It’s hard to believe what happened to Army veterans Mark Jones, Dominic Lucci and Kenny Gardiner on a January night in 1992. “It just blinds you like lightning,” Lucci said.
“You’re stunned and in shock,” Jones said.
Gardiner said: “One day you’re preparing to appear before the promotions board, the next you’re fighting for your freedom.”
A chance encounter with a Savannah, Georgia, police officer investigating a murder cost each of them 26 years in prison for a crime they did not commit. “Why us? So why?” Lucca said. “We haven’t had anything in our lives that would lead anyone to that assumption. There is no logical reason for us to do this.”
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Their arrest, conviction and fight for freedom are as dramatic as the plot of any legal thriller, says bestselling author John Grisham, who has written nearly 50 of them. “It’s all there: drama, suffering, injustice, you name it,” Grisham said.
The Savannah 3 story is one of ten cases featured in Grisham’s new book, “Framed,” co-written with Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion, one of the nation’s first nonprofits helping free wrongfully convicted people. The cases they write about are not, as they claim, outliers; in fact, Grisham said, it’s “the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of such cases.”
This is only the second work of non-fiction by Grisham, a former lawyer on Centurion’s board of directors. When asked about the painful emotions associated with these stories, he said: “We cannot believe that someone could survive 20 years on death row and then come out and be able to function normally. I’ve met so many guys like this over the years and they’ve been through things the rest of us can’t even fathom.”
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As for the book’s title “Bound”, who does the binding? “Police and prosecutors,” McCloskey said. “The police force witnesses to give false testimony. Prosecutors hide exculpatory evidence from the accused. It goes on and on.”
The walls of Centurion’s office in Princeton, New Jersey, are covered with some of these clients’ faces, and the numbers are disturbing, Grisham and McCloskey say. Since 1989, 3,600 people have been acquitted nationwide; 68 percent are people of color.
“Racism is a huge factor,” Grisham said.
“If you are a person of color and indigent, you have an uphill battle ahead of you because you don’t have the resources to fight this wrongful belief,” McCloskey said.
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And most people wrongly convicted – as the cases of Kenny Gardiner, Mark Jones and Dominic Lucci show – were simply unlucky.
On January 31, 1992, the three soldiers, all in their 20s, were together at a wedding rehearsal, the day before Jones was scheduled to marry. “Everything finally really came together and came together in my life,” he said.
After dinner, the three soldiers drove 45 miles to a nightclub in Savannah for an impromptu bachelor party. Lucci said: “We tried to get into a strip club and they wouldn’t let us in because (Mark’s) birthday was in three months. So we went to another one. We had no idea how to get there.”
They stopped three times to ask police officers for directions, unaware that a drive-by shooting was taking place nearby, and were about to cross paths with the only eyewitness.
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Lucci said: “We asked a policeman who was crossing the street with a man in a suit where this place was. She replied, “It’s right there.” We assumed the guy in the suit was a detective. He was an eyewitness who told her, “It looked like a car.”
Shortly thereafter, police took the three men for questioning. A few hours later, they were arrested on suspicion of murder.
None of them had a criminal history. None of them knew the victim. No weapons were found in their car. “No weapons were found anywhere, and yet no weapons were found,” Lucci said.
Jones said there was nothing connecting them to the shooting. So how did not only the arrest but also the conviction come about? “Wrong place, wrong time,” he said.
According to McCloskey, there was also racial unrest in Savannah, and the murder of a black man blamed on three whites put the city on edge. “They filed a case against them to show black leaders that they care about black victims as much as they care about white victims,” McCloskey said. “And these three innocent soldiers fell into their embrace and went away.”
During the trial, eyewitness James White identified two men as the shooters. Other witnesses and prosecutors portrayed them as racists and thrill-seekers. The judges were absent for 8 hours and 20 minutes before returning a verdict finding him guilty of mind murder and possessing a firearm during the commission of a crime.
“I literally almost fainted because I was so shocked,” Gardiner said.
They were sentenced to life imprisonment plus five years. Lucci asked, “Does this mean I have to serve a life sentence and when I die in prison, you will keep my body for another five years before releasing it to my family?” I don’t understand what’s going on here!”
Lucci wrote letter after letter to Centurion, which only accepts one or two new cases a year. However, in 2009, McCloskey and his team took up the case.
Justice was still years in the making. Even after James White admitted at trial that he had lied about his identity, the men remained in prison until December 20, 2017. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the state’s failure to present key evidence for the defense at the original trial, even if unintentional, violated the law. Lucci, Gardiner and Jones were finally free.
“It was a spine-tingling moment,” McCloskey said. “You can’t believe this is actually happening and you’re so happy that families and mothers are bringing their sons home.”
Kenny Gardiner currently lives in Texas and rents a room in the house where Mark Jones lives with his mother. They both have jobs delivering pizza. Dominic Lucci moved to Ohio, where he works as a telephone operator at a VA hospital. The three men, now in their 50s, are still best friends.
Although the Georgia Legislature awarded all three men some compensation, they will never be able to recover what they lost.
“Think about what you did from the age of 21 to the age of 47 and you will lose it all – school, marriage, home,” Gardiner said.
“Your children are being born,” Lucci added.
“No employment history. Twenty-six years of Social Security contributions not deferred,” Gardiner said.
And they can’t quite get rid of the past. They admit that they still have nightmares. And when asked if they have trouble trusting people, Lucci laughed: “I don’t trust anyone! “The family is as far away as possible and (Kenny and Mark) are part of the family.”
“These men are actually lucky,” says John Grisham. There are countless others who are still waiting to be heard: “We’re trying to draw attention to these issues and show people that these things happen all the time. Convicting an innocent person is not that difficult; freeing such a person is practically impossible. “
READ EXCERPT: “Framed” by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey
EDITOR’S NOTE: In response to questions about John Grisham’s reliance on the reporting of others at Framed, the author provided Sunday Morning with the following statement:
“I have long been obsessed with stories about wrongful convictions. This theme has appeared in many of my novels and nonfiction over the last thirty years. I am also an outspoken supporter of criminal justice reform and serve on the boards of The Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries.
“There are a total of eight pages of source notes in “Bound.” I expressly state that while Jim McCloskey has dealt with these cases throughout his extraordinary work at Centurion, I have not read about them in newspaper and magazine articles, books, legal reports, court opinions, etc. documentaries.
“I have fully acknowledged and cited all of my sources in every chapter of “In the Box.” While the facts of any case are undeniable and immutable regardless of form, the text in “The Framed” is my own. To claim otherwise is simply and patently untrue.”
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Story produced by Michelle Kessel. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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Erin Moriarty
