scenario, a bullet fired by Rob could have struck Ms. Chow.

Weaknesses:

• Street witnesses unanimously place the victim 200 feet to the west of the crosswalk (almost to the church (red pin above).
• In Larry’s story, a bullet fired by Rob (blue dot) would have stuck the victim (yellow dot) on the right side or in the chest, not on her left side (per forensic testimony).
• If Larry’s story is true, Barbara’s story must be false, and vice versa.

The prosecutor’s story:

In his closing statement to the jury, AUSA Whitted created a scenario that departed dramatically from all the testimony presented at trial.  By combining elements of Barbara’s story and Larry’s story, Whitted avoided some of the weaknesses in both accounts.  In Whitted’s story, Alice Chow was about to cross K Street at the crosswalk (yellow dot below) when the bullet struck her.    

Strengths:

• In Whitted’s story, a bullet fired by Rob (blue dot) at June Bug (red dot) could have struck Alice Chow (yellow dot). 
• A bullet fired at this angle could have struck Alice Chow in the left side of her body, consistent with forensic testimony.

Weaknesses:

• Whitted was alleging facts not asserted by any trial witness.  Although Larry placed Alice Chow in the crosswalk in his grand jury statement, he never made this claim at trial. 
• To make his story work, Whitted had to move Ms. Chow 200 feet to the east of where street witnesses consistently placed her.
• Darrell Haskell (more on him later) testified that he was standing where Whitted’s story places Alice Chow when he heard a pistol round.  Haskell didn’t see June Bug, Chow, or David Black.
• Whitted’s story assumes that Ms. Chow was coming home from church.  But since the worship service she attended ended two hours before the fatal incident, this couldn’t possibly be true.  Street witnesses unanimously testified that Ms. Chow was walking toward 5^th street.  In other words, she was leaving her apartment, not coming home.

Witnesses on the Run

Over seven months elapsed between the mid-April day when Larry and Barbara testified to a grand jury and the December trial of David Black.  As a reward for assisting the Chow investigation, Larry spent this period incarcerated in Hope Village, the only halfway house in the city (he was facing a laundry list of charges that were not adjudicated until the conclusion of Black’s trial).  When you are the only person claiming to have observed a crime, you enjoy a great deal of leverage.  (As explained in an earlier post, Larry didn’t give David Black’s name to the police; the police gave David’s name to Larry.)

Hope Village residents had to be home by midnight, but were otherwise free to come and go as they pleased.  Even so, days before Larry was scheduled to testify to the grand jury in mid-April, he failed to return to Hope House.  The police eventually tracked him down and, after a brief conference with prosecutor Kenneth Whitted, deposited him in front of the grand jury. 

Larry was rewarded for his grand jury testimony by being returned to Hope House even though he had demonstrated he couldn’t be trusted.  Not surprisingly, sometime between his mid-April and early December, Larry escaped a second time.  Court records document this second escape, but no details are given. 

Barbara Marshall’s story follows a similar pattern.  Informed that the trial was scheduled for December, Barbara told prosecutor Whitted that she had decided not to testify.  If Whitted put her on the stand, she said, she would recant the story she had told to the grand jury.  Moreover, she planned to accuse the police of bullying her into compliance.  We know she said this because Whitted forced her to recount the entire story in the presence of the jury.

When Inspector Joe Fox attempted to go over Barbara’s grand jury testimony with her, he received the same treatment.  

Fox and Whitted weren’t too worried.  They knew Barbara couldn’t change her story without committing perjury, and that would mean serious jailtime. 

On December 8^th, the first day of David Black’s trial, Steve Roth found a distraught Barbara sitting outside the courthouse cafeteria.  Roth introduced himself as an investigator for the defense and asked if she would be willing to give a statement. Without hesitation, Barbara told Roth that she hadn’t seen anything on the day of the shooting.  She had seen people running in the street, but this was several minutes after the shooting.   She had been unable to identify faces because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. 

Larry Johnson couldn’t have seen anything either, she said, because he had spent the night in her apartment and was asleep when she heard gunshots.  When Barbara saw police officers entering the building, she woke Larry up and escorted Larry to the nearest elevator.  Since he had been barred from entering the building and had missed an important court hearing, he was subject to arrest.  

Finally, Barbara explained that she had signed off on Fox’s favored scenario because she was frightened and just wanted to go home.  Like Larry, Barbara didn’t identify David as the shooter, she simply agreed (after two days of intense interrogation) to endorse the official story.

Roth jotted down her recantation word-for-word, and then had her read it.  Barbara made a couple of inconsequential corrections and signed her name.  Then she went into hiding.  Whitted had hoped to put her on the stand early in the trial, but it took the police several days to track her down.  Barbara ended up being one of the last witnesses to testify.

At trial, both star witnesses both denied seeing the shooting

Larry Johnson had been happy to tell his story to the grand jury.  This was likely because he had just escaped from the halfway house and feared he might be sent back to jail.  By contrast, his trial testimony was grudging, vague, and riddled with contradictions.  He claimed that he had seen Rob and June Bug beefing on the street, but had moved back inside the apartment he was visiting by the time the shooting started. 

A startled Ken Whitted was forced to show Larry his grand jury testimony and ask him if he really wanted to change his story.  Not wishing to add a perjury charge to the string of felonies he was already facing, Larry reluctantly returned to his original account.  Larry’s entire testimony consisted of him either getting the story wrong or not being able to remember anything about the incident.  Over and over, Whitted was forced to direct his star witness back to the grand jury transcript. 

Most likely, Larry was uncooperative because he honestly couldn’t remember what he had told the grand jury seven months earlier. Not wishing to contradict his earlier story, he repeatedly claimed ignorance of even the most basic facts.

I am not an attorney.  My voice, in isolation, can’t win justice for David Black.  But facts this bad, once exposed, typically invite concerted pushback.  The justice coalition David Black deserves is taking shape.  I promise to keep you posted.

It is also possible that Larry was unnerved by the sight of David Black seated beside his attorney.  He had always known that his testimony would send David Black to prison for decades, but the full implications of this fact may not have hit home until he found himself face-to-face with the man he was incriminating.

Barbara Marshall’s testimony got off to a more promising start.  She had a good grasp of her grand jury testimony and calmly repeated the official story.  She had seen June Bug and Rob fighting.  She had seen June Bug in the direction of 4^th Street.  She had seen Rob retrieve a pistol from the car and fire two or three shots.  Then she saw Rob drive away.  She wasn’t sure if someone else was driving, she said, but she definitely saw him leave the scene.

When Whitted had completed his examination, defense attorney Thomas Farquhar asked Barbara about the recantation she had dictated to his investigator on the first day of trial.  Suddenly, Barbara’s story underwent a 180-degree transformation.  She had been in her apartment when she heard gunfire.  Since her apartment faces onto a parking lot behind the building, she had no way of knowing what was happening on K Street.  So, she opened a window and shouted to a friend who was walking across the lot.  The friend had also heard gunfire, but didn’t know where it was coming from.

Farquhar asked Barbara if, as stated in her recantation, she remained in her apartment until police officers came knocking on her door.  Yes, she said, that’s what happened.  She knew Larry was a wanted man and was eager to get him out of harm’s way.

Then, inexplicably, the defense attorney started insulting and badgering his witness.  Hadn’t she told Whitted that Rob was running in the direction of 5^th Street (she hadn’t).  Barbara reminded Farquhar that June Bug, not Rob, was the man running, and he was headed for “the alley” (that is, in the direction of 4^th Street).

Next, Farquhar accused Barbara of claiming that June Bug was running toward Lily Memorial Baptist Church (she hadn’t).      

Farquhar’s accusatory tone rekindled Barbara’s trauma and wounded her pride.  If what she told Steven Roth was different from what she told Fox and Whitted, she insisted, Roth must have written it down wrong.  She was an honest people who always told the truth.

Farquhar reminded his witness that Roth had given her a chance to read over the statement and make corrections.  It was too late.  All that mattered to Barbara now was defending her own honor.

When Farquhar sat down and it was Whitted’s turn to ask the questions once again, Barbara returned to her original story. 

The jury never heard David Black and James “June Bug” Smith testify

Bullying an emotionally fragile witness was a major blunder.  Failing to call the two men involved in the altercation on K street proved to be a total disaster. 

By keeping his client off the witness stand, Farquhar assured that the jury would never learn that, although David had never done prison time, he had a few minor drug infractions on his record.  This small advantage was more apparent than real.  Most jurors suspect the worst from a young Black male from a high-crime neighborhood who stands accused of killing an honorable woman.  

When a defendant doesn’t testify, jurors always wonder why.  Always.  They reason that, if they were accused of a serious crime, they would certainly speak in their own defense.  When the man on trial stands silent before his accusers, he looks guiltyg.  Every single time. 

From the time David was arrested in March, 1997 to the time he was convicted nine months later, he was never allowed to tell his own story.

David’s silence wouldn’t have been as damning if James “June Bug” Smith had been called to the stand.  Testifying before the grand jury in May, Smith insisted he wasn’t on K Street the day Alice Chow died.  He had been near enough to hear gunshots, he said, but had no idea who was shooting.  

In addition, June Bug told the grand jury how he had inadvertently implicated David Black.  Asked if he knew anyone in the neighborhood who owned a blue car, June Bug said he knew of one person.  He didn’t know his actual surname, but his street name was “Black”.  He hadn’t been talking about David, he insisted.  Everyone knew that Rob drove a red Cadillac.

James “June Bug” Smith spent several days at the courthouse waiting in vain for a chance to set the record straight. In Farquhar’s view, Smith had “too much baggage”.  But even if his rap sheet was as extensive as Farquhar implied, his silence bolstered the prosecution’s case. 

Street witness testimony doesn’t square with the official story

According to Barbara Marshall’s trial testimony, the altercation between “Rob” and “June Bug” (orange rectangle) occurred across the street from Lilly Memorial Baptist Church ( represented by the red pin).  Three women testified that they were standing on the sidewalk immediately in front of the church (blue rectangle above) when they heard gunfire and saw Alice Chow fall. 

If the violent argument between Rob and June Bug made such a big impression on witnesses located in the apartment building 250 feet away (green box above), it certainly would have captured the attention of three women who were happily conversing just across the street.  The women saw nothing.  No blue car.  No shouting match.  No running.  No shooting.   

It is possible, of course, that the Rob-June Bug dust-up took place immediately in front of the apartment building.  This is what Larry told the grand jury.  But Darrell Haskell (the man initially identified as the shooter) was standing immediately across the street from the building when he heard a single shot fired (black box above).  Like the women in front of the church, Haskell didn’t see a blue car, he didn’t see two men arguing, and he didn’t see anyone fire a gun.

In short, there is a complete disconnect between the events alleged by the government and what the event observed by street witnesses.  Larry and Barbara are all over the map.  Both witnesses testified that they didn’t see the shooting and that they did.  Barbara places the Rob-June Bug argument across the street from the church; Larry locates the altercation right in front of the apartment building (at least 200 feet to the east).  The street witnesses, by contrast, told the jury the same exact story. 

Police testimony contradicts a central feature of Larry Johnson’s testimony

There were no police officers on the 400 block of K Street when Alice Chow died.  But within five minutes of the incident, the area was swarming with law enforcement and EMS personnel.  Kimberly Bowman arrived on the scene less than five minutes after the shooting.  She saw a crowd of people was gathered around the victim.  Ms. Chow had already been placed on a stretcher.  Within ten minutes of the shooting, the victim was in an ambulance headed for Howard University Hospital. 

Other officers testified that, within ten minutes of the shooting, they had arrested Darrell Haskell at apartment 305. 

Larry Johnson consistently testified that, after witnessing the shooting from a hallway window, he rode the elevator to the 6^th floor where he briefly compared notes with Barbara Marshall and her friend, Reecie Green.  Then Larry and Barbara took the elevator to the lobby, rushed out onto the street, and observed Alice Chow surrounded by a crowd of people.  Larry testified that he was back in apartment 305 when the police arrived to arrest Darrell Haskell.

Barbara Marshall was never asked to corroborate this remarkable story.  If Barbara confirmed Larry’s account, why didn’t Whitted ask her about it?  Either Barbara told Whitted that it never happened, or, inexplicably, he never asked her. 

Larry testified that he stood in his hallway window for five minutes after the shooting until Rob finally drove away.  By that time, if police officer testimony is to be believed, Alice Chow would have already been removed from the scene.

Larry has also testified that between fifteen and twenty minutes elapsed between the shooting and his arrival on the street with Barbara and Ms. Green.  And yet he says he returned to apartment 305 before the police arrived.  Since the police arrived at apartment 305 within ten minutes of the shooting, Larry’s timeline is impossible.  Again, the story crumbles at the slightest touch.  Unfortunately, defense counsel never brought these obvious problems to the attention of the jury.  In addition, he never interviewed Barbara’s friend Reecie Green. 

A solid alibi

Three members of David Black’s family told the jury that he was with them when Alice Chow died.  They were celebrating his sister Kizzie’s birthday, so the date was easy to remember.  Kenneth Whitted questioned each alibi witness, probing for inconsistencies.  None emerged.  David had been with them all afternoon and well into the evening.  If they were lying to protect a loved one, it was an impressive performance. By finding David Black guilty, the jury had to conclude that his alibi witnesses were liars.

Hopelessly deadlocked

According to trial transcripts, the jury struggled with the David Black case.  After several hours of deliberation, they sent a note to the judge saying that they were hopelessly deadlocked.  The jury may have been split 6-to-6 or 4-to-8.  It is more likely, however, that only one of two jurors had serious misgivings. 

When the judge told the jurors to keep working, they asked him for a definition of “reasonable doubt”.   Shortly thereafter after receiving an answer, they had reached a verdict.

It is shocking that a case resting on the credibility of two comically compromised witnesses ever made it to trial.  When both key witnesses state flatly that they didn’t actually witness the incident then say the exact opposite, reasonable doubt is cooked into the judicial pie.

Perjury and obstruction of justice

The prosecution argued that Larry and Barbara were afraid to implicate the defendant because they feared retaliation.  But were they afraid of David Black, or did they fear the consequences of angering the government?  If they were afraid of David, they would have said whatever was most likely to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.   

We don’t know what Kenneth Whitted told his star witnesses behind closed doors, but we can be pretty sure.  By the time he took the stand at David’s trial, Larry had already escaped from prison on two occasions and was facing several other criminal charges.  Barbara had defied a subpoena by going into hiding on the first day of trial.  All would be forgiven if they stuck with the government’s story.  But if they contradicted that story, both witnesses were facing serious time in prison.  You can be sure that Whitted described their predicament in the starkest terms possible.

Perjury (intentional false testimony) is taken very seriously by the judicial system.  In a case this sensitive, Larry and Barbara faced up to five years in prison.  It is difficult to testify honestly with the sword of Damocles hovering over your head.

In most cases, jurors have little grasp of these realities. 

The juror’s dilemma

When the crime is heinous and the facts are ambiguous, criminal cases often hinge on raw emotion.  The emotional rewards of a guilty verdict greatly outweigh the feel-good effect of an acquittal.

From a juror’s perspective, prosecutors play for Team America and speak from conviction; defense attorneys are viewed as hired mercenaries doing a nasty job.  You can’t find a defendant not guilty without tacitly accusing the police and the prosecution of serious misconduct.

Neither Judge Herbert Dixon, Assistant US Attorney Kenneth Whitted, lead investigator Joseph Fox, or defense attorney Thomas Farquhar ever understood what was being alleged in this case.  They were too busy to appreciate the huge gap between Larry’s testimony and Barbara’s, to grasp just how frequently both witnesses contradicted themselves, or to ask themselves why these people were so afraid of testifying.  No one asked how many hours Barbara spent in police custody before breaking down, or why, in the first few weeks of the investigation, Larry falsely implicated several innocent people in the death of Alice Chow. 

All they knew was that two people said they saw the defendant fire a gun on K Street seconds before Alice Chow slumped to the round.  The Metropolitan Police Department had a scandalously poor record of closing murder cases in the late 1990s.  The public was demanding justice for Alice Chow and, if the killer wasn’t David Black, the case was headed for the cold case file. 

It is equally clear that Dixon, Whitted, Fox and Farquhar lived inside an echo chamber.  No one had the time or inclination to ask hard questions, so they took their cues from one another.

The jury likely concluded that all the authority figures in the courtroom believed David was guilty.  Sure, Farquhar was going through the motions, but if he really thought his client was innocent he would have prepared for trial.  He was asking questions off the top of his head.  He had no discernible trial strategy.  He frequently misstated the facts.  He failed to call critically important witnesses. 

An acquittal, therefore, would have been construed as an indictment of the entire legal system.  You couldn’t vote to acquit without concluding that the men on Team USA were guilty of gross misconduct.  Most jurors are unprepared to send a message of such gravity. 

But there is a second aspect to the juror’s dilemma.  A guilty verdict gave the community the closure it craved; an acquittal or a not-guilty verdict would have deprived Alice Chow of the justice she deserved.  No one would question a guilty verdict, low-status defendants almost never beat a federal indictment.  Unless a case has generated national publicity, the media generally show up for opening arguments and disappear until the verdict is announced (if they show up at all).  A not guilty verdict would have left the citizenry with a mouthful of ashes. 

It is unspeakably difficult for a single individual to hang a jury.  Eleven jurors are eager to see justice served (even if that means giving people like Larry and Barbara a pass); the lone holdout is frustrating that desire.  Only the rarest of individuals can withstand that kind of pressure.

These emotional realities are in play in every trial; but in the David Black trial, the stakes were unusually high.

Where from here?

Once an innocent defendant has been convicted by a jury, the mischief is extraordinarily difficult to undo.  Technical and procedural issues can be raised on appeal, but the validity of a jury verdict cannot be questioned. 

Yet I believe justice is coming for David Black.  The case is too stupid, too ridiculous, too bizarre and, frankly, too obscene to stand.   

That said, I am quite sure the jurors in this case were well-intentioned, diligent and reasonably intelligent.  If the jurors in this case were exposed to my critique, I suspect some of them would have serious second thoughts.  Tragically, the fatal flaws in the government’s case weren’t exposed at trial.

Neither do I blame Thomas Farquhar, David’s (now deceased) defense attorney, for the outcome.  In the course of David Black’s trial, Farquhar repeatedly asked Judge Dixon to delay the proceedings so he could speak to other judges in the building about other cases.  To survive financially, defense attorneys are typically forced to take far more cases than they can realistically handle. The vast majority of cases end in plea bargain.  The rare case that goes to trial generally receives little attention until the last minute.  This was certainly true in the Black case.  In a pretrial hearing, Farquhar skimmed through police reports he had never read before even as he put questions investigator Joe Fox.  Farquhar had a vague grasp of the grand jury testimony in the Black case, but he lacked the time required to spot problems and inconsistencies.  Since he had no time to vet potential witnesses, he simply didn’t call them.

In short, Thomas Farquhar was a typical overworked and underpaid defense attorney.  He did the best he could under the circumstances, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

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