Last Night Out#2
The defendants spent the next seventeen years in prison.
In 2009, Centurion Ministries, after having spent several years studying the voluminous record of the case, began a field investigation on the soldiers’ behalf.
Through 2012, Centurion interviewed numerous witnesses in a search for new evidence.
It retained new counsel for the soldiers, tapping Seattle attorney Peter Camiel, who had previously served as attorney for other Centurion clients, and Savannah attorney Steve Sparger.
At the top of the witness list was James White, whose testimony had always been questionable.
Police had measured the distance between White’s front door on East Broad Street and where the car had sat in the middle of the intersection as seventy-two feet.
It had been a dark, moonless night with inadequate street lighting.
These factors, along with the short time White had had to observe the shooting while in a highly traumatized state, fearing for his life, all undercut the reliability of his testimony.
Centurion tracked down White, along with his wife, Suzette, in a room at a Super 8 motel off I-85 just outside Newnan, Georgia, some thirty miles southwest of the Atlanta airport.
They were homeless and had all their worldly possessions piled every which way in their room.
Over the course of that year, Centurion met with the Whites three times, getting to know them as people and discussing James’s testimony and the circumstances surrounding it.
Finally, with shame and remorse, the Whites admitted that James had indeed lied at the trial.
Ever since, their consciences had been deeply troubling them. This led them to execute sworn affidavits in January 2011, fully recanting White’s trial testimony. (Sadly, Suzette died of a heart attack in 2012 at age fifty-one.)
In 2011, Centurion caught up with Heather Radford at her home in central Pennsylvania.
By then she was in her eighth year as a state prison corrections officer, and was married to a corrections officer.
Initially reluctant, she agreed to speak with us once we explained our purpose and showed her photos of the three men.
She said her testimony had weighed heavily on her heart over the last eighteen years, because it hadn’t been strong enough to refute the testimony of the prosecutor’s investigators in the eyes of the jury.
She called the conviction of the three soldiers a “travesty of justice.”
She remembered feeling extremely intimidated by the two investigators, recalling that she was a young single mother of a little baby and was essentially alone in the world feeling very vulnerable and scared.
Once her testimony concluded, she told us, “I was done.
I couldn’t deal with the fact that maybe I had something to do with Kenneth’s conviction.”
After speaking with her husband, she gladly executed an affidavit and agreed to testify if we wanted her to.
Her 2011 affidavit made clear that Kenny had never made any anti-black comments to her.
When Centurion interviewed Sylvia Wallace at her home in North Carolina, she conceded that she’d told four different stories about what Jones told her and that the testimony of Mark’s company commander and Mark’s roommate, contradicting hers, was true.
Yet she couldn’t account for her conflicting stories.
Throughout our visit, even when we were not discussing her trial testimony, she would suddenly blurt out things like “I can’t take back what I said,”
or “I cannot change what I said in the courtroom,”
or “I did not lie and cannot take back what I said.”
Why she made such statements so wildly out of context is difficult to understand other than indicating her guilty conscience.
Finally, in 2010, after a public records request, Centurion discovered a crucial piece of evidence in police files.
Buried within six hundred pages on the case was a one-page Savannah police report referred to as the “Yamacraw report.”
It described an incident that occurred at 1:00 a.m.
on Saturday morning, February 1, 1992, two hours after the three soldiers were in police custody.
The incident took place in the Yamacraw Village housing projects.
Two white men with military-style haircuts, armed with semiautomatic weapons, driving two vehicles—a white Chevy pickup and a silver two-door 1989–91 Ford Thunderbird—were “threatening to shoot blacks who hung out on street corners.”
The report had been hidden from the soldiers’ defense team for eighteen years.
On behalf of the defendants, attorneys Camiel and Sparger filed a petition in May 2012 that presented the case for the soldiers’ “actual innocence”
and highlighted the suppression of evidence by law enforcement that pointed to their innocence.
This led to a post-conviction evidentiary hearing held before Judge Sarah Wall of the Wheeler County Superior Court located in McRae, Georgia, in July 2013.
McRae, a small town of 5,700 in south central Georgia, is located near the prison that housed the soldiers during the hearing.
This hearing was the first time that the men’s parents had reunited since the trial twenty-one years earlier.
Kenny’s mother and father, Mark’s mother, and Dino’s father and uncle were in attendance.
They all shared the same heartache but now also the same hope: to bring their sons home after all these dark years.
Dawn Burgett also attended to show her support for Mark and his codefendants.
At the hearing, Harvey Middleton, once the rookie homicide lead investigator in charge of the case, in 2013 serving as a police officer in Miami Beach, told the judge that “Mr.
White’s identification was never 100 percent sure.
He never gave us a 100 percent positive identification.”
Assistant DA Lock also testified that the detectives “were concerned about his [White’s] ability to make an ID.”
This explains why, even though White asked to see a lineup, the police demurred.
He was also never asked to identify the soldiers in a photo lineup using the photos taken of the men that night.
Lock’s and Middleton’s testimony was the first time in the twenty-two-year history of the case that law enforcement revealed this concern.
It directly contradicted and undercut White’s testimony at trial that he was “positive”
Jones and Gardiner were the shooters.
The inability of White to make an identification was a clear violation of the rule established by the U.S.
Supreme Court in Brady v.
Maryland that prosecutors and police are required to disclose to the defense all exculpatory evidence in their possession before trial.
Why had White lied at trial? Here is what he said, in person at the 2013 hearing and in his affidavit:
I lied because everybody was pushing me to say it was these guys.
The pressure to identify them was overwhelming.
To convince me to make these identifications, the police told me that these soldiers had been on a rampage killing black people around town, and that they did so because they didn’t like blacks.
They told me that if I didn’t identify them there would be race riots in the city.
They told me they knew they were guilty but that they couldn’t make a case against them without my identification, and that they would go free unless I identified them. They told me that they needed my help, and that the community needed my help.
My wife and I were getting phone calls from a lot of black folks encouraging me to do “the right thing.”
I remember in particular Reverend Matthew Brown [a prominent black church pastor in Savannah] telephoning us and telling me the police have the right guys, and that it was time to stand up and come forward.
He also told me that the city would have riots and would be in an uproar unless these boys were convicted.
Rev.
Brown said he would invite me to come speak to his church in the near future.
[He never did.]
My wife, Suzette, pleaded with me not to lie on those boys.
But I was afraid that if I didn’t identify them something bad was going to happen to me and my family.
We had eight children at the time, all living at 1703 East Broad Street.
Before it was time for me to testify at trial, I told the police and prosecutor that I couldn’t make any identifications and that I didn’t want to testify.
I was told that if I didn’t testify at trial the way I did at the preliminary hearing, I would be prosecuted for perjury and be sent to prison.
That freaked me out.
I was scared because I didn’t want to be away from my family, my wife and kids.
So I thought about it and said I gotta keep lying at this point…I knew I was lying when I positively identified two of them as the shooters of Stanley Jackson.
But much to my regret and shame I did it anyway out of fear…Because being a minister of the Gospel I know it says in the Book of Exodus you can’t be a false witness.
Thou shall not kill, steal or be a false witness against people. And I did that. And that hurt me so bad and it’s been torturing me for years. For at least 21 and I’m sorry.
The second Brady violation cited in the petition was the suppression of the Yamacraw police report, which stated that other white men had been driving around Savannah housing projects looking to shoot black men on street corners with semiautomatic weapons the same night Jackson had been gunned down.
The prosecution was also aware that on October 21, 1991, a few months before Stanley Jackson was killed, two white men driving a small red pickup truck had shot two black men an hour or so after midnight.
The first victim was fatally shot in the abdomen while getting out of his car in front of his home.
Minutes before, four blocks away, another black man was shot in the left arm while exiting his car outside his home.
Witnesses told police that the perpetrators were two white men in their mid-twenties to early thirties. They were described as clean-cut. The cases were never cleared.
Although Lieutenant Ragan’s name was written on the top of the Yamacraw report, he, along with Sergeant Stevens, the other officer in charge of the investigation, claimed that they did not remember seeing this report.
They did concede at the evidentiary hearing, however, that this document contained information that should have been followed up on by the police.
Lock also conceded in his testimony that in his meetings with Ragan and the detectives the night of the murder, their biggest concern was the need to get more incriminating evidence against the soldiers.
Ronald Holmes, who was black, testified at the hearing on the time and distance it took to get from the Golden Corral restaurant in Hinesville to the crime scene and to Tops Lounge, to underline for the judge how impossible the prosecution’s timeline had been.
Holmes had spent fourteen years as a taxicab driver based in Hinesville.
He drove from Hinesville to Savannah four to six times a week.
He testified that it was forty-one miles from the Golden Corral to the crime scene, and that the quickest time via the shortest route took a minimum of forty-six minutes, going an average of nine miles over the speed limit on the highways.
If the three men drove directly to the “Hazard County”
area of Savannah, carrying assault weapons and ammunition with intent to randomly shoot someone, they’d have to be careful to keep close to the speed limit so as not to attract the highway patrol on a busy Friday night.
Three former senior sergeants and a twenty-year veteran of the Hinesville police department testified that Sylvia Wallace had told each of them a different story concerning her conversation with Jones, all different from the one she offered at trial.
The defense brought in twenty-two witnesses in all and presented as primary evidence James White’s recantation, the testimony of Detective Middleton, and the suppression of the Yamacraw report by the Savannah police.
The general staff attorneys representing the State introduced only one witness, trial prosecutor David Lock.
Centurion thought its witnesses made a strong case and believed that the hearing went extremely well.
We were wrong.