Free After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by Marilyn J Bardsley Page A

length, and fire it one-handed (empty of course) at a wall. This she did, with no perceptible movement of the muzzle whatsoever.”
     
    It was 5:30 PM on Saturday night, October 8. The jury had been sequestered since September 27. It took less than three hours to return with a verdict: Guilty of murder. Judge Oliver, who, like the jury, was tired and cranky, delivered a sentence of life imprisonment.
     
    Jim was taken to the Chatham County jail and put in a special cell away from the general inmate population. His requests for bond during his appeal were denied. Early in 1984, the defense produced two new witnesses that claimed Danny had tried to lure them into a plot to harm Jim and steal his money. Lawton protested and told the court that the two men had been offered money to make these false assertions.
     
    On June 11, 1985, the Georgia Supreme Court again overturned Jim’s murder conviction and ordered a third trial. The reason for the reversal was that the state had improperly introduced evidence—the trigger pull demonstration—during closing arguments that Jim’s attorneys had no opportunity to rebut. The court also ruled that Savannah Detective Everette Ragan was improperly allowed to testify to conclusions that took away the jury’s ultimate decision.
     
    In “The Other Side of ‘Midnight,’” Lawton wrote about political hanky-panky in this second reversal. “According to the sworn statement of a retired banker who’d been a character witness for the defense, Jim Williams told him that ‘things were looking up’; that former Gov. Carl Sanders had taken an interest in the case; and that ‘these things are as much political as legal.’ Separately, another independent third party (an attorney) stated that a lawyer on the defense team told him that they had engaged Gov. Sanders to intercede with the Supreme Court on an informal basis. The only refutation of this in the record is an equivocal affidavit of denial from the talkative attorney on the defense team. There was no sworn statement from his co-counsel or from Gov. Sanders.
     
    “The 4-3 decision to reverse Williams’ second jury conviction was written by Justice George T. Smith, who was Speaker of the House under Gov. Sanders, his known long-time personal friend and political ally. As the only ground for reversal, Justice Smith took the highly unusual step of relying on a point not even complained of by the defense as an error. Justice Smith had recently been implicated in allegations—giving rise to an investigation by the Attorney General—that he had been improperly influenced, off the record, by a friend and ally representing one side in a high-stakes insurance case, authoring an opinion that the Court was forced to retract. Also, one of Williams’ defense counsel had admitted previous improper communications with Justice Smith in pending cases.
     
    “After the reversal, and during the preparations for
Williams III
, new counsel entered the case for the defense: he was David Botts, the son-in-law of Gov. Sanders. Mr. Botts sat through but took no apparent substantive role in the three weeks of the third trial … Mr. Botts made no appearance in the fourth trial.”
     
    After the reversal decision and 21 months in a jail that had been criticized as substandard, Jim was granted a $250,000 bond and left jail on July 3, 1985. During the time between his second conviction on October 8, 1983, and early July 1985, Jim conducted his antiques business from jail by routing his calls through Mercer House.
     

Chapter 14: Not Again!
     
    Jim’s Third Trial
     
    On June 11, 1985, the Georgia Supreme Court called for a new trial, but legal wrangling delayed the start of the third trial until May 18, 1987. The jury was composed of three men and nine women. One woman was selected to be an alternate.
     
    A sameness haunts the third repeat of a trial, except that much of the commentary in the testimony of prosecution witnesses was precluded by the