Kyles v. Whitley

Desire Street runs from the river
it dead ends up at Law
just one block up river is Piety Avenue
running back down to St. Claude

from the NY Times

'Desire Street' "A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans" By Jed Horne 343 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

The 1984 murder trial of Curtis Kyles looked like an open and shut case. Several eyewitnesses were on hand to testify that they saw him approach Delores Dye in a supermarket parking lot on Gentilly Road in New Orleans, struggle with her briefly and then shoot her in the head. Mr. Kyles then, according to witnesses, calmly slipped behind the wheel of Dye's red Ford LTD and drove off.

The police quickly found the murder weapon, a .32-caliber revolver, hidden under the stove in Mr. Kyles's apartment on Desire Street. Dye's purse and credit cards turned up in some trash bags outside the house. Inside the Ford was a grocery-store receipt with Mr. Kyles's fingerprints on it. It was the 150th murder of the year in New Orleans, and Harry Connick, the city's newly re-elected district attorney, badly wanted a quick conviction, especially given the racial tensions the case generated: the defendant was black and the victim white.

After one mistrial he got it, and the death penalty. But the open-and-shut case would eventually go through five trials, at one point reaching the Supreme Court and becoming, in the author's words, "one of the most thoroughly adjudicated in history." With the executioner's clock ticking, a dogged and highly unlikely team of defense lawyers uncovered a pattern of sloppy police work and concealment of evidence that in the end freed Mr. Kyles after 14 years in prison.

Jed Horne, the city editor of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, follows each twist and turn of Mr. Kyles's legal ordeal, relying on a mountain of court transcripts and interviews with many of the people involved in the trial, including Mr. Kyles. As a purely legal drama, the story is fascinating. Time and again, pure coincidence and strange bits of luck, both good and bad, influence the life-or-death outcome for the defendant, things as small as the difference between "on sale" and "for sale."

At his second trial, Mr. Kyles, a casually employed bricklayer who dealt drugs and fenced stolen goods in a small way, was asked to explain why he happened to have newly purchased cans of the same cat food that Dye had bought just before being shot. Mr. Kyles testified that he had bought the cat food because it was on sale. The store's manager testified that no cat food was on sale that day. It later turned out that Mr. Kyles had simply misinterpreted the meaning of the price tags on the store shelves, but to the jury, it seemed that he had been caught in a damning lie.

It was both good luck and bad luck when George W. Healy III, a maritime lawyer, was pressured into taking on the Kyles case pro bono by his white-shoe firm, Phelps Dunbar. Mr. Healy, a staunch proponent of the death penalty, believed that his client was, as he put it, "guilty as sin." But his methodical habits and painstaking research, an approach developed over decades of civil-law cases, began uncovering flaws and inconsistencies in the prosecution's case. Signed and dated interviews with witnesses had not been turned over to the defense team. Most puzzling was a tape, not given to the defense team, with a conversation between the police and an informant named Beanie Wallace, whom several of Mr. Kyles's friends had seen driving Dye's car right after the murder. The Wallace thread would eventually lead to a tangled web of police duplicity.

Even with the Supreme Court thrown in, the Kyles case does not really add up to more than a local story, but Mr. Horne's total-immersion approach yields unexpected dividends. Fact by fact, interview by interview, he creates a vivid picture of life at the bottom in one of America's poorest cities, jumping back and forth between the endless appeals and hearings and the events that shaped Mr. Kyles's life and the neighborhood around him. Mr. Horne is particularly good at explaining the economics of Desire Street, the dodges and shifts that make it possible for a semiliterate man like Mr. Kyles to support a common-law wife and several children.

He also takes a close look at the code of the streets, the rules according to which males establish respect and save face. When Beanie Wallace cheated Mr. Kyles of $150 in a drug deal, Mr. Kyles's hand was forced. He would have to hunt Wallace down and kill him. "I was scared to death," he tells Mr. Horne. "I really didn't want to do it, but I knew the code."

Gunplay was averted only when Mr. Kyles's mother-in-law, who raised Wallace like a son, summoned both men to her house. After delivering a tongue-lashing, she turned her purse over and emptied $50 onto a table. Wallace took the hint and came up with $22, giving Mr. Kyles just under half of the disputed money. Honor was saved, and peace restored. "I came up short, but that was cool," Mr. Kyles says. "I didn't really want to kill nobody."

Mr. Horne takes a novelist's license with description, and his taste for the tabloid turn of phrase can lead him into lurid territory. The prosecuting attorney at Mr. Kyles's first trial, Mr. Horne writes, was "a man particularly hungry for blood, or at least for the smell of it coagulating in the veins of a man with 50,000 volts of electricity passing through his body."

The humidity down in New Orleans can give even hard-boiled city editors a bad case of fever. It's when Mr. Horne cools off that "Desire Street" heats up. The facts speak for themselves in this compelling portrait of life, death and the justice system at the bottom of the social scale.

Footnote