Seeing Justice Never Done

By Richard Lacayo

Hanford, Calif., is a farm community, the kind of place where people know each other by name and trust each other by nature. "You can go downtown without a dime in your pocket, do your shopping and come back to pay later," says City Councilman J. Brent Madill. "It's not faceless like L.A." In any town, the brutal killing of a teenage girl leaves a deep mark, but in Hanford the wound remains, 24 years after the crime. And now the U.S. Supreme Court has rubbed the wound open again all these years later.

Emerging from fundamental precepts of the Constitution, Supreme Court rulings are fashioned to guide justice throughout the country. But their imprint is felt most immediately on a smaller scale among the people whose controversies the court has ruled upon. People in Hanford understand the larger principle the court recently reaffirmed--that blacks may not be systematically excluded from grand juries--but most in town are horrified that the result may be the release of a man they believe is a fearsome killer.

In March 1962, the body of 15-year-old Marlene Miller was found dumped in an irrigation ditch behind her home, a pair of scissors embedded in her throat, her shorts and underpants slit open. Within hours police arrested Booker T. Hillery Jr., a local black ranch hand already on parole from an earlier rape conviction. Circumstantial physical evidence, including his belt and tire prints from his car, was found near the scene of the crime. Hillery insisted on his innocence, but a jury found him guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death.

Then began the sort of unremitting and tortuous legal battle that leads critics to complain that justice is never final in the U.S., while admirers say that justice is never prematurely closed off. Twice Hillery's sentence was thrown out by the California Supreme Court because of irregularities in the sentencing phases of his trial. Twice he was recondemned to death. Then in 1974 his sentence was reduced to life because of a California decision barring capital punishment in the state. Since then, Hillery has come up for parole eight times, and each time he has been turned down after petition drives organized in Hanford gathered thousands of signatures opposing his release.

Meanwhile, Hillery, an energetic jailhouse lawyer, continued to attack his conviction because blacks had been deliberately excluded from the grand jury that indicted him. Last month the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that he must be charged and tried again or set free. It was a decision that saw such ordinarily conservative Justices as Sandra Day O'Connor and Byron White joining such liberals as William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall. The state argued that although blacks should not have been intentionally excluded from the judge-selected Kings County grand jury, it was "a harmless error." But Justice Marshall responded for the majority that overturning the conviction was "the only effective remedy for this violation" and was "not disproportionate to the evil that it seeks to deter."

"Where's the justice?" asks Councilman Madill. "Is there any justice?" Most of Hanford believes little attention was given to deterring the larger evil. "It's an absolute shame that the Supreme Court has to take such a gruesome crime to make a social statement," says Deputy Kings County Planner Bill Zumwalt, who had been a member of Marlene's high school class. Joan Pegues, assistant city editor of the Hanford Sentinel, puts it more simply: "When you say 'Hillery' around here, people turn purple."

A few in town see it differently. Burdella Minter, who moved to Hanford in 1973, began researching Hillery's case after being asked to sign one of the petitions to deny him parole. An organist for the black congregation of the Second Baptist Church, she helped lead a drive in support of parole for Hillery, mustering 480 signatures. Minter believes that if a fair trial finds Hillery guilty, he should go back to prison. "If you do the crime, you do the time," she says, with the air of someone who has thought about what the words mean: her own stepson is serving time in San Quentin for rape. But the proceedings must be fair, she argues. "There's racism here now, and there was racism back then."

Now 54, Hillery is being held at Vacaville, where he awaits the next step. Within a few weeks, local authorities are expected to decide whether to charge Hillery again. Very likely, they will, despite the vexing problem of how to retry him nearly a quarter of a century after his alleged crime was committed. "It's a frustrating case for us," complains Kings County District Attorney Robert Maline. "For a jury to base credibility on old court transcripts is difficult." As many as nine key witnesses may have died since the original trial. Others have moved away. Old pieces of evidence, like the belt, the scissors and the tire track photographs, will have to be dug out of storage. Worse, although the Supreme Court's Miranda decision was not handed down until four years after the killing, local rulings on its retroactive application may permit Hillery's attorney to exclude statements made by his client after his arrest. Stiffer modern rules on evidence gathering may also apply.

"Something about this killing has stirred this community," says William Prahl, California's deputy attorney general. "These people won't forget it." Neighbors say that Marlene's parents, now in their 70s, dread the possible reopening of the case. They still reside in Hanford, though the house they lived in at the time of their daughter's death has long since been torn down. The memories have been harder to demolish. "The sad thing is that it keeps coming back," says Marlene's brother Walter Jr. "We have not been allowed the time to heal." And the end is still not in sight.

With reporting by Paul A. Witteman/Hanford