Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South. David Rose
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had no real idea why he was wedded so strongly to capital punishment, but there was obviously nothing confected about the strength of his feeling. ‘I love people,’ he remarked happily as we sped through the gates of the vast military base. ‘You can probably tell that. So if you hurt one of my people, I’m going to come after you.’
In the past, he said, he had received dozens of letters asking him to reconsider death sentences. ‘The strange thing was, they all seemed to come from Holland and Wales. Don’t think I can’t recognise an organised letter-writing campaign when I see it. I got news for you. My education puts me in the top 3 per cent in this country, but I couldn’t name a single city in Wales. Folks round here don’t necessarily care what folks in Wales think of them. I guess those letters came from Amnesty International or something. They should be concentrating on real human rights abuses, like in the Third World.’
Pullen’s class, in an echoing room easily big enough to contain his hundred students, was a bravura performance. ‘Let me give you a little insider tip,’ he began. ‘Our fine Attorney General, Michael Bowers, is planning to run for Governor.’
‘How do you know?’ someone asked.
‘Bowers made his intentions plain to me personally. When we met up recently’. Pullen paused, then winked: ‘At an execution.’
An Alabama state trooper, so fat he seemed almost triangular, asked how lawyers got to be judges. Pullen chuckled. ‘You may rest assured that anyone successful in defence litigation need not apply. At least not on the Chattahoochee circuit.’
After the seminar, Pullen took me to dinner in a barbecue restaurant downtown. As we consumed a small pork mountain, I asked him about one of the cases that had attracted those letters from Holland and Wales, a capital murder he’d prosecuted in 1976. The defendant had been a mentally retarded man named Jerome Bowden, an African-American aged twenty-four. The body of his victim, Kay Stryker, a white woman of fifty-five, was found in her house, knifed and beaten, several days after her death. Afterwards, the police searched the home of her sixteen-year-old neighbour, Jamie Graves, and found an old pellet gun, its butt stained with her blood, together with her jewellery. Graves admitted burgling her home, but claimed she was killed by his friend Bowden. In return for his help, he was sentenced to life rather than being given the death penalty.
Bowden soon heard the police were looking for him. He walked up to a squad car he saw in the street, and asked if he could be of help. He was arrested on the spot, and less than two months after the murder, he stood trial. Pullen’s case rested on Bowden’s confession. He tried to retract it on the witness stand, saying he hadn’t been in Stryker’s house at all, and that a police detective had promised ‘to speak to the judge’ to save him from the electric chair in return for his signature. At the start of the hearing, Pullen had exercised his right to strike prospective jurors, so removing all eight African-Americans from the panel and ensuring that Bowden was tried only by whites. They did not believe him, and found him guilty on the second day of the trial.
In Georgia, as in many American states, capital trials consist of two phases. The first is the ‘guilt phase’, when the jurors have to decide guilt or innocence; in the event of a guilty verdict, they will go on to the ‘sentencing phase’, when it becomes their responsibility to decide whether a murderer should live or die. Here Bowden’s attorney, Samuel Oates, begged the jury not to impose the death penalty, arguing that his client was of low intelligence and had a ‘weak mind’.
Pullen dismissed this suggestion, arguing that it had been cooked up ‘so someone can jump up and say, “Poor old Jerome, once about ten years ago his momma told somebody he ought to see a psychiatrist.” He is not a dumb man, not an unlearned man … He certainly knows right from wrong.’ In his view, Bowden was ‘a defendant beyond rehabilitation’, for whom death was the only possible sentence, because he had been sent to prison – for burglary – before. He held up a photograph of Stryker’s body. ‘How do you take a three-time loser who would take a blunt instrument and beat a harmless fifty-five-year-old woman’s head into that? You can look through the holes and see the brains.’
In the nineteenth century, slavery’s apologists had justified human bondage by equating black people with animals. Appealing to the jury to decree the death of a mentally retarded teenager, Pullen invoked this tradition: ‘This defendant has shown himself by his actions to be no better than a wild beast – life imprisonment is not enough. Why? Because he has killed. Because he has tasted blood.’ It would take courage for the jury to vote to have Bowden put to death, Pullen averred; much more courage than giving him a life sentence. But ‘it took more courage to build this great nation, and it will take more courage to preserve it, from this man and his like’.
Almost ten years later, in June 1986, Bowden had lost his every appeal, and his last chance lay with Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole. However, evidence had now emerged that Pullen had overstated Bowden’s mental capabilities. In fact he had an IQ of fifty-nine, and was well within the clinical parameters of mental retardation.
Bowden’s pending execution became a cause célèbre. The international music stars Joan Baez, Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Bryan Adams signed a petition to stop the killing, and sang at a protest concert in Atlanta. A flurry of last-minute legal petitions bought a few days’ stay of execution, but on 23 June the Pardons and Parole board decided that he had indeed, in Pullen’s phrase, ‘known the difference from right and wrong’ at the time of Kay Stryker’s murder. The following morning, Bowden was led into the death chamber, his head and right leg shaved. The prison warden held out a microphone to carry his last words to an audience of lawyers, reporters and officials.
‘I am Jerome Bowden and I would like to say my execution is about to be carried out,’ he said. ‘I would like to thank the people of this institution. I hope that by my execution being carried out it will bring some light to this thing that is wrong.’ His meaning was ambiguous, but most observers thought he was referring to his own electrocution. Then he sat down in the electric chair. There was a short delay when the strap attaching a leather blind to hide his face from the audience snapped, and had to be replaced. But when the executioner threw the switch, the chair functioned smoothly. Eighteen months after Bowden’s death, the Georgia legislature passed a new statute barring state juries from sentencing the mentally retarded to death.
Pullen told me he still slept easy over Bowden’s execution. ‘I never heard Jerome Bowden was retarded until Joan Baez had a concert in Atlanta and said he was retarded. Jerome Bowden was no rocket scientist, but he knew words like “investigation” and “detective” and was kind of articulate. On death row, they said he was a deep thinker in Bible class. He was fit to execute.’
When we left the restaurant, it was already late. The cicadas were out in force, their strange chorus loud enough to overcome the noise of the distant traffic. We strolled back towards Pullen’s car, the shadows of the historic district’s houses shifting under a blurry moon. Not far from the Government Center, Pullen stopped.
‘This is the site of the old courthouse. This is where they seized a little black boy and took him up to Wynnton, right by where the library is now. He wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen and they shot him thirty times. The son of the man who led that mob grew up to become a judge. Kind of interesting, isn’t it?’
I left town next day intrigued but also bewildered, and with no real answers as to why Doug Pullen and his colleagues had such a passion for putting men to death. But notwithstanding Gray Conger’s protestations, I was beginning to suspect that if there was a place where the ‘amazing transformation’ in race relations that he claimed to have witnessed had been least effective, it was within the criminal justice system.
In police stations, prosecutors’ offices and the criminal courts, societies attempt to deal objectively with their most traumatic events. But the horrifying nature of those events sometimes makes objectivity impossible to achieve, and creates opportunities for ancient hatreds and primeval fears to reassert themselves. Stories about crimes and criminal trials, writes the British historian Victor Gatrell, permit ‘a quest for hidden truths, when obscure people have to articulate motives, interests, and buried values and assumptions … They expose fractured moments