persistent. We eventually agreed that they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable.
Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they had been putting money away to send him to college. They explained in their letter that they wanted to use the money they’d saved for their grandson to help Charlie.
Eventually, Charlie and this couple began corresponding with one another, building up to the day when the Jenningses met Charlie at the juvenile detention facility. They later told me that they “loved him instantly.” Charlie’s grandmother had died a few months after she first called me, and his mother was still struggling after the tragedy of the shooting and Charlie’s incarceration. Charlie had been apprehensive about meeting with the Jenningses because he thought they wouldn’t like him, but he told me after they left how much they seemed to care about him and how comforting that was. The Jenningses became his family.
At one point early on, I tried to caution them against expecting too much from Charlie after his release. “You know, he’s been through a lot. I’m not sure he can just carry on as if nothing has ever happened. I want you to understand he may not be able to do everything you’d like him to do.”
They never accepted my warnings. Mrs. Jennings was rarely disagreeable or argumentative, but I had learned that she would grunt when someone said something she didn’t completely accept. She told me, “We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”
The Jenningses helped Charlie get his general equivalency degree in detention and insisted on financing his college education. They were there, along with his mother, to take him home when he was released.
Chapter Seven
Justice Denied
Walter’s appeal was denied.
The seventy-page opinion from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirming his conviction and death sentence was devastating. I’d filed a lengthy brief that documented the insufficiency of the evidence and raised every legal deficiency in the trial that I could identify. I argued that there was no credible corroboration of Myers’s testimony and that under Alabama law the State couldn’t rely exclusively on the testimony of an accomplice. I argued that there was prosecutorial misconduct, racially discriminatory jury selection, and an improper change of venue. I even challenged Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s override of the jury’s life sentence, though I knew the reduction of an innocent man’s death sentence to life imprisonment without parole would still have been an egregious miscarriage of justice. The court rejected all of my arguments.
I didn’t think it would turn out this way. At the oral argument months earlier, I’d been hopeful as I walked into the imposing Alabama Judicial Building and stood in the grand appellate courtroom that was formerly a Scottish Rite Freemasonry temple. Constructed in the 1920s, the building was renovated into a cavernous courthouse in the 1940s, complete with marble floors and an impressive domed ceiling. It stood at the end of Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, across the street from the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had pastored during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A block away was the state capitol, adorned with three banners: the American flag, the white and red state flag of Alabama, and the battle flag of the Confederacy.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals courtroom was on