A Knock at Midnight(38)
“What the evidence is going to show,” Wiley said at trial, “is that there was one person making money in this whole equation…it was her. The rest of the people are just doing the best they can. And she’s using them.”
I didn’t understand how any ethical attorney for the government of the United States could stand before a court of law and argue that Sharanda Jones, whose role was to pick up single kilos from Spider and deliver them to Baby Jack and Julie, could be using Spider, who by his own admission was a supplier known throughout Texas. And unlike Sharanda, to whom not a shred of physical evidence was ever connected, Baby Jack and Julie had been caught red-handed with an entire apartment devoted to cooking crack, the packing wrappers from multiple kilos of cocaine, and forty thousand dollars in cash. It was common for the feds to use low-hanging fruit to flip dealers higher up the chain—I’d seen that often enough in the courtroom throughout the course of my two judicial internships. But here was the reverse situation—the Department of Justice was using three higher-up career dealers to prosecute someone far less culpable. It didn’t feel like justice to me.
My incredulity only grew as I read through the pages of testimony from government witnesses. The trial was a circus, with one clearly self-interested or unreliable witness after another paraded in front of the jurors.
“What did the feds want from you?” I asked Sharanda after my second night of reading, note taking, and pacing in outrage at the injustice of it all. “They must have wanted something.”
“They wanted me to flip on my friend,” she wrote back. “The one I opened Cooking on Lamar with. She was a police officer in Dallas, and they wanted me to say that she was my partner in carrying the drugs. But it wasn’t true. They had it all wrong. And I was so clueless at the time, I didn’t even get it. I didn’t even get that they wanted me to be a snitch. My mind just didn’t work like that. I didn’t know why they were putting all this on me. It wasn’t until way after when McMurrey came to visit me in prison and asked about her again that I even realized.”
“He came to see you in prison?”
“He sure did. They don’t ever give up. All they want is for you to flip on the next person. Basically told me if I gave her up they’d reduce my sentence. But none of it was even true. And how am I gonna just hand my suffering to somebody else? They didn’t know what they were talking about. Later my friend sued them for defamation and won. She’s still on the force now. She didn’t have nothing to do with any of it. And that’s the God-honest truth.”
The feds were ready to reduce Sharanda’s sentence if she made up a story about her friend. How could they play with people’s lives like that? And to what end? They had stacked Sharanda’s case with absurd charges against her entire family just to get to a woman who Sharanda swore was innocent? Was Sharanda’s life sentence simply a callous bargaining chip gone bad? My disgust was outpaced only by my determination. I kept reading.
The charges concerning Genice’s house on Rose Hill Road were absurd, and from the beginning, so was the testimony surrounding them. Prosecutors dragged up a motley crew of drug users and petty dealers, all of whom were testifying in exchange for lesser charges and sentences of their own. Their testimony was so farfetched and inconsistent it would have been laughable, if not for the gut-wrenching stakes.
Cooter was the linchpin in this part of the prosecutors’ case. He’d been arrested for selling crack on multiple occasions to an undercover police officer, and in the early days of his ordeal he had signed an exceptionally eloquent statement that claimed Sharanda and his mother were his suppliers—a statement he’d never read and did not write himself. On the stand he retracted the written statement completely, stating that he alone in his family sold drugs. I knew from Sharanda that prosecutors added time to Cooter’s sentence for crossing them on the stand. And he wasn’t the only government witness who testified that the feds had put words in their mouth. An old friend of Cooter’s, Kevin Henderson, refused to agree to leading questions establishing that Sharanda supplied crack to her family members. Instead, Kevin was adamant that all the dope was Cooter’s. Yes, he and Cooter went to Genice’s house to pick up the dope, he testified, but it was stashed in the back of the house, in the doghouses of Cooter’s pit bulls. No, he’d never seen Sharanda come to the house with dope. And when asked about Cooter’s suppliers, he named Baby Jack and two other people.
For Sharanda, it was clear that the damning work wasn’t done by these inconsistent, low-level witnesses, but by the testimony provided by the biggest dealers in the case: Baby Jack, Julie, and Spider himself.
After being arrested in November 1997 as part of the Terrell sweep, nearly two years before Sharanda, Baby Jack and Julie entered into plea agreements to cooperate with the government. Julie had begged Sharanda repeatedly to find them a new connection, but it was all a setup; whenever Sharanda went to see her at the record store, Julie was wearing a wire. Many of the recorded conversations had been entered into evidence and played at Sharanda’s trial. In the majority of the tapes, Sharanda and Julie were gossiping about mutual friends from Terrell who’d been caught up in the same bust that had swept up Julie and Baby Jack. That portion of the transcript reminded me exactly of the conversations we’d have sitting in Sissy’s front yard in the Hole, especially after the feds hit Commerce during the summer of 2000, busting down doors before sunrise, rounding up friends and acquaintances in paddy wagons: how much time they were looking at, who had their kids, how much money and drugs were found, who was snitching. Federal prosecutors twisted all of this street talk to make Sharanda sound like a hardened dealer talking about her trade. And Julie went along with it.