Last Night Out

JIM McCLOSKEY

Mark Jones, a native Texan from Corpus Christi, was two months shy of his twenty-first birthday. He was about to get married to the love of his life, Dawn Burgett, the pretty twenty-year-old daughter of a career soldier. Their wedding date was set for Saturday, February 1, 1992. Jones had worked as a radio operator in Desert Storm and was now stationed at Fort Stewart in Hinesville, Georgia. They planned to wed in the base chapel.

This was to be no small affair. Dawn and her mother had invited 150 people. Mark's mother had come in from the Florida Keys; his father, wheelchair-bound, from Texas. Family and friends had traveled from the Burgetts' home state of Tennessee. Dawn's parents loved Mark; he was the son they never had.

After the wedding rehearsal at the base chapel on January 31, sixteen family members and friends arrived at the Golden Corral restaurant in Hinesville for the rehearsal dinner. Despite a reservation mix-up that didn't get them seated until 8:15, everyone was in a festive mood and looking forward to the next day's big event.

Among the dinner guests were two of Mark's best buddies from the base, Kenneth Gardiner and Dominic Lucci. A fellow Texan, twenty-one-year-old Kenny had arrived at Fort Stewart five months earlier from assignment in Germany. Before that, he, too, had served in Desert Storm, working as a mechanic on vehicles and tanks. Twenty-two-year-old Dominic, whom everyone called Dino, had been born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After a one-year tour in Korea, he had been transferred to Fort Stewart, where he worked as a food specialist. This would be his last billet before discharging from the army.

After dinner a group of the young people drifted out to the Golden Corral's parking lot, trying to decide where to go from there. Kenny and Dino wanted to take Mark to a club for his last night as a bachelor. Mark, a teetotaler, was reluctant and wanted to call it a night. But Dawn urged him to join his friends and even suggested a local club that was having a bikini contest.

At 9:30 everyone went their separate ways. Dawn returned to her parents' house, while the three soldiers headed to the club holding the bikini contest.

Mark was carded at the club and, since he was not yet twenty-one, denied entry. Dino came up with a backup plan: a strip club in Savannah called Tops Lounge that he had been to once. Since Mark and Kenny were not familiar with Savannah, Kenny let Dino drive his new 1992 black, two-door Chevrolet Cavalier, a recent gift from Kenny's father. Off they went, driving the only route Dino knew, forty-eight miles along 95, taking the Route 204/Abercorn Street exit and then heading east onto Victory Drive to Tops Lounge.

As they were driving, thirty-five-year-old Stanley Jackson, a black man, was walking in a dangerous part of Savannah known locally as "Hazard County," the epicenter of the drug trade where buyers and sellers came and went. At 10:05 he was gunned down by a barrage of bullets as he stood at the corner of 33rd and East Broad Street.

James White, also black, was a married thirty-eight-year-old father of eight children, employed as a bus driver and serving as an assistant minister at a small black Baptist church in Savannah. At the moment of the shooting, he was standing at his front door, about to let himself in. Hearing gunshots, he turned in their direction and saw sparks hitting the street. Then he saw a car come out of seemingly nowhere, screeching to a halt in the middle of the intersection.

He told the police when interviewed at the crime scene that two men were leaning out of the car shooting back toward the victim with some kind of rifles. He said that the killer's car remained in the intersection during the shooting for only a few seconds before it sped off, going north on East Broad. A police officer one mile away heard the gunfire and headed in that direction, arriving at the crime scene close to 10:10 p.m. Five shell casings were recovered. Tests later determined that all casings were fired from the same AK-47 assault rifle. Bullet holes riddled a nearby home, though thankfully no one was hit.

Although an autopsy revealed no bullets or bullet fragments in Jackson's body, he had been hit six times by bullets that passed through him. What caused his death were spinal bone fragments that pierced both lungs, causing severe hemorrhaging. Toxicology tests found a "significant level" of cocaine in Jackson's blood, and he'd been carrying a homemade crack pipe. At his death he was on probation for purchasing what he believed to be a rock of cocaine from an undercover agent at a Savannah drug house.

Oblivious to the shooting that had occurred four miles away just ten minutes before, the three young white soldiers arrived at Tops Lounge around 10:15, where Mark got carded again, this time by the Tops Lounge doorman. Listening to the soldiers failing to talk their way in, a taxicab driver and an arriving customer suggested they go to another strip joint, Club Asia. The soldiers got directions and headed for the club, driving north on East Broad until they ran up against the police barricade at the Stanley Jackson crime scene. Here, a police officer gave them new directions and pointed them away from the scene. Still uncertain, they then asked an off-duty cop working as a security guard at a Kroger's for the best route to the club. Finally, they approached a uniformed police officer, Deborah Evans, while she was waiting to cross the street. She directed them to Club Asia, only a few blocks away. Once seated in the club, Kenny and Mark ordered Cokes and Dino ordered a beer and a shot of Soju, a Korean liquor.

Little did they know that their world was about to collapse.

Officer Evans had been waiting to cross the street with James White, the eyewitness to the killing of Stanley Jackson. She was escorting White from the crime scene to Savannah Police headquarters, commonly called "the Barracks," so that detectives could take his statement. It was a few minutes after 10:30, thirty minutes after Jackson had been mowed down.

After the soldiers had driven away, White told Evans that their car "looked like" the killers' car. With that, all hell broke loose. Evans immediately called for backup, dropped White off at the station, and hurried over to Club Asia. Within minutes a swarm of police had escorted the three men out of the club. They were made to stand in front of it so that White, whom they had brought over from the Barracks, could see them more clearly and identify them as the shooters. He could not.

In the parking lot, police searched the car with Kenny's consent and found nothing of evidentiary value—no weapons, no ammunition, no spent shell casings, no dents from ejected shell casings, nothing that connected the car or the soldiers to Jackson's murder or any other crime.

The car was later vacuumed and closely inspected for gunshot residue, with negative results.

Nonetheless, at 10:50 p.m. the soldiers were transported a short distance to the Barracks for questioning. A phalanx of detectives and their bosses reported to the Barracks to lend a hand with the all-night investigation. The lieutenant in charge of the violent crime division, D. Everette Ragan, and Assistant District Attorney David Lock took charge of the investigation.

The police interrogated the young men separately for two hours, trying to extract confessions through pressure and lies. Each of them was falsely told that the other two had confessed, so it would go easier on him if he would also confess.

All three insisted on their innocence and offered consistent accounts of their whereabouts that day and night leading up to their interrogation. Police went to Tops Lounge at 3:00 a.m. and interviewed the doorman who had carded Mark. He affirmed the soldiers' alibi and told the police that all three boys had tried hard to convince him to let them in, that all they wanted to do was help Mark celebrate his wedding the next day. He characterized them as "just three guys wanting to have a good time at a titty bar."

Dino refused to be bullied and threatened to walk out of the station. He was then handcuffed to a chair and stuffed in a closet. When he kicked open the closet door, he was arrested. Mark was worn out and in tears when they told him that he was under arrest for murder.

Meanwhile, James White was in another part of the building giving a detailed statement to rookie homicide detective Harvey Middleton. Twice in the statement he said the Gardiner car "looked like" the shooters' car, but by the conclusion of his statement he had changed this to the soldiers' car being "one and the same" as the killers' car. He also stated first that he thought the shooters were either white or Creole, then later in the statement said they were white.

Middleton got what he wanted—a car identification. But White's initial description of the car at the crime scene had been markedly different from that of the Gardiner car. White had first told Middleton that the killers' car was an older model, "?'85 to '90," with tinted windows, and was "bigger in the back and smaller in the front." The new 1992 Gardiner car was just the opposite—big in the front and small in the back, and it did not have tinted windows.

The three young men were not your everyday suspects. None of them had any prior encounters with either civilian or military police—no arrests, no convictions, no problems whatsoever with law enforcement of any kind. None of the three used drugs, nor did they abuse alcohol. There was no connection between the soldiers and Jackson. The young men had neither motive, means, nor opportunity to commit such a heinous crime.

Nonetheless, with only a car ID, sometime after 2:00 a.m., ADA Lock and Lieutenant Ragan decided to hold the men for murder and ordered them transported to the Chatham County jail.

—

In 1991, more than 40 percent of Savannah's approximately 140,000 residents were black. White men, however, held all the political power, as they always had. There was growing racial tension between the long-tenured all-white city fathers and the politically active black civic and church leadership. Very little room existed in Savannah's calcified city government for racial diversity or mutual understanding.

In recent years, a nationwide crack cocaine epidemic had fueled an explosion of violent crime as drug gangs committed brutal killings in most major cities. In Savannah, the all-black Ricky Jivens gang was particularly murderous. The homicide rate in the city had tripled in two years, from twenty-one dead in 1989 to fifty-nine in 1991. By the time of the murder at 33rd and East Broad in late January 1992, there had been five homicides already in Savannah, predicting an annualized rate of seventy-two. Stanley Jackson's was the sixth.

Black community leaders had become increasingly frustrated with law enforcement, who they saw as failing to invest the same effort in solving cases involving black victims as white ones. The issue had come to a head in mid-September 1991 when a sixteen-year-old runaway and prospective member of the Jivens gang randomly shot to death a man and his dog in the upscale white Savannah neighborhood of Ardsley Park. The affluent residents were outraged and afraid. In response, Mayor John Rousakis and Police Chief David Gellatly called press conferences and personally met with the Ardsley Park residents, assuring them that the killer would be brought to justice. A score of detectives was assigned to the case.

The disparity in how officials reacted to this one white person's murder compared to the thirty-seven black murder victims that year infuriated the city's black leadership. They held press conferences and asked why Savannah city leaders had not visited or shown equal concern for their communities.

In the November election, black voters had a chance to express their anger. Democratic mayor Rousakis suffered a stunning defeat in his bid for a sixth consecutive term, losing to transplanted New Yorker Susan Weiner, the first woman and only the second Republican to win the Savannah mayorship in the city's two-hundred-year history. The Savannah Morning News, the city's leading newspaper, credited Weiner's shocking victory to black voters crossing over to the Republican ticket. She had made crime her leading issue; her campaign billboards plastered throughout the city featured no words, only bullet holes.

Stanley Jackson's murder thus unfolded in a Savannah deeply divided along racial fault lines—Jackson was a black man shot by at least two white men, according to a black eyewitness who called himself "Reverend," and now three young white soldiers, by sheer happenstance, had fallen into law enforcement's lap. The authorities believed that if they could find enough evidence to convict the three men, they could demonstrate to the black electorate that black victims were just as important to law enforcement as white victims. Mark, Kenny, and Dominic became perfect scapegoats. The three young soldiers would not receive justice. They would be sacrificed on the altar of politics.

—

The Savannah police quickly figured out how to use TV cameras to their advantage. They alerted the media, and at some time after 2:00 a.m., TV cameras were waiting to film the soldiers as they were led out of the Barracks in handcuffs on their way to the county jail. Even before Jackson's body had been removed, cameras were at the crime scene. By giving the media easy access, the assistant district attorney made the Fourth Estate, formerly an enemy, into his new best friend. (Later, during the trial, cameras were allowed in the courtroom, a rare event in Savannah at that time. The trial was the lead story on all TV channels each night of the proceedings.)

In shock, still unable to comprehend what had just happened to him and his friends, Mark made a collect phone call to Dawn at her parents' house sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. He asked her not to be angry with him, and then stunned her with the news that they were in the Savannah jail "because they think we murdered someone." In a state of panic, Dawn raced to his mother's hotel, banged on her door, and told her where Mark and his friends were and why.

For the next fifty minutes they drove to downtown Savannah, arriving before dawn. Miraculously they were permitted to visit all three men together through a window. The only thing Dawn remembers from the visit is that someone at the jail gave her Mark's blue jacket.

Later that morning, Dawn wrote a notice and taped it to the base chapel's door that read, Wedding of Dawn Burgett and Mark Jones Canceled Due to Family Emergency .

On February 6, a week after their arrest, a bail hearing was held for the three men. Dino's grandfather retained local criminal defense attorney Bill Cox for his grandson. He also provided the funding for Cox to recruit John Watts, Sr., to represent Kenny, and Watts's son, John Watts, Jr., to represent Mark. Bail was set at $30,000 for each defendant. In mid-April, when their families came up with the funds, Kenny and Dino were released and remained free through the trial. Mark, however, stayed in jail awaiting trial because his family could not raise the bail.

The preliminary hearing, during which the State was required to present evidence sufficient for the defendants to be held for trial, was scheduled for February 26. As the date neared, political pressure mounted. On February 19, more than two hundred people from the black community, including Stanley Jackson's friends and family, held a candlelight vigil at the intersection of 33rd and East Broad. The speakers criticized city officials for not attending and lamented once again that "when one man died in Ardsley Park, everybody showed up."

The next day, a thirty-member contingent from the Jackson vigil attended a city council meeting. Although the group was not on the agenda, Mayor Weiner, in her second month in office, allowed its spokesperson, Rev. Leonard Small, to speak. He admonished Savannah officials for treating cases of black victims differently than those of white victims, citing the Ardsley Park murder, and called for an end to Savannah's "institutional racism." He prayed for "racial unity" and "equal treatment in Savannah."

One week later, at the preliminary hearing, witness White for the first time claimed that he could positively identify Jackson's shooters, pointing to Gardiner and Jones. He testified that when he saw their faces at the bond hearing (during which bail was set), it suddenly came to him that they were the men who shot Jackson. He added that it was "definitely" them. Needless to say, this greatly strengthened the prosecution's case against the defendants. ADA Lock now had an eyewitness who could identify two of the soldiers as the shooters, and the Gardiner car as the vehicle used by the killers.

The State tried to get Dino to turn against his friends, maintaining that since he'd been the driver and not a shooter, he could get twenty years for voluntary manslaughter in exchange for testimony naming Jones and Gardiner as the shooters. He soundly rejected this.

On the eve of the trial, the State tried again, significantly improving their offer to eighteen months for involuntary manslaughter if he would incriminate his codefendants. Without the slightest hesitation Dino refused, saying years later that there was no way he would "sell out my friends and myself for something none of us did."

The trial opened on November 9, 1992. The jury panel consisted of nine white jurors and three black jurors, together with two black alternate jurors.

The State's case relied heavily on the testimony of James White, who spiced up his eyewitness account by telling the jury that "I saw them good. I was looking right at them." When asked by Lock if he was "positive that the individuals you've identified in court are the ones you saw in the intersection shooting that night," he responded, "I'm positive."

Yet his testimony seemed to undercut his certainty, emphasizing as it did the brevity of his observation and the fear he felt for his life. On the night of the shooting, he testified, he was returning to his home from a church service. As he was fumbling for his keys at his front door, he heard heavy gunfire coming from around the corner of the intersection of 33rd Street and East Broad Street. When he turned to look toward the intersection, he saw sparks hitting the street like "fire." Then a car came into view and stopped in the middle of the intersection. He saw "fire coming from the guns" of what he claimed were two men leaning out of the passenger side window of the car, shooting back toward the victim. He couldn't tell if the fire was coming from one or both guns. Before he knew it, the car sped off, tires screeching.

Clearly traumatized, he thought he was in "a war zone." He observed the shooting for "three to four seconds" at the most. During the shooting he backed up hard against the door and banged three or four times loudly for his wife, Suzette, to let him in. When she finally came to the door he was so "upset and shaken," he had her call the police because he couldn't speak.

Months before the trial, on March 6, 1992, a recently retired E-6 staff sergeant, Sylvia Wallace, had come forward to give Detective Middleton a statement to which she now testified at trial. Her disjointed story was that, on Friday morning, January 31, 1992, she and Mark Jones were chatting in front of the barracks following the conclusion of a major battalion inspection requiring Battle Dress Uniform. When she asked Jones what he was doing that weekend, he replied that he "was going to go into Savannah, that he was going to get married on Saturday, and that he had somebody in Savannah he was going to shoot." When she asked him who, he said, "I got a black guy up there I got to get."

Under cross-examination Wallace admitted that she'd had unspecified "problems" at the time she claimed Jones had made his racist remarks, and that these problems, coupled with stress, had led her to destroy all her army-related possessions except her military dress uniform and to retire after twenty-one years of service. Mark was stunned when she appeared on the witness stand and fabricated this exchange. He barely knew her. They were in the same battalion but different companies. She was twice his age. They had what he considered to be a cordial but very superficial relationship.

Mark's company commander and Mark's roommate both contradicted her testimony, testifying that on the day in question Mark was on leave preparing for his wedding, and that there had been no inspection of any kind.

ADA Lock played the race card again with his next witness. He tried to elicit racially charged testimony from Private First Class Heather Radford, a twenty-one-year-old single mother of a six-month-old. She and Kenny Gardiner had been stationed at the same time in Saudi Arabia and in Germany prior to their September 1991 arrival at Fort Stewart. They were casual friends but nothing more than that.

Among other explosive questions, Lock asked Radford if she remembered telling his two investigators during an interview a month before that Gardiner had told her that he "hated niggers period, he would always say he hated niggers 'cause they wanted to take over the party and the music and the women. He said he would like to dress up in black and kill them." She denied ever telling the investigators this.

Under cross-examination by the defense, she testified that, after her meeting with the two investigators, she met with Lock. During this interview, Lock kept insisting that Gardiner had made that statement, that he hated blacks and wanted to kill them. He pressed her, asking five or six times if Gardiner made that statement. She insisted that Gardiner had never said such a thing.

To rebut her, Lock brought in his two investigators, J. D. Smith and Glen Kessler, who both testified that Radford had told them that Gardiner had made these statements. Smith admitted under cross-examination that they had not taped the interview nor drawn up a statement for her to sign.

Since ADA Lock was at a loss to establish a motive for the killing, and knew that there was no connection between the defendants and Stanley Jackson, he decided to accuse the soldiers not only of being racist but also dangerous thrill-seekers. It had been established at trial that the young men loved to play Dungeons instead, "reading was his top priority."

Within days of the soldiers' arrest, both Kenny's company commander and Detective Middleton searched Kenny's quarters and the trailer that Kenny shared off-base with Dino. Nothing was found indicating any racial bias, nor anything of evidentiary value: no hate literature or anything related to crime or violent behavior, only comic books and science fiction paperbacks.

The record clearly absolved Mark Jones of even a hint of racism. First of all, he came from a biracial family. His stepfather was a black jazz musician. The army report on Mark shortly after his arrest described him as "a naive, innocent individual…who has a positive attitude and performs his job in an efficient manner." It goes on to say that "PV2 Jones has never shown any indication of racial prejudice, and has no significant problems working with Sergeant Davenport, a black American. He has worked diligently by his side for the past two years."

Sergeant Davenport said that it was "preposterous" to think Mark would commit a murder. He testified at Mark's bond hearing that he had been Mark's squad leader for more than two years, including their time together in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and that Mark was "not violent nor has he given people any trouble." He visited Mark three times in the county jail before he left for Germany on assignment.

Mark's black roommate, Aaron McAbee, testified at trial that Mark had invited him to the wedding, and that he'd never had any type of racial problem with Mark. It was common for soldiers of every racial stripe—whites, blacks, and Hispanics—to congregate in Mark and Aaron's room and watch TV. Mark's black supervisor who served with him in Desert Storm, Eric Bibbs, told the jury that Mark "is not a mean or violent person," and that he liked people regardless of their race or color.

There is not much in the record about Dominic Lucci's racial attitudes. For whatever reason, the prosecution did not attempt to paint Dominic as racist. E-7 Special First Class Sergeant Marinaro supervised Dino soon after he arrived at Fort Stewart in October 1991 from his one-year tour in Korea. When Marinaro was interviewed by the police the week after Dino's arrest, he told them that he "didn't think Lucci was prejudicial."

The defense also made the point that thorough searches of the defendants' car and quarters had turned up no evidence against them. (Neither the police nor prosecution could ever account for where or when or how the soldiers were able to dispose of the weapons or ammunition, or why the car contained no forensic evidence of involvement in a drive-by shooting using assault rifles.) In addition, all three of them had clean records, did not do drugs, did not know the victim, and had no motive, means, or opportunity to kill him.

The defendants did not testify. Their attorneys thought they had presented a strong case, and therefore there was no need to risk Lock confusing and baiting the young defendants on the witness stand.

Just before jury deliberations began, a white juror reported to the judge her concerns that, throughout the two-week trial, another juror, a black female, made no secret of the fact that she knew the victim's father and that she believed the defendants were guilty. She was excused and replaced by a black male alternate who lived two blocks from where Jackson had been shot. This juror admitted to "hearing neighbors talking about how it happened and everything…you hear different things all the time." The defense challenged this juror, but Judge Perry Brannen denied his removal.

Jury deliberations began at 3:30 p.m. on November 19, 1992. By 11:51 p.m. they reached their verdict: All three defendants were guilty of malice murder.

As soon as the jury departed the courtroom, Judge Brannen, in a hurry to finish the case, began a brief nine-minute sentencing hearing. No testimony was taken and the attorneys spoke for only a few minutes. At 12:05 a.m. on November 20, a scant fourteen minutes after the guilty verdict, the judge sentenced the three men to life in prison. He later admitted that he secretly had the National Guard on call in case the soldiers had been acquitted. Throughout the trial, the Savannah authorities had feared there might be race riots akin to those in Los Angeles following the April 1992 acquittal of the LAPD officers in the Rodney King assault trial.

The defense attorneys were as appalled as anyone by the verdict and went to work pro bono seeking evidence challenging the conviction. Six jurors provided affidavits stating their belief that the soldiers did not get a fair trial because of abuses during jury deliberations. The jurors described how a fellow juror, Murphy Cooper, a black attorney, intimidated those leaning toward acquittal, accusing them of being racially prejudiced.

He told them that unless they unanimously voted to convict the soldiers, there could be racial disturbances in Savannah similar to those in Los Angeles seven months earlier. Cooper also erroneously told them that anyone who voted to acquit would be identified in open court and could therefore expect racial retaliation.

In 1994, the Georgia Supreme Court denied an appeal of the conviction based on these juror affidavits, ruling that state law disallowed jurors from impeaching their own verdict unless "extraordinary circumstances" beset a particular case, and this case did not rise to that level.

—

The defendants spent the next seventeen years in prison. In 2009, Centurion Ministries, after having spent several years studying the voluminous record of the case, began a field investigation on the soldiers' behalf. Through 2012, Centurion interviewed numerous witnesses in a search for new evidence. It retained new counsel for the soldiers, tapping Seattle attorney Peter Camiel, who had previously served as attorney for other Centurion clients, and Savannah attorney Steve Sparger.

At the top of the witness list was James White, whose testimony had always been questionable. Police had measured the distance between White's front door on East Broad Street and where the car had sat in the middle of the intersection as seventy-two feet. It had been a dark, moonless night with inadequate street lighting.

These factors, along with the short time White had had to observe the shooting while in a highly traumatized state, fearing for his life, all undercut the reliability of his testimony.

Centurion tracked down White, along with his wife, Suzette, in a room at a Super 8 motel off I-85 just outside Newnan, Georgia, some thirty miles southwest of the Atlanta airport. They were homeless and had all their worldly possessions piled every which way in their room. Over the course of that year, Centurion met with the Whites three times, getting to know them as people and discussing James's testimony and the circumstances surrounding it. Finally, with shame and remorse, the Whites admitted that James had indeed lied at the trial. Ever since, their consciences had been deeply troubling them. This led them to execute sworn affidavits in January 2011, fully recanting White's trial testimony. (Sadly, Suzette died of a heart attack in 2012 at age fifty-one.)

In 2011, Centurion caught up with Heather Radford at her home in central Pennsylvania. By then she was in her eighth year as a state prison corrections officer, and was married to a corrections officer. Initially reluctant, she agreed to speak with us once we explained our purpose and showed her photos of the three men. She said her testimony had weighed heavily on her heart over the last eighteen years, because it hadn't been strong enough to refute the testimony of the prosecutor's investigators in the eyes of the jury. She called the conviction of the three soldiers a "travesty of justice."

She remembered feeling extremely intimidated by the two investigators, recalling that she was a young single mother of a little baby and was essentially alone in the world feeling very vulnerable and scared. Once her testimony concluded, she told us, "I was done. I couldn't deal with the fact that maybe I had something to do with Kenneth's conviction." After speaking with her husband, she gladly executed an affidavit and agreed to testify if we wanted her to. Her 2011 affidavit made clear that Kenny had never made any anti-black comments to her.

When Centurion interviewed Sylvia Wallace at her home in North Carolina, she conceded that she'd told four different stories about what Jones told her and that the testimony of Mark's company commander and Mark's roommate, contradicting hers, was true. Yet she couldn't account for her conflicting stories. Throughout our visit, even when we were not discussing her trial testimony, she would suddenly blurt out things like "I can't take back what I said," or "I cannot change what I said in the courtroom," or "I did not lie and cannot take back what I said." Why she made such statements so wildly out of context is difficult to understand other than indicating her guilty conscience.

Finally, in 2010, after a public records request, Centurion discovered a crucial piece of evidence in police files. Buried within six hundred pages on the case was a one-page Savannah police report referred to as the "Yamacraw report."

It described an incident that occurred at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, February 1, 1992, two hours after the three soldiers were in police custody. The incident took place in the Yamacraw Village housing projects. Two white men with military-style haircuts, armed with semiautomatic weapons, driving two vehicles—a white Chevy pickup and a silver two-door 1989–91 Ford Thunderbird—were "threatening to shoot blacks who hung out on street corners." The report had been hidden from the soldiers' defense team for eighteen years.

On behalf of the defendants, attorneys Camiel and Sparger filed a petition in May 2012 that presented the case for the soldiers' "actual innocence" and highlighted the suppression of evidence by law enforcement that pointed to their innocence.

This led to a post-conviction evidentiary hearing held before Judge Sarah Wall of the Wheeler County Superior Court located in McRae, Georgia, in July 2013. McRae, a small town of 5,700 in south central Georgia, is located near the prison that housed the soldiers during the hearing.

This hearing was the first time that the men's parents had reunited since the trial twenty-one years earlier. Kenny's mother and father, Mark's mother, and Dino's father and uncle were in attendance. They all shared the same heartache but now also the same hope: to bring their sons home after all these dark years. Dawn Burgett also attended to show her support for Mark and his codefendants.

At the hearing, Harvey Middleton, once the rookie homicide lead investigator in charge of the case, in 2013 serving as a police officer in Miami Beach, told the judge that "Mr. White's identification was never 100 percent sure. He never gave us a 100 percent positive identification."

Assistant DA Lock also testified that the detectives "were concerned about his [White's] ability to make an ID." This explains why, even though White asked to see a lineup, the police demurred. He was also never asked to identify the soldiers in a photo lineup using the photos taken of the men that night.

Lock's and Middleton's testimony was the first time in the twenty-two-year history of the case that law enforcement revealed this concern. It directly contradicted and undercut White's testimony at trial that he was "positive" Jones and Gardiner were the shooters.

The inability of White to make an identification was a clear violation of the rule established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brady v. Maryland that prosecutors and police are required to disclose to the defense all exculpatory evidence in their possession before trial.

Why had White lied at trial? Here is what he said, in person at the 2013 hearing and in his affidavit:

I lied because everybody was pushing me to say it was these guys. The pressure to identify them was overwhelming. To convince me to make these identifications, the police told me that these soldiers had been on a rampage killing black people around town, and that they did so because they didn't like blacks. They told me that if I didn't identify them there would be race riots in the city. They told me they knew they were guilty but that they couldn't make a case against them without my identification, and that they would go free unless I identified them. They told me that they needed my help, and that the community needed my help.

My wife and I were getting phone calls from a lot of black folks encouraging me to do "the right thing." I remember in particular Reverend Matthew Brown [a prominent black church pastor in Savannah] telephoning us and telling me the police have the right guys, and that it was time to stand up and come forward. He also told me that the city would have riots and would be in an uproar unless these boys were convicted. Rev. Brown said he would invite me to come speak to his church in the near future. [He never did.]

My wife, Suzette, pleaded with me not to lie on those boys. But I was afraid that if I didn't identify them something bad was going to happen to me and my family. We had eight children at the time, all living at 1703 East Broad Street. Before it was time for me to testify at trial, I told the police and prosecutor that I couldn't make any identifications and that I didn't want to testify. I was told that if I didn't testify at trial the way I did at the preliminary hearing, I would be prosecuted for perjury and be sent to prison.

That freaked me out. I was scared because I didn't want to be away from my family, my wife and kids. So I thought about it and said I gotta keep lying at this point…I knew I was lying when I positively identified two of them as the shooters of Stanley Jackson. But much to my regret and shame I did it anyway out of fear…Because being a minister of the Gospel I know it says in the Book of Exodus you can't be a false witness. Thou shall not kill, steal or be a false witness against people. And I did that. And that hurt me so bad and it's been torturing me for years. For at least 21 and I'm sorry.

The second Brady violation cited in the petition was the suppression of the Yamacraw police report, which stated that other white men had been driving around Savannah housing projects looking to shoot black men on street corners with semiautomatic weapons the same night Jackson had been gunned down. The prosecution was also aware that on October 21, 1991, a few months before Stanley Jackson was killed, two white men driving a small red pickup truck had shot two black men an hour or so after midnight. The first victim was fatally shot in the abdomen while getting out of his car in front of his home. Minutes before, four blocks away, another black man was shot in the left arm while exiting his car outside his home. Witnesses told police that the perpetrators were two white men in their mid-twenties to early thirties. They were described as clean-cut. The cases were never cleared.

Although Lieutenant Ragan's name was written on the top of the Yamacraw report, he, along with Sergeant Stevens, the other officer in charge of the investigation, claimed that they did not remember seeing this report. They did concede at the evidentiary hearing, however, that this document contained information that should have been followed up on by the police.

Lock also conceded in his testimony that in his meetings with Ragan and the detectives the night of the murder, their biggest concern was the need to get more incriminating evidence against the soldiers.

Ronald Holmes, who was black, testified at the hearing on the time and distance it took to get from the Golden Corral restaurant in Hinesville to the crime scene and to Tops Lounge, to underline for the judge how impossible the prosecution's timeline had been. Holmes had spent fourteen years as a taxicab driver based in Hinesville. He drove from Hinesville to Savannah four to six times a week. He testified that it was forty-one miles from the Golden Corral to the crime scene, and that the quickest time via the shortest route took a minimum of forty-six minutes, going an average of nine miles over the speed limit on the highways. If the three men drove directly to the "Hazard County" area of Savannah, carrying assault weapons and ammunition with intent to randomly shoot someone, they'd have to be careful to keep close to the speed limit so as not to attract the highway patrol on a busy Friday night.

Three former senior sergeants and a twenty-year veteran of the Hinesville police department testified that Sylvia Wallace had told each of them a different story concerning her conversation with Jones, all different from the one she offered at trial.

The defense brought in twenty-two witnesses in all and presented as primary evidence James White's recantation, the testimony of Detective Middleton, and the suppression of the Yamacraw report by the Savannah police. The general staff attorneys representing the State introduced only one witness, trial prosecutor David Lock. Centurion thought its witnesses made a strong case and believed that the hearing went extremely well.

We were wrong.

The soldiers were stunned when Judge Wall issued her opinion in August 2014, one year after the hearing, denying the defendants a new trial. In regard to the Yamacraw report, she ruled that "since Petitioners did not raise this allegation at trial and did not enumerate it as error on direct appeal, this claim is procedurally barred from consideration on the merits by this Court."

This was nonsensical. How could it have been used by the defense at the 1992 trial or in the direct appeal in 1993–94 when it was not known by the defense until 2010? The same objection applied to White's inability to make a positive identification. No one except law enforcement knew that until 2013. By its very nature, a Brady violation is typically discovered at some point post-conviction.

The first legal break in the case came in November 2014 when the Georgia Supreme Court, in a 9–0 unanimous vote, quickly remanded it back to Judge Wall, instructing her to rule on the merits and materiality of the suppression of the Yamacraw report and White's inability to make a positive identification. But Wall again denied the soldiers, fifteen months later, in March 2016. This time she ruled that the State did not suppress the Yamacraw report nor have a reason to turn it over to the defense because there was no indication that it had any connection to the murder of Jackson.

Regarding White, she did acknowledge that his identification of the petitioners as the shooters was an important part of the State's case. She also agreed that any information that detracted from the credibility of his trial testimony would be "potentially exculpatory evidence for the defense." But she discredited his recantation, and made no mention of Middleton's testimony that White never made a positive identification of the soldiers throughout the investigation. She omitted that pertinent fact, which was certainly exculpatory and detracted from the credibility of his trial testimony.

Naturally the defense appealed Judge Wall's denial, turning again to the Georgia Supreme Court. This time, on November 9, 2017, the soldiers received what they had sought for the last twenty-six years—justice and exoneration. Overriding Judge Wall's denial, again in a 9–0 decision, the court ruled that, "in light of the totality of circumstances, the outcome of the trial was undermined by the State's failure to provide the Yamacraw report to the defense."

It stated that the Yamacraw report "was evidence that others similar in appearance were threatening a racial attack similar to that suffered by Jackson," and that "if the jury had been presented with information that other persons, not the defendants, were in the area that same night to engage in racially motivated violence, the outcome of the trial might well have been different."

In its opinion the Georgia Supreme Court also pointed out other exculpatory facts: namely, that the defendants were at a rehearsal dinner "over a 50-minute drive away" from the 10:00 shooting until 9:15–9:30; and that the State's case was "heavily dependent" on White's identification of the defendants, "but the investigators conducted no identification lineup, either in person or by photograph. No murder weapon was ever recovered; no firearm was found in the defendant's car, no casings from an automatic weapon were found there, and the forensic scientist who vacuumed the interior of the car looking for gunshot residue found none."

These were indicators that the court, considering the same evidence presented to Judge Wall, had strong reservations concerning the soldiers' guilt. Wall's decisions had egregiously delayed justice for four years.

The day for which the three men and their families had been waiting finally arrived. On Wednesday, December 20, 2017, everyone gathered in the same, now renovated, Savannah courtroom in which the judge had sentenced the men to life in prison almost twenty-six years earlier.

Defendants whose convictions have been vacated by a higher court have a right to be released while they await the prosecution's decision to retry them. Legally speaking, at this point they stand indicted, not convicted. As when originally arrested, however, they must have the financial ability to meet whatever bail the trial judge sets.

Among the attendees nervously sitting side by side in the courtroom were Mark's mother, sixty-five-year-old Deborah McGill; Kenny's seventy-six-year-old mother, Betty; and Dino's seventy-eight-year-old father, Roger, and his uncle Burt. All had driven great distances from Texas and Ohio. All were hoping to take their sons home if the judge set a reasonable bond.

There was a gasp when the three defendants filed into the courtroom, handcuffed one behind the other in white jail jumpsuits, wearing ankle and waist chains. Aged by the years of false imprisonment, they were unrecognizable. They quietly took their seats next to Peter Camiel and Steve Sparger at the defense table. You could hear a pin drop as everyone waited for the judge to take the bench.

Everyone was relieved and somewhat surprised when the prosecutor told the judge, "The State leaves the issue of bail entirely to the discretion of the court." That meant the DA was not going to take an adversarial position. The men were halfway home.

Knowing that the families were unable to post a bond in an amount likely to be set by the judge, Centurion had arranged with a New York City benefactor to post a $100,000 bond—$33,000 per defendant. If needed, he was on standby to immediately wire that amount of money to the Chatham County sheriff's office.

When the judge set bail at $30,000 for each man, the benefactor sprang into action and wired the money, with the assurance that it would be returned to him once the case had concluded.

Excitement grew by the minute because all of us were now confident that the former soldiers would be released without restrictions before the end of the day, free to go home with their loved ones as they awaited the DA's decision on whether to retry them. And that's exactly what happened. Together they walked out of the Chatham County jail at 3:32 that afternoon wearing Centurion-provided T-shirts emblazoned with the words I Didn't Do It.

Surrounded by a sea of supporters cheering loudly in the jail's lobby, the first to greet them was Mark's mother, Deborah, who hugged her son so tightly you couldn't tell them apart. Holding on to him for dear life, she exclaimed for all to hear, "Except for his birth, this is the greatest day of my life." Except for the birth part, that was how we all felt, too, as we took our turns to embrace the three, one by one, and record the moment with photographs.

The sheriff was kind enough to allow the three men to take over the jail lobby for this impromptu party. That night we celebrated at the beautiful Savannah home of John Watts, Jr., Mark Jones's former trial lawyer, who had worked hard alongside Centurion, assisting in our effort to free his former client. Also celebrating that night were Dino's trial lawyer, Bill Cox, and Kenny's former attorney, John Watts, Sr. All three had testified at the 2013 hearing. Bill Cox brought tears to my eyes when he told Judge Wall, "I'll go to my grave thinking these guys didn't do this. I brush my teeth and think about them. I'll never forget 'em."

The next day everyone returned home. It was going to be the first Christmas since 1991 that Mark, Kenny, and Dino could celebrate as free men, and with their families.

Now there was nothing more to be done except wait and see if the DA was going to retry them. Even though their case had been eviscerated, a prosecutor might do anything in an attempt to save face. It took seven months, but finally the DA announced she was not going to retry the former servicemen and would petition the judge to dismiss all charges and thus end the case against them. On July 18, 2018, this was done.

The Sword of Damocles that had been hanging over their heads had finally been removed. For the first time, they could breathe easily, secure in the knowledge that this interminable nightmare had really ended. Now they could begin to start life all over and make their way in the free world.

Their new life, though, would be shaped by their life in prison. All three had spent twenty-six years as model inmates with hardly any disciplinary write-ups. This was extraordinary, practically unheard of, especially for such a long stretch of time. As one of many examples, for several years Dino even worked as an assistant chef in Governor Sonny Perdue's kitchen, and one year shared a Thanksgiving meal with the governor and his family.

What kept these men going all those years with no assurance they would ever get out? When this question was separately posed to each of them, all three had the same answer: their families' rock-solid belief in their innocence and unwavering support and love, from the day of their arrest until the day of their freedom. Mark had his devoted mother, Deborah McGill; his father died in 1995. Kenny had his mother, Betty, and father, Carroll, who died in 2015. Dominic had his father, Roger, and his uncle Burt; his mother, Gayle, died in 1995. Without that support, they simply would not have survived, especially in the early years of imprisonment.

Hope was another friend, never constant but, like a flickering candle, refusing to be extinguished. Kenny was more or less resigned to his fate until Centurion's investigation started to pick up steam. Then his hope came alive, only to fade again with Judge Wall's denials. The second Georgia Supreme Court decision allowed his hope for freedom to finally flourish.

For the first several years after the initial verdict, Dominic believed that the system would see the error of its ways and recognize their innocence. He was convinced the courts would soon see the truth and correct their mistake. The other thing that kept him going was a dream that, once that truth came out, he and his two friends would be the beneficiaries of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. It took some time before this illusion evaporated and reality set in.

And then the parole board kept denying his requests, giving him eight-year hitches until his next review; and the courts continued to deny his appeals . Okay, he decided, that's it, although he hadn't completely given up. It was his fighting spirit that impressed Centurion when he wrote us a second letter in 2003, saying, "You told me to come back in a couple of years. It's been a couple of years and this time I'm not taking no for an answer. If McCloskey is retired send somebody else down here to help us out."

But the two denials by Judge Wall were finally too much. Dominic had decided to end his life by suffocation with a plastic bag if the Georgia Supreme Court also ruled against them. If that happened, there would have been no way out, and he didn't want to live for decades more with no hope of freedom.

Mark freely admits that, when his appeals were denied and parole was a dim prospect, he accepted his fate as an innocent man living and dying in prison. Settling in with that mindset, he was determined to make the best of a bad situation by finding "comfort" in the day-to-day prison routine through teaching and playing sports and board games. That was how he chose to cope.

His hope was rekindled at the onset of the 2013 evidentiary hearing. Although he had no confidence that Judge Wall would rule in his favor, after the strong hearing he did believe that the higher court would, especially when it sent the case back to her instructing her to rule on the merits with a unanimous 9–0 vote.

From 2013 until they were sent back to Savannah for the December 2017 bond hearing, Mark, Kenny, and Dominic were housed together, not only in the same prison, but in the same dormitory, one that was exclusively for veterans. This made them feel safe and secure, knowing that they had each other's back. It also gave them a sense of confidence that maybe, just maybe, the wheel of justice was beginning to turn their way. During those last four years they trained together as Braille transcribers to convert English text to Braille for the blind. They were doing this until their transfer to the Chatham County jail.

Despite family and mutual support, twenty-six years of false imprisonment deeply affected the men. Now in their fifties, finding gainful employment was a real challenge. None had a job history or a marketable skill. In completing an application, how were they to explain the twenty-six-year void in employment?

With some luck, and through the good offices of a local Cleveland Veterans Administration counselor, the VA hired Dino as a full-time telephone receptionist with full medical benefits. He lives by himself in the house where he grew up. Mark and Kenny share a four-bedroom house in Corpus Christi recently purchased by Mark. Kenny pays him rent. They are employed as Domino's Pizza delivery drivers.

The men also suffered from a history of inept and poor medical attention while in prison. Since his release, Mark was hospitalized for two months with a near fatal case of bacterial spinal meningitis, Covid, and double pneumonia. He miraculously recovered, but with a loss of hearing in one ear. Kenny suffers from arthritis in the ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders, which is worsening. In addition to a recent diagnosis of diabetes, Dino has recently undergone a hernia and gallbladder operation.

All three suffer from PTSD. Each has continuing nightmares about prison. Kenny dreams he is either back in prison or going back; and once he is there he can't get out. Dino dreams that someone is coming to his cell to wake him up. He has flashbacks that are triggered by a smell or a jingling of keys. In Mark's dreams he is in his jail cell dreaming he has been exonerated, only to discover, while still in the dream, that his exoneration never happened. Knowing that it is completely irrational, Kenny and Dino still have it in the back of their minds that "the state of Georgia will come after them again." They can't shake that fear.

They experience significant depression, anxiety, and stress levels generally, and particularly when meeting new people in unfamiliar settings. Dino, who prior to his arrest was fun-loving and gregarious, now feels inadequate when trying to converse with people. He says that prison "beat the ability to talk to people out of me." He despairs that his time away robbed him of having children and any kind of family life.

Kenny has always been rather shy and a bit of a loner, but those tendencies have noticeably increased. Other than Mark, he has no friends. Talking to someone he doesn't know "ramps up" his stress levels to the point that sometimes his "knees start to shake." He thinks it will be several years before he attempts to date again. When not working, he stays home at night watching animation programs on TV or reading fantasy and science fiction books, habits going back to his days before incarceration.

To this day, Mark's biggest regret is the loss of Dawn Burgett, whom he calls "the love of my life." They both lament that they were unable to have kids and raise a family together. He says losing her was "a heavy price that can't be fixed." She is a hole in his heart, as he is in hers. As friends they still speak periodically on the phone.

Thinking it was best for her and her future, after several years in prison Mark unilaterally broke off their relationship, and did it in what he regretfully described as "a mean way." That broke Dawn's heart. It has taken many years for her to recover and emerge from anxiety attacks and severe depression, brought on by the unresolved and traumatic separation from Mark. She has married twice since then, her second marriage a happy one.

But there is good news, too. In the spring of 2023, the Department of the Army issued Mark and Kenny honorable discharges, enabling them to take full advantage of VA benefits. Dominic had earlier received an honorable discharge, because he had officially left the army prior to his conviction.

Financially, the former soldiers are managing. Effective August 1, 2022, the state of Georgia awarded each of them $1,000,000 as compensation for their false imprisonment. This is distributed in monthly nontaxable payments of $2,612 for the next twenty years, which comes to $31,344 per year per man, after attorney's fees are deducted.

It is impossible to view these men today and not think "If only." If only the doorman at Tops Lounge had granted Mark entrance even though he was two months away from his twenty-first birthday. If only the three soldiers hadn't by chance pulled up to the Savannah police building at the exact moment that James White arrived with police officer Deborah Evans. How much pain and suffering could have been prevented? And who knows how bright the lives of Mark, Kenny, and Dino could have become?