Marion Roberts, the wife of Lewis for five weeks in early 1972, was brought on as a defense witness. But she turned out to be valuable to the prosecution too. On cross she admitted that John Lewis had denied to her raping anyone; that he did not own a green coat. And then a seemingly innocuous admission, but one which Ormesher very much wanted in the record: She told the jury that John L. Lewis was a bowler and had been to the Cotton Bowling Palace on several occasions. There it was: a possible link between Lewis and Jackson. Both bowlers; both had been to the Cotton Bowling Palace. Though he had no evidence to prove the two knew each other — in fact, each had denied ever meeting before this trial — Ormesher wanted the jury to ask themselves a question: Was it possible that the watch could have passed from Jackson’s hands to Lewis’ at the Cotton Bowling Palace?
At last, Willard Jackson was called to the stand. Tessmer once again led his client through the litany of his innocence. When did you first meet John Lee Lewis? “I first met him when they put us in the holdover together…”
“Had you shot a woman with black gloves, would you go into the Sportspage three blocks away where mostly white girls go and have some black gloves around?”
“No sir.”
“Do you remember seeing Ms. Michaels at the Sportspage?”
“No.”
As the defense rested, Ormesher tidied up two other bits of State testimony. He had Deputy Webb testify to John Lewis’ admission that he was only confessing to the Jackson crimes to build an insanity defense. He had John Clark, a young man who was with Beverly at the Sportspage, testify that Jackson had stared at Beverly.
Final arguments were the next morning. Tessmer, still feeling confident, started bluntly: “There is only one thing wrong with the State’s case. The wrong defendant is in this chair.”
He hit hard on the racial question, finally exposing his long-held view that Jackson started out with two strikes against him with an all-white jury. “I wouldn’t stand the chance of a snowball in hell, no matter what the evidence, if a black jury, black prosecutor, black judge, and two black women said I did it.”
He attacked the hair comparison as best he could. “This machine they call a Geiger counter … you’re supposed to stick a hair in there and get an answer, guilty or not guilty. We haven’t reached 1984. Don’t put your trust in that kind of baloney yet.”
And then he reiterated the strength of the defense: Willard Jackson had an alibi; another man had admitted to the crimes; that man had been linked to the watch taken from one of the girls; Jackson had voluntarily signed search waivers of his home; Jackson had not run from the Sportspage, even though he supposedly saw Beverly there.
“This is a case that demands a verdict of not guilty. There is every reasonable doubt in the world here. We don’t have the $2 taken, but know one thing: We have a watch. When I sit down, I can’t answer Ormesher. They get the last say. I hope you do justice in this case.” Tessmer paused and looked at Jackson. “It’s about time you had it, Willard. I don’t know how I would feel if I was locked up for three years for something I didn’t do.
“Jackson is running out of money … don’t let him run out of any more of his life.”
It was a moving summation; but Ormesher, in substance, if not style, was his match. He pulled his small, compact frame up from the prosecutors’ table and rattled off the case for the State. The two victims identified this man; that was corroborated by scientific hair comparison. The defendant’s alibi didn’t hold water. Lewis’ confession was similarly full of holes and discrepancies. The watch? Well, it was Beverly’s, and it was pawned by Lewis’ sister. But both Lewis and Jackson were known to bowl at the Cotton Bowling Palace. Think on that a while, he suggested.
Of Jackson’s impressive array of character witnesses, he said: “Now I submit to you that if we were having a trial for Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus that we would have the other apostles in this courtroom and they would have to say that until that time, Judas had a good reputation.”
Concluding, he said: “If we can’t take and keep a rapist and a potential killer off the streets with the evidence we brought you, then God help us.”
It would later be called by at least one astute legal observer, “the best-tried case in the history of Dallas County.” Certainly, it was one of the most complex; and one of the most even. The jury essentially had to choose between scientific proof and immutable physical evidence; between Jackson’s word and that of the girls; between Lewis’ confession and prosecution impeachment of it. It was not an easy choice.
Charles Tessmer sat statue-like, impassive, as the jury foreman handed the bailiff the small white slip of paper. It had all come to this instant: three years of the most difficult trial law he’d ever encountered. Three years of searching for a reasonable doubt. Now, as the judge prepared to read the verdict, he was certain he’d found it. The alibi, Lewis, all of that was fine; but this jury had seen that watch.
“We the jury find the defendant … guilty as charged.”
The courtroom buzzed like a summer night; Ormesher and Tokoly exchanged congratulations; Charles Tessmer continued to stare straight ahead, stunned by a verdict as he’d never been stunned before. Guilty! You mean they bought that razzle-dazzle hair business over the watch! You could never, never, he reflected through his anguish, second-guess a jury.
But there was another chance. The last jury had compromised on punishment on circumstantial evidence; surely this one would compromise even more, based on the physical evidence presented. The State had asked life. This jury would never give that, Charles Tessmer was sure of it. Those men and women just had to be more confused about Willard Jackson’s guilt than that.
“We the jury, have found the defendant guilty as charged, do sentence him to a term of years in prison not less than … life.”
The words hit Tessmer like a blind side block. Guilty. Life. What did it take to convince a jury of reasonable doubt? He’d have been better off without the watch and John Lee Lewis. Then, Jackson had only received 25 years, a pittance of what the State asked. But now life.
Willard Bishop Jackson returned to prison that fall of 1974: his wife Ann returned to her letter-writing crusade. The couple soon had to “go indigent” in the court’s eyes: Legal bills had eaten up all their savings and more; even the $ 10,000 raised by friends in the community was gone. Indigence meant the court had to appoint counsel for Willard. It would have been easy, logical for Gossett simply to appoint Charles Tessmer. He was ready to appeal the conviction for free. But Gossett wasn’t about to do that. He’d had enough of Charles Tessmer. The judge appointed James Finstrom to handle the Jackson appeal.
Finstrom, a young but experienced criminal attorney, relied heavily on Tessmer’s first appeal brief in his protest to the Court of Criminal Appeals. He hammered on many of the same points, particularly in the exclusion of the Longview man’s testimony. That, the appeal stated in no uncertain terms, was a key to the mistaken identity case; it was admissible on that count.
But once again, that would do Willard Jackson no good for the present. Even if a second reversal were granted, he would spend another two years behind bars for a crime he still maintained he did not commit. In the meantime, he would plan his third trial. As he saw it, it would be no quiet affair. This time around, the black community would rise up and come forth to aid him in his defense. The media would banner headlines explaining his plight. He would sit before the jury of the entire city.
• • •
On March 16, 1977, the second conviction of Willard Bishop Jackson was reversed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The ruling stirred as much talk in the legal community as the first reversal had, though for completely different reasons. In this second reversal, the higher court did the unthinkable: It wrote new law. Basing its reversal on the failure of the trial court to admit the testimony of the Longview man before the jury, the majority on the court said, “Clearly, the testimony of the Longview man] was germane and material to the issue of identification and to the defensive theory propounded by the appellant. This evidence was highly relevant because it tended to prove not only that Jackson had been misidentified, but that his identity had been previously confused with John Lewis, the person who confessed to the offense charge in the case at bar.”
To buttress its opinion, the court’s majority cited a rather obscure Fifth Circuit ruling, which in turn was based on two rather obscure New York State Supreme Court rulings. However, the minority on the court issued an atypically searing dissent on the ruling, recounting the impeachment of Lewis’ confession and the prosecution evidence in the case. Exclusion of the Longview man’s testimony, it said, was “harmless error.”
But the controversy was larger than the fine print of the court’s ruling. Only 10 percent of all cases appealed are reversed by the higher court; very few are reversed twice. Even after five years, two trials, tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayers’ money — and considerable suffering — the case of Willard Jackson seemed to mock and defy justice. Twice it had been cranked through the complex labyrinth of criminal justice, and still no satisfactory conclusion had been produced.
Perhaps fittingly, that conclusion would never come. On September 2, 1977, Willard Jackson pled guilty to 16 years on two counts of robbery with firearms in the Michaels/Moore crimes. It was, in his own words, the only option he had left; the best he could make of a system he grew convinced would never affirm his innocence.
Percy Foreman urged Jackson to cop a plea. “Who do you think is going to save you,” he said, “God?”
Following his second reversal, Jackson had faced some cold, hard realities. Without recanting his claims of innocence, he had to face the fact that he had no money left; the State’s paltry $500 investigation fund for his case would not begin to cover even development of rebuttal testimony to the hair-comparison testing. Secondly, he no longer had Charles Tessmer. If the finest trial lawyer in the city had not been able to achieve acquittal, then maybe it just wasn’t possible.
And there was Ann. His wife, though still sympathetic to his desire to fight for his innocence, wanted him back home. They had been married eleven years, she would often tell him, and she’d lived with him only four. “Think about it,” she would tell him over and over. “You are the one who is suffering from this the most. Get out. Then you can prove your innocence.” Willard had quietly concluded one afternoon in his cell that that made a perverse kind of sense.
The deal, aside from its ugly bottom line, was a good one. Sixteen years on what had been a jury sentence of life; with the six years he’d already served, and all the extra time he’d earned for good behavior, he would be eligible for parole immediately. Moreover, the DA’s office had agreed to drop the other indictments against him. And there was another codicil to the covenant, one Jackson had insisted on from the beginning. It was a stipulation by the State rarely seen at the Dallas County courthouse.
Any plea of guilty before the court contains two simple admonishments to the defendant from the judge: First, the defendant is asked to swear that he is pleading guilty of his own free will; next, he is asked if he is pleading guilty because he, in fact, committed the crimes in question. The latter is called a judicial confession. These two admonishments are more ritual than anything else; pleas of guilty can be entered and consummated without them. But seldom are they excluded from the ceremony.
But Willard Jackson had made one firm, non-negotiable stipulation: He would plead guilty but in no way — even in perfunctory ritual — confess to the Michaels/Moore crimes. The judicial confession had to be eliminated from the ceremony, or it was no deal. So when Willard Jackson stood in the empty third-floor courtroom of Judge Tom Allen that sultry summer afternoon, and made his partial peace with The System, it represented a judicial irony: Willard Jackson would accept the burden of a final conviction in the crimes he’d battled against a full one-fifth of his life; but he would not confess to them. Even as Willard Jackson pled guilty that day, he was, in a backhanded way, reaffirming his innocence.
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