TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040389/04038900.035

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5KB | 109 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 23

Recrossing the Thin Blue Line


Randall Adams is free of everything but the media


    Randall Adams did not complain when Continental Flight 140
from Houston to Columbus took off 20 minutes behind schedule
last Thursday. He was already twelve years late leaving Dallas
County, Texas, which he says had become his "hell on earth." In
1976, several weeks after Adams found a job repairing pallets,
he was arrested for the slaying of a Dallas policeman. At one
point, with only three days to spare, he was saved from
execution by a U.S. Supreme Court stay while the Justices
considered a legal technicality.

    Adams had been in jail for eight years when Errol Morris,
an avant-garde film-maker from New York City, came to Texas to
make a documentary about Dr. James Grigson, known as Dr. Death
to defense lawyers for his consistent findings that convicted
murderers were so unrepentant that they deserved execution. In
its zeal to help Morris, the Dallas district attorney's office
turned over the dusty records from Adams' trial. What Morris
found in the boxes was more intriguing than Dr. Death: evidence
of a prosecution willing to bend, if not break, the guarantees
of a fair trial in its efforts to obtain a conviction. Morris
abandoned his original project in order to tell Adams' story in
The Thin Blue Line, which won two major film awards and helped
Adams finally win his freedom.

    The nightmare began Thanksgiving weekend in 1976, when
Adams was picked up by David Harris, 16, after running out of
gas. The two went to a drive-in movie. Adams claims Harris
dropped him off at his motel room a little before 10 p.m., but
Harris said the two tooled around Dallas with Adams driving
until well after midnight. When they were stopped by a
policeman, Harris claimed, he hunched down in the passenger seat
as Adams pulled out a .22-cal. pistol and shot officer Robert
Wood dead.

    But everything else pointed to Harris. Both the car and the
pistol had been stolen by Harris. The teenager had been in
trouble before. Harris even boasted to some friends that he had
killed Wood. Still, the prosecution bought Harris' story. Adams'
attorney, Randy Schaffer, contends that Harris supplied two
things the prosecutors wanted: an eyewitness (Harris) and
someone to execute (Adams). Harris was too young for the death
penalty.

    Convicted and condemned, Adams was like the man in the
dream whose lips form words but who cannot be heard. He got a
major break when Schaffer, a scrappy young Houston lawyer, took
his case in 1982 for expenses only. Then Morris began filming
in 1985. The investigating officers sat before him in their
best Sunday suits, preening for the camera, as did two
prosecution witnesses whose stories fell apart. Most chilling
of all, Harris all but confessed, saying to Morris, "I'm the one
who knows" Adams is innocent.

    Even so, prosecutors were determined to keep Adams in jail,
discounting Harris' statements as the rantings of a condemned
man. (Harris is on death row for a 1985 murder.) But on March
1, an appellate court unanimously threw out Adams' conviction,
finding that the state was guilty of suppressing evidence
favorable to Adams, deceiving the trial court and knowingly
using perjured testimony.

    If, in one sense, Adams was saved by the media, he is now
at risk of becoming their prisoner. Released on $50,000 bond
three weeks after the appellate-court ruling, Adams was soon out
of his orange prison uniform and into a borrowed shirt and tie,
then whisked off to a Houston studio to appear on Nightline, the
first of a slam-bang round of television appearances. Awkward
at first, Adams quickly seemed as comfortable as Tom Hanks
discussing his latest movie on Johnny Carson's couch. For the
moment, prying reporters have become as ever present as guards.
On the plane to Ohio, flight attendants passed food trays
bucket-brigade style over the backs of cameramen crouched in the
aisles.

    Waiting in the Columbus airport were about 100 people,
including Adams' mother Mildred, a retired supervisor at a home
for retarded children, and friends from her Baptist church with
yellow ribbons around their necks. Adams plowed through the
crowd to hug his mother and then the teary-eyed Morris. At the
press conference, Adams' sister whispered in his ear that Texas
had decided not to retry him. He squeezed his mother's hand so
tightly his knuckles turned white.

    The next day Adams' sister threw a party. The family
brought deviled eggs and a cake; someone had left seven bags of
groceries on the doorstep during the night. Recalling his first
postprison meal of chicken chalupas, Adams said, "It felt
strange to have the man across from me eating something
different than I."

    Adams, now 40, seems to have made his peace with his
jailers, knowing that to pursue revenge could poison his future
happiness. He has learned, he says, to "think the worst and hope
for the least." Doug Mulder, the former Dallas prosecutor who
wronged him, is shielded by law from suits by convicts. But
cases like Adams' leave a residue of uneasiness: if the Supreme
Court had not reversed the death sentence, and if a filmmaker
had not stumbled onto suppressed evidence in locked and
forgotten files, Adams would have been dead long ago.