David Rose - Violation - Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South

It is only in the south of the city, on the other side of its racial frontier, that the signs of twenty-first-century prosperity are less visible. There, the surfaces of the roads are potholed and pitted. There are junkyards piled with ancient cars, and meagre stores with signs done in paint, not neon. In the poorer districts, lines of low-rise public housing projects stand amid meadows of ragged grass, competing for space with wooden three-room ‘shotgun’ houses, whose squalor would not look out of place in Gaza or Soweto.

The clubs of south Columbus are different, too. The biggest, a huge, low-ceilinged cavern just off Victory Drive, belongs to the R&B singer Jo-Jo Benson, responsible for a string of hits in the sixties and early seventies, including a national pop chart number one, ‘Lover’s Holiday’. A big, bearded bear of a man, the day we met he was dressed in a vivid striped caftan. He showed me round the club and took me into his office, taking pains to check that the large-calibre revolver he kept in the drawer of his desk was still there. ‘This town is a trip,’ he said. ‘A lot of people don’t want to see you make no money or succeed. Coming here from Atlanta is like leaving earth and going to the twilight zone, or travelling back in time.

‘But this is the biggest, the nicest club in town, and I’m a public figure. A lot of people ask me why I stay. Well, I was raised in Phenix City, and more than that, I don’t want to go in for that big-city stuff – gangs and shit. At the end of the day, Columbus is a place to sleep, lay down and rest. Most of the time I don’t get no trouble.’

Benson led me out of the club into the parking lot, and asked me to sit in the passenger seat of his impressive grey sports utility vehicle. ‘I’ve got sound equipment worth thousands of dollars in here,’ he said. He opened the glovebox and removed an unmarked CD. ‘We recorded this last week. Ain’t finished with it yet.’ It turned out to be a romantic duet of heartbreaking sweetness and purity with another local singer, Ruby Miles. Jo-Jo’s music filled the car and brought to mind decades of Georgia gospel, blues and soul: Otis Redding, Randy Crawford, Sam Cook. For a moment he looked bashful. ‘You like it? Tell your friends.’

I made my first visit to Columbus to investigate what looked like a paradox. It was 1996, and the British newspaper that employed me, the Observer , had asked me to go to Georgia to write about the death penalty. My editors were intrigued by the fact that the state’s death row held two prisoners who had exhausted every possible appeal, but whose execution had been indefinitely delayed. The reason, it seemed, was that Georgia wanted to wait until after the Olympic Games, which were shortly to be held in Atlanta. In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, capital punishment had been abolished many years earlier, and the paper wanted me to try to find out why parts of America still found it so attractive.

I began by talking to defence attorneys in Atlanta. They all said the same thing: I should go to Columbus. While its overall crime rate was relatively low, since 1976, when a case from Georgia persuaded the US Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty, Columbus had sentenced more men to die than anywhere else in the state. By the middle of 1996, four had been executed, all of them African-American, and eight were still on death row. At least another twelve had been condemned by Columbus judges and juries, but had won reprieves in appeals. If one worked out the number of death sentences per head of population, Columbus was one of the most dangerous places to commit a murder in the whole of the United States.

A few days later I found myself in Columbus’s second tallest building, a harsh monstrosity in white concrete which would not have looked out of place in Stalinist East Berlin, the eleven-floor Consolidated Government Center. In front of a view across the river sat Judge Doug Pullen of the Chattahoochee Circuit Superior Court, which covers the city and five neighbouring counties. It had been a hot and languorous weekend, and I knew Pullen’s reputation: criticised for his record a few years earlier by Time magazine, he had told the local media that Time ’s problem was that it had yet to discover glasnost , the new policy of openness pioneered by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and was still a ‘lovely pink colour’. Nevertheless, his lusty enthusiasm for capital punishment took me by surprise.

‘I would guess that your experience of seeing bodies splattered and mutilated is limited,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘Unfortunately, mine is not.’ A spreading, heavy-set man with round eyes too small for his face, he moved a little stiffly. ‘In all honesty, abolishing the death penalty would have a negligible effect on crime. But the effect on the American people would be horrific. It would be symbolic, like flag-burning.

‘We like to talk tough on crime, but we’re soft. And every time you get an execution, you get people picketing, saying it’s so cruel. Phooey. The first man I prosecuted for capital murder, even if he’d been executed on his due date, it would have been nine years to the day after he committed the crime. And then he got a stay, and all the anti-death penalty people went out dancing. In my view, there should be one appeal, and one only, then that’s that: homeboy goes.’

‘What about life without parole?’ I asked.

Pullen shook his head. ‘It’s a weak sister, my friend. A horribly weak sister.’

As we talked, a big, stooped man with unusually bright blue eyes entered the room without knocking. The two of them stood, whooped, and made high fives. ‘Meet Gray Conger, my successor as District Attorney,’ Pullen said.

‘We still on for that barbecue this weekend?’ Conger asked him. Pullen replied in the affirmative. Before Pullen became a judge, the two men had worked together as prosecutors for more than twenty years: Pullen had been DA, and Conger his assistant. That was the way things had been done for decades in Columbus, they explained: an orderly progression from District Attorney to Superior Court judge meant that four of the five judges then sitting had spent most of their careers in the prosecution office.

‘They’re friends of mine, and they employed me,’ Conger said. ‘But don’t get the idea that that means I get any advantages in court. All it does is give us a smooth transition when a new DA comes in.’

‘Why do you think the city has sent so many men to death row?’ I asked.

‘I just don’t know,’ Conger shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just that we’ve had some awful horrible murders around here.’

One thing he was sure of. ‘In deciding which cases to seek the death penalty, and in the way we work in general, race is not a factor. In the South in my time, over the last thirty years, there’s been the most amazing transformation. Southerners are very conscious of race. They go out of their way not to be accused of racial bias.’

Later that afternoon, Pullen took me in his battered Volvo down to Fort Benning, where he taught a class in criminal law and capital punishment to soldiers and police patrolmen. I still 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.’