CONVICTIONS OF LENELL GETER - The Washington Post

July 19, 2024

He steps out of the limousine and gazes about the snow-covered street like he owns it, and in a way he does. Lenell Geter, 29, has earned this moment. It's not a moment he longed for as a boy, growing up in Denmark, S.C. Nor was it a moment he ever expected, after going to college and getting his degree. But this moment belongs to Lenell Geter now, and he's not giving it away.

There's a Channel 9 reporter upstairs waiting to interview him. She will be nice. She will be courteous. She will ask him questions he's answered nine times already for nine other reporters this Friday afternoon. She will thank him and shake his hand and look into his eyes and wish him all the luck in the world, and she will mean it. But she will not share this moment with Lenell Geter either.

In October 1982, Geter, then an aerospace engineer at a firm in Greenville, Tex., was arrested for the armed robbery of a fast food restaurant outside Dallas. Although nine of his coworkers testified that he was at work -- 50 miles away -- when the robbery occurred, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Geter spent 16 months in maximum-security prisons before the efforts of his coworkers, the NAACP, his wife and a "60 Minutes" broadcast led to his release and exoneration. Tonight, "Guilty of Innocence," a CBS docudrama based on his story, is airing nationally (Channel 9, 9 p.m.).

Sixteen months is a large chunk of life for a young man raised in a quiet, religious home, who picked his first 100 pounds of cotton by the age of 12, who walked a half-mile to his school bus and washed dishes to make it through college, who bore his college degree and white-collar job with no small amount of pride -- only to face the indignity of handcuffs and the humiliation of calling his parents from a jail cell. Sixteen months. All those sunrises, all those sunsets. All those moments. All that wasted time.

Which is why Geter, already 40 minutes late for his Channel 9 interview, will take this moment for himself, to show his 10-month-old daughter Marquita what snow is like. As his publicist waits at the front door, and passers-by look curiously at the well-dressed man kneeling on the sidewalk, Geter takes his little girl's hand and runs it through the snow. Wordlessly. Back and forth. Back and forth. Slowly.

Sixteen months. All those moments.

"I am not bitter," says Geter, clad in a crisp gray wool suit, his lean frame seated on a couch in a suite at the Madison Hotel. "Being a Christian expels a lot of hatred I might have. When I touch upon parts of the ordeal, it might bother me. Looking back, having seen the movie, I don't believe my eyes, but I know it happened."

He avoids discussing details of his imprisonment. "My life," he says, "will never return to normal."

He calls the television drama "educational. I don't have any major problems with it. People can learn from it. I will suffer whatever notoriety it gives me in order for it to be shown." He says Dorian Harewood's portrayal of him is fairly accurate. "He really exemplified my frustration, my anger. I can't sit here and describe how I felt, how frustrated I was. The helplessness. How surprised I was. It seemed as if it wasn't happening."

What happened was that Geter, a graduate of South Carolina State, moved to Texas in early 1982 to take a $24,000-a-year job at E-Systems Inc., a defense contractor. He often spent his lunch hours in a neighborhood park, where he would sit and read the Bible and feed the ducks. Six months after he arrived in Greenville, an elderly woman -- who testified that his frequent presence in the park "upset" her -- noted his license plate number and gave it to local police, who were looking for suspects in the armed robbery of a fast food restaurant. His photograph was circulated among among witnesses and victims of robberies in the Greenville area. Two weeks later, Geter was arrested and charged with the armed robbery of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Balch Springs, a suburb of Dallas, and two other robberies.

Although Geter's colleagues at E-Systems contended that he was at work in Greenville -- an hour's drive away -- when the Balch Springs robbery occurred, they could not raise his bail, initially set at $255,000. Geter was assigned a public defense lawyer, who advised him to plead guilty. He refused. His trial, before a visiting judge and an all-white jury, proceeded before his attorney, Ed Sigel, had time to adequately prepare his case. Sigel originally doubted his client's story. By the time the trial was over, he was convinced that Geter was innocent.

"Lenell's trial was a hanging," says Sigel, now a Dallas County attorney. "The Geter case stands for a lot in the law. The system is too difficult on the innocent guy. It's too difficult to undo one of those quickie trials. The bureaucrats, once they found out {he was innocent}, did zero. They had a million chances to look into this case. They would not do it. Lenell is a lucky person. He had friends -- the engineers, NAACP, me. If it wasn't for those people persisting, the system wouldn't work. We had to break their back vis-a`-vis '60 Minutes.' "

Although the print media had run stories on Geter, "60 Minutes" was the catalyst in the case. Producer Suzanne St. Pierre read about him in August 1983 and decided to investigate. Ten days after the story was broadcast that December, Geter was out on bond and granted a new trial by the Dallas district attorney's office. The following March, the prosecutor's office dropped all charges against him. Four of the five eyewitnesses who had identified Geter had identified another suspect.

As far as Sigel is concerned, the problem that was brought to light in the Geter case is endemic and needs to be changed. He calls the docudrama "entertaining, but it missed a great deal. The basic story is that a guy came to the big city from a small town and got railroaded. They still haven't done much about the hurry-up trials they give defendants in {Texas} and other states. They continue to prevent lawyers from alluding to the Geter case itself. People are fools to believe that Lenell Geter's the only innocent guy who's ever been put in the penitentiary."

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No one knows this more than Geter himself, who in the midst of the Justice Department's proposed review of the Miranda ruling, which protects the rights of the accused, has started the Geter Justice for All Foundation, a referral agency to assist prisoners in finding help. "When I was incarcerated, I had no idea of how to reach individuals who could help me," Geter says. "It was hard to get the names of local people, so I thought I would do something to solve these problems."

In 1985, Geter filed an $18 million civil suit against "certain police officers, district attorneys and municipalities" for "prosecuting and convicting me wrongfully." He hopes it will be a landmark case -- "I'm hoping to change some laws."

More importantly, he says, he wants to clear his name. "Robbery is such a low-life crime. It's like you've got dirt on your hands and can't wash it off. My life hasn't returned to normal. Now there are press interviews, sharing testimony with churches. I'm a private person."

When Lenell Geter was at South Carolina State, his chemistry professor gave him a problem to solve. Geter was stumped. Two years of junior college study at Denmark Technical Education Center hadn't prepared him for the rigors of college chemistry. Desperate, he went to the science department to seek help. Sitting in the department office, he saw a young woman walk in. Now Lenell Geter had two problems: the chemical problem and finding out who she was.

He never was the type to talk much. As a boy, he walked the dusty roads of Denmark (population 4,400) with his grandfather, gathering up corn the harvesting machines had missed to sell for extra change, while listening to his grandfather's stories. Grandaddy, as Geter calls him, knew the value of listening, and he passed it along to his grandson early on.

"He always tried to imprint in our minds the importance of getting a good education," Geter says. "He looked at that as being a steppingstone for progress. He would look at what he had to do to survive, and he didn't want that to happen to us. He never tried to impart any prejudice, or bias. He always encouraged us to treat everybody pretty much with respect."

Theirs was a close family, three boys, five girls. His stepfather, a railroad brakeman for the Seaboard Coast Line for more than 30 years now, married Ella Mae Willis when her son Lenell was less than a year old. The two have raised their kids, of which Lenell is the fifth, quietly and religiously. "I'm not an emotional person, per se," Geter says. "That's a function of my upbringing. I'm an engineer by profession. I look at things pretty much in that sense. I was brought up pretty shy from the beginning."

Which is why, that afternoon in the chemistry department at college, Geter had to summon no small amount of courage to ask the young woman who she was. He talked to her on the phone for a year before asking her out. He married her -- Marcia, 28, a college graduate and a nurse -- in 1984.

"I knew I would never find anyone like Lenell," says Marcia, who is even shyer than her husband. "I was willing to wait, however long. I knew he was innocent. If it would've taken me 10, 20 years to save up the money to help him, I would have."

"My wife's been with me every step of the way," Geter says proudly. "We do everything together. You can't tell how God's blessings can come at you. They can come to you so many different ways.

"When I was in prison, I was in maximum security, with the worst prisoners. I can't begin to tell you what went on there. I had to totally rely on God. I said, 'God, you've shown me in the Scripture certain persons who overcame their fear and became strong. I believe I'm your servant. I need the same thing to happen. Take this fear away from me.' By and by this happened, and I began to rely on faith more. Religion became real to me."

Friday afternoon, emerging from his interview at the Channel 9 studios, Lenell Geter is once again late. He's supposed to be up on Capitol Hill in less than an hour, and since he has to stop at his hotel, he'll never make it on time. Lots of bigwigs are supposed to be at the banquet in his honor, where the film will be previewed: Ben Hooks of the NAACP, all sorts of shirts-and-ties who aren't supposed to be kept waiting, especially if you're just an engineer and not a bigshot. Geter took his old job back at E-Systems after his release, and he's serious about it. The publicists for the docudrama are crying for him to do more interviews, but Geter has refused to take any more time off work other than this one day. Enough time has been wasted.

His publicist dashes down the stairs toward the waiting limo and hops inside, followed by Marcia and finally Geter himself, who steps briskly out the studio doors, down the steps, onto the sidewalk -- and suddenly stops cold.

While the limo driver and his wife and his publicist watch, Lenell Geter takes his moment again. This moment is his.

He stoops down, places Marquita on the ground, and runs her hand through the snow. Back and forth. Slowly. Wordlessly.

Sixteen months. All those sunrises, all those sunsets. All those moments.

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