Black Views Collide : Can a New South Do Him Justice?

At first, the news from Washington gave Etowah County Dist. Atty. Jimmy Hedgspeth reason to celebrate. We have O. M., the police there were saying. Picked him up Friday night.

When the call came one morning early last December, O. M. had been missing for six months, ever since a baby boy died during a firebombing on the west side of this small town 60 miles northeast of Birmingham. Authorities had filed arson and murder charges against O. M. back on June 3, identifying him only by his initials because he was a juvenile. O. M. was 16 then. Now he was 17.

Finally, the prosecutor told his staff. Soon two Gadsden cops were heading for Washington.

It would be days before Hedgspeth learned the problem: The District of Columbia didn’t want to return O. M. Certain details, it seemed, troubled the District of Columbia Council.

Dubious History

There was, for example, the Gadsden Police Department’s dubious history of abusive behavior. There was the suggestion of a particular police vendetta against O. M.’s family--both O. M.’s father and uncle had died while in close proximity to officers of the law, the father in a hail of bullets while fleeing a routine traffic stop in 1978, the uncle at the end of a rope swinging from a county jail shower head in 1984, an event ruled a suicide. Finally, there was Alabama’s historic willingness to execute young people--11 have died in the state’s electric chair for crimes committed as juveniles. All were black. O. M. is black.

We won’t return O. M. unless Alabama promises not to seek the death penalty against him, the D. C. council pronounced in an emergency act adopted May 30.

Hedgspeth was not inclined to make any such promise. “They can’t tell me what to do,” he insisted. “What the law is in Alabama is none of their damn business.”

Still a Standoff

So began a standoff that still persists, at least pending a ruling from the D. C. Court of Appeals. The fractious debate now waging, however, has only a little to do with O. M.’s fate. Mainly, the argument has to do with what the O. M. case is all about.

The oratory in the D. C. council chambers and courtrooms sounds an assortment of themes about racial justice in the South, the death penalty for juveniles and the moral obligations of those allowing extraditions.

Talk here in Gadsden about the O. M. case, however, sometimes seems to involve another matter entirely. In Gadsden, the O. M. case has a great deal to do with crime--crime against blacks. O. M. is black, but so too, as it happens, was the 14-month-old baby boy killed in the firebombing.

Until recently, crimes committed by blacks against blacks were not a particularly high priority for investigation or prosecution in Etowah County. Black voters who gave Hedgspeth a big majority of their vote in 1987 asked two things of him at campaign appearances--that he not bar blacks from juries and that he prosecute black-on-black crime just like any other type.

“I don’t see how this is racist,” said the dead infant’s uncle, Sol Reynolds. “We’re black. And O. M’s family’s black. They didn’t care about blacks killing blacks before. Now they do. Wrong is wrong, right is right. We don’t have the money to hire lawyers to argue for us. What if it was their baby? Be whole different story then. Death penalty? Baby got death penalty without a trial. Something to think about.”

Whatever else the O. M. case may be, it has provided the occasion for the people of Gadsden to reflect on where they’ve come in the 25 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and to take inventory of what now is most important to them.

No one disputes Gadsden’s roots in the old South. When federal troops sacked Gadsden in 1863, two heroes were born. John Wisdom rode 67 miles through the night to warn Rome, Ga., that the Yankees were coming, a ride more celebrated in these parts than Paul Revere’s. And 15-year-old Emma Sansom guided the Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his men across Black Creek, a feat remembered today whenever anyone drives by the Emma Sansom High School.

Gadsden sits astride the muddy Coosa River at the southern tip of Lookout Mountain in northeastern Alabama. The Goodyear Tire and Gulf State Steel plants anchor a shrinking blue-collar job market--a population once above 70,000 has dwindled to 47,000. The main thoroughfare through town, Broad Street, is a wide, uncrowded road lined by faded storefronts. People here are mainly Democrats, and not rich.

Labor problems have helped shape Gadsden’s reputation--the cotton mill closed for good in 1960 when workers voted in a union--but racial conflicts have had their days as well. A good deal of the troubles seemed to involve the Gadsden police. There was a time when prisoners riding the station elevator with an officer faced a fair chance of emerging on the top floor in considerably more pain than when the trip began.

“I’m not going to tell you the police department was crystal clear,” Hedgspeth allowed. “Some officers were out of control. They watched too many TV shows. We had some problems here.”

None of the problems drew as much anguished attention as the death of O. M.’s father in 1978.

It’s not that Collis Madden Jr. was an angel, people say. He was 27, he drank, he liked hot-rod cars. But the day he died, Friday, Jan. 20, he was only driving to his girlfriend’s apartment. The Etowah County sheriff’s deputies who pulled him over thought he was weaving. When Madden decided to speed off, his car door hit a deputy. City police joined the chase. Nine vehicles filled the street by the time the pursuit ended, just past the cemetery. The shooting started when one officer thought he saw Madden move. The coroner counted 15 to 17 entrance wounds, the mortician 40 to 50 holes in all. O. M. was 6 when his daddy died.

That first week about 500 people, led by local chapters of the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Voters League, marched down Broad Street singing “We Shall Overcome.” Six weeks later, more than a thousand marched again, this time led by national SCLC President and Executive Director Dr. Joseph Lowery and the Rev. Hosea Williams. Security was abundant--helicopter and airplanes, emergency control center, riot control equipment, 24 state troopers--for the Ku Klux Klan was marching, too, having chosen that day to demonstrate support for local officers of the law.

Then the affair just dwindled away. First an Etowah County grand jury ruled the officers had acted in self-defense, and later a federal grand jury decided there wasn’t enough evidence to return an indictment. Madden’s family finally settled a civil suit for $36,000.

There are those here who contend conditions have changed little since Madden’s death, little even since the 1960s. They have their reasons.

From time to time, after all, someone in police custody still turns up at a local hospital with an assortment of unexplained injuries. One black prisoner ended up paralyzed from the neck down--the result, police said, of banging his head against his cell bars. Gadsden jail conditions, for that matter, seem to encourage people to end their lives--in the last three years, civil rights lawyers have counted four suicides in the city jail, and several attempts.

Some bring their complaints of mistreatment to black City Councilman Bob Avery, a Goodyear Tire employee and past president of the local SCLC chapter. Others go to physicians. Dr. Spencer Thomas, president of the local NAACP chapter, found one such middle-age victim in his examining room, sobbing helplessly.

“My patient was beat so severely he had a buildup of byproducts in his body tissue and signs of renal failure,” Thomas said recently. “He came to me after being held overnight. ‘Doc, I just don’t understand,’ he cried.’ ”

A year ago, the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta filed a class action lawsuit against Gadsden and the Police Department, charging that dozens of prisoners are subjected frequently to beatings, abusive treatment, physical harassment and severely unsafe physical conditions. In July, 1988, the city agreed to a 20-page consent order that called for changes in everything from safety and security to personnel monitoring, medical care, suicide prevention and grievance procedures.

Disturbing as these conditions may be, however, they do not seem to concern everyone here as much as they might have 25 years ago. People still demonstrate outside city hall, 6 or 12 one day, 150 another day, and a few rise from time to time before a City Council meeting to protest. But their voices are relatively scattered and not infrequently tinged with extremes of rhetoric.

“Jimmy Hedgspeth is worse than Hitler,” Mildred Williams, a black woman connected with a group called the National Alliance Against Racial and Political Oppression, told the City Council one morning recently. “They’re attempting to exterminate the black race. They create lies and deceive like the ancient rulers of Egypt.”

If Williams can claim a constituency, so too can Ida Shaw, the black proprietor of a gas station convenience store on Tuscaloosa Avenue.

“We’ve had difficult times in this town, but it’s getting better,” she said. “Not perfect, but better. . . . Nothing like 20 years ago. . . . Now we’re not afraid. No big deal now.”

Of course, Shaw is not among the impoverished and unprotected who are most likely to be pummeled in the Gadsden jail, but neither is she rich or powerful. A widow, her face full of lines and creases, her smile both worn and warm, she represents a class of blacks in Gadsden who have come over the years to feel they have as much at stake in the community as many whites.

For that reason alone, times have changed. A 40-year-old man here can still readily recall his high school days when the local Sears store had separate water fountains for colored and white, and blacks could sit only in the balcony at the Pittman and Princess movie theaters. Now those picture palaces stand shuttered and peeling, abandoned in favor of the gleaming multiscreen complexes at the malls out by the interstate. Schools are integrated. Two blacks sit on the City Council, thanks to a political redistricting the city consented to in 1986 in the face of a lawsuit filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

These days, Floyd L. Donald, the black general manager of gospel and blues radio station WMGJ, worries mainly about the condition of the local economy and his community. Donald, whose tailored suits and crisply pressed dress shirts easily make him one of Gadsden’s best-dressed men, organized 50 people to spend one recent Saturday cleaning up graffiti sprayed on walls at a neighborhood center.

“Disrespect, immorality, wide-open dice games down the street . . . “ he complained. “They call the graffiti ‘art’ and the gangs ‘social clubs.’ Art? Well, they better enjoy that art before Saturday.”

It’s crime more than police that worries a good many people here now, blacks and whites alike.

The first signs appeared about 18 months ago, in the form of graffiti spray-painted on walls near the federal housing projects and the Carver Community Center--gang names such as Cripland and 5-9AGC. Stories about drug-dealing followed, punctuated by raids and arrests. A 17-year-old chased a 15-year-old behind a gas station and shot him to death. An elderly woman was found dead in her home, savagely beaten during a robbery. Suddenly folks in Gadsden found themselves worrying and debating. Whether part of gangs or not, kids were carrying guns.

Shaw’s husband got shot right at the front counter of their store and never left the hospital, although the cause of death was cancer. Adell McAlpine, better known as Mrs. Mac, proprietor of Penny Proffit BBQ & Beverage, the champion of local barbecue, got held up one night and watched a band of teen-agers scare the wits out of her customers another evening.

In all cases, blacks were victimizing blacks.

“Black man came in, pulled a gun,” Mrs. Mac recalls. “I told Mr. Hedgspeth, get that man off the street. I didn’t care if he was black . . . I don’t care black or white. Crime is crime.”

“I’m in a danger spot with this convenience store,” Shaw said. “Less drugs there are, less problems for me. I tell our prosecutor: ‘You do your job.’ And he is. . . .”

That’s the sort of message Hedgspeth hears often. When he walks along Tuscaloosa Avenue, blacks do not just greet him warmly, they rush from behind their counters with wide grins to embrace him, to slap his back, to pump his hand. Driving by teen-agers outside the Sixth Street project at night, he’s hailed by name--calls of “Hedspet” or “Jimmy” following his passing car. This has something to do with his personal style, which is open and gregarious, but it also has something to do with his background.

Hedgspeth grew up here poor, his father working at a gas station shoulder to shoulder with blacks, and before getting elected prosecutor in 1987, he spent 11 years as a private lawyer, handling criminal defense, bankruptcies and divorces. He had many black clients. “You came to me, you had problems,” he observed.

His voice sounds pure old South, and the accent thickens minute by minute as he talks to people on the street or waxes lyrical about Alabama barbecue. But Hedgspeth is far from Old South. Just turned 40, he wears blue blazers and rep stripe ties, and the accent can evaporate when the topic or setting calls for a different sort of demeanor.

When he ran for district attorney, the New South Coalition and the Alabama Democratic Council, Gadsden’s two main black political organizations, backed him. There, campaigning at their gatherings, is where he most often heard the request to prosecute black-on-black crime.

Hedgspeth still keeps in his desk drawer the shaded voter sheets that break down the election-night tally by individual ballot stations. The black neighborhoods, 17% of the electorate, gave him from 60% to 90% of their vote, and Hedgspeth won with a strong 55% majority.

Once in, he began prosecuting black-on-black crime so vigorously that some eventually began to feel Hedgspeth was harassing blacks. But if the district attorney was overzealous, his excesses seemed to be directed against anyone who ventured to break the law in Etowah County.

On the very morning Mildred Williams was comparing him to Hitler, Hedgspeth was standing in a courtroom prosecuting a white cocktail waitress for selling a single ounce of marijuana, $120 worth, to a customer at Bill’s Lounge.

“These kind of people have to be taken off the streets. They’ll sell to anyone, to your friends, even to your kids, your grandchildren . . . “ Hedgspeth drawled to the jury. “Whether or not we’re going to allow activity like this in our county is up to you. . . . We in the D. A.’s office can do only so much. . . . You are the conscience of this county. . . .”

By the time he was through, Hedgspeth had worked in references to Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. The jury, which included two blacks, stayed out just five minutes before returning with a guilty verdict. Because the sale happened within one mile of a school, the waitress faced a minimum sentence of five years, even though she had no prior record involving drugs. The 33-year-old woman shuffled from the courtroom looking stunned and blinking back tears.

“If I’d got me a Coke, I wouldn’t have had time to pop the top off,” Hedgspeth grinned minutes later.

Councilman Avery in the end sounds both wary and respectful of the district attorney: “Jimmy Hedgspeth was a damn good defense attorney. Very good. It seems he’s trying now to be just as good a prosecutor as he was defense attorney. He’s not racist or a bigot. He’s an opportunist. He’s a politician.”

It was in this setting that a Molotov cocktail arced through a kitchen window in the Myrtle Wood federal housing project on the night of May 12, 1988, bringing with it a firestorm and death to a black 14-month-old baby boy.

In the beginning moments of what has come to be called the O. M. case, six or eight teen-agers were walking the paths of the Myrtle Wood project, a two-story soot-stained brick complex with sparse brown lawns and walls marked with graffiti. One was O. M., 16 and skinny at 5-feet-10 and 135 pounds, still in the ninth grade, with no arrest record but some history of trouble at school. Another was O. M.’s 17-year-old uncle, S. T. A third was a boy who had said something lewd about S. T.’s sister, O. M.’s aunt.

That’s all that was needed to get things started. Later, the city attorney would claim the melee erupted between two gangs. Others would credit what happened simply to the warm, restless night.

S. T. “told Bennie not be (messing) with his sister no more,” reads O. M.’s statement to police. “Scoop then said y’all ain’t going to double-team Bennie and everybody started arguing back and forth. . . . After that a fight broke out and (S. T.) came out with a hatchet and hit Sol on the chest. Then everybody started running. . . .”

Three times O.M’s grandmother, Alyce Guice Thomas, broke up the fight, ordering everyone home, but she couldn’t hold back what was building. O. M.’s older uncle, Bobo, 33, appeared. He was strong and muscular and he’d served time, his record full of burglary, robbery and assault convictions.

“Bobo said, which (apartment) did they go into and I pointed to the (apartment) where they went into . . ., “ O. M.’s statement reads. “Bobo said don’t worry about it, we’re going to get them back. . . . When we got to the back of the building Bobo reached into his jacket and pulled out a bottle, it was a big bottle like a 16-ounce Coke bottle. It had a piece of cloth in the top of it. Bobo . . . pulled out a lighter and lit the cloth. Bobo had the bottle in his hand and reached back to (throw) it and me and (S. T.) turned and ran. I heard the bottle hit and I heard glass break then there was a big woosh sound. . . .”

The Molotov cocktail entered through a kitchen window. In the kitchen, the baby, Tamel Rutledge, sat alone on the floor. The nine others in the apartment could hear him crying but they couldn’t reach him through the wall of flames. After awhile, the cries stopped. Tamel had walked that day for the first time.

There was a time when Gadsden authorities might have treated this sorry, pointless melee lightly. No longer. Guided by an eyewitness, Gadsden police came the next day for Bobo, O. M. and S. T. Bobo they kept for good, the two youngsters they released to the custody of their mothers after two days of questioning outside the presence of a lawyer or family.

“The police officers . . . told me that ‘some nigger is going to fry’ . . .” O. M. said later in an affidavit. “They told me that I could be the one to ‘fry’ if I did not give them a statement. I was extremely frightened and scared. . . . In 1978 my father was killed by police officers in Gadsden. . . . The police officers told me that the same thing that happened to my father might happen to me if I didn’t give them a statement. . . .”

When the police next came looking for O. M. and S. T. a few days later, both had vanished.

“Where are they?” Judge Robert E. Lewis of the Etowah County juvenile court demanded of Alyce Thomas.

O. M’s grandmother--S. T.’s mother--is a small, worn but vocal and combative woman of 57 years, 25 of those spent working as a domestic for the owner of a Gadsden construction company. She was not unknown to Gadsden authorities. More than once over the years she’d raised her voice to charge them with racism. And more than one of her offspring had experienced trouble with the law, including convictions for forgery and burglary.

I don’t know, Alyce Thomas said.

On May 27, Judge Lewis held the grandmother in civil contempt and jailed her. I’ll release you when you produce your son, he said.

There she stayed for 83 days, most of them marked by a handful of demonstrators picketing outside the jail, until the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, calling her confinement a “flagrant violation of constitutional rights,” ordered her release in mid-August.

When Washington officers arrested O. M. at the home of relatives three months later, they transported him to the Northeast Receiving Home for Children on Olivet Road. There he has remained.

The network of civil rights and death penalty activists in Washington who soon scrambled to O. M.’s defense hung their arguments not just on conditions in Alabama, but also on the District of Columbia’s long-held and deeply felt record against the death penalty. The D. C. council had passionately denounced capital punishment in 1976 and repealed its use in 1980.

“We’re not trying to dictate to Alabama what to do,” O. M.’s defense attorney, Gerald Fisher, argued. “We’re saying what the District should do. After all the legalisms, the bottom line is: What does the District stand for? This is not an anti-law-and-order issue. We’re not saying Alabama has no right to prosecute. We’re saying, we are not going to contribute to putting someone to death.”

Underlying such thinking was the notion that authorities had discretion in agreeing to extradite someone, a discretion that could be informed not only by legal details but also by moral considerations, or even by the simple impression that a place like Alabama was not entirely civilized.

This theory had considerable history on its side, but not the most recent Rehnquist-era U.S. Supreme Court rulings. This evolution in law was well understood by D. C. Superior Court Judge Stephen Eilperin, who 25 years ago happened to be working in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, advising federal officials which of Alabama’s voting laws were invalid under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

O. M.’s claims should be dealt with in Alabama state and federal courts, Eilperin ruled on March 30, in response to Fisher’s request that the court block the youth’s return. To rule otherwise, the judge said, would elevate the District’s opposition to capital punishment into national policy and turn the District into a haven for persons wanted by other states on capital charges.

“Courts do not sit to make moral judgments loosed from law . . .” the judge concluded. “O. M.’s claims must fall.”

Fisher soon after turned to the District of Columbia court of appeals, where a ruling now is pending. But as he did so, the lawyer and other interested organizations also solicited a group they suspected might be more sympathetic to their cause--the district council.

Council chairman David A. Clarke, a former legal assistant to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and director of the SCLC’s Washington bureau, quickly obliged. “Nobody takes full responsibility for what happens in executions . . .” he told his colleagues. “If the switch is pulled, our fingers are going to be upon that switch as well. . . . Our fingers are on that button, and I’m not going to push it.”

But other council members did not so immediately rush to O. M.’s defense. There were concerns, some heatedly debated for hours over a number of days. Why were they worrying about Alabama’s conditions when people in the District had so many problems? Shouldn’t we be concerned about the dead baby and about black victims of crime? Should we impose our will on another state’s business? Do we have the authority to adopt or power to enforce such an act? Do we know all the facts?

In the end, two voices from Gadsden seemed to provide the decisive persuasion.

One came from afar. In a newspaper interview that appeared in the Washington Post in late March, Etowah County Judge Robert Lewis offered the thought that O. M. was a “definite accomplice in this thing” and had otherwise “done a lot he hasn’t got caught for.” All the same, the judge hastened to add: “I don’t think I would have any problem of objectivity because the facts are the facts.”

The other voice reached the D. C. council’s ears more directly. O. M.’s grandmother, Alyce Thomas, traveling to Washington to speak before the council, identified herself as a secretary of the National Alliance Against Political Repression and an active member of the SCLC, the Voters League and the NAACP. She connected her civil rights activities to what was happening to O. M.

“They’ve harassed us, they’ve put out threats. . . . I’ve been arrested, illegally several times. . . . My kids have been picked up simply because they were my kids, and we live in fear for our lives because of my involvement in civil rights. . . . The police are taking what they feel for me out on my children.”

When the District council finally adopted the emergency bill restricting the return of O. M., one councilman wondered what would happen if neither Alabama nor the council backed down.

“After some period of time. . .” the council’s lawyer, Greg Mize, explained, “O. M. could not lawfully be kept in custody. . . . He would have to be released by the District government.”

It’s fair to say people in Gadsden found such a prospect troubling. What’s more, the image of their community that was presented in the nation’s capital just did not fit with how many here saw themselves and their town.

“Gadsden may be a gritty factory town, but it is not in South Africa,” the city attorney, Roger Kirby, felt compelled to point out.

“I’m no bigot, I’m not a Kluxer,” Hedgspeth found himself telling people. “I resent like hell when people who have never been in Etowah County talk about what it’s like down here. . . .”

“D. C. council needs to look and do some business in D. C. Got some serious trouble there. Not right for them to pass judgment on Gadsden. . .” said Donald at WMGJ.

More than a few here felt particularly puzzled when they listened to the case being described in Washington as a persecution of Alyce Thomas’ family for her civil rights activism. The puzzlement rose mainly because not everyone here thinks of Alyce Thomas as a civil rights activist.

A good number, again blacks included, tended instead to identify Thomas as part of a family that mainly gets in trouble with the law.

“Alyce claiming so much commitment to the cause . . . there is some question about that,” the NAACP president Thomas said carefully. “I don’t know about that.”

“The family ain’t angels,” allowed councilman Avery. “Bobo beat up a deputy sheriff pretty bad once. . . .”

Because they didn’t believe O. M. would be treated unfairly in Gadsden, many blacks just couldn’t imagine why O. M. would flee their town unless he was guilty.

“He should be brought back,” said John Blount at his Texaco gas station, wiping his hands on a grease-stained rag. “Why’d he flee? Wouldn’t run unless he did it.”

“We’re not going to prejudge him,” Ida Shaw said as she rang up a sale at her convenience store. “But he needs to serve time. People shouldn’t be allowed to get out of jail. He’s a young boy. But there’s a dead baby too. . . .”

Over the course of two mornings recently, callers from the black community flooded radio station WMGJ’s popular 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. talk show with similar thoughts:

“If a person committed a crime, he should not be given sanctuary. . . .”

“The 14-month-old baby had a right to live. . . .”

“The city of Washington, D.C., is setting a dangerous precedent. . . .”

“The boy has nothing to fear if he’s innocent. . . .”

“If he’s guilty, he needs to pay a price. . . .”

Here and there, someone did rise to offer a contrary thought--”I don’t think O. M can get a fair trial in Etowah County based on the publicity and based on the family’s previous problems with the police,” said councilman Avery--but such scattered voices were overwhelmed by a sea of people insistent that their community could deliver justice.

If there was a moment when this attitude wavered, it came when a visitor mentioned to various people that O. M.’s father was Collis Madden. Few know this here, for O. M.’s identity remains obscured by use of his initials. When they found out, folks’ reactions often registered feelings of pain and dismay.

“I didn’t know that . . .” Mrs. Mac said, her eyes suddenly studying the floor.

“No, didn’t know that,” said Donald, shaking his head. His thoughts drifted to the days when he often rode the back of the bus to Birmingham. “That was a bad time. I marched in that protest. I marched against brutality and demanded action. That was done wrong. . . . Damn if that didn’t hurt. Not a good memory.”

The moment usually passed, though.

“Wasn’t the entire police department anyway,” Donald added upon reflection. “One or a few bad cops. That happens a lot of places. No different than a sniper on a roof. . . . Can’t live in the past, like rebel boys in the back of a truck. Civil War’s over.”

Rising out of such conflicted and commingled feelings of pride and concern, the O. M. case in the end seems to be more about fairness than about racism or crime. Many here want O. M. returned to Alabama just as much as they want Alabama to treat him justly.

“There is cause for concern whether O. M. would be treated fairly, and there is cause for concern that he not be treated for what he did. I’m not sure which is the worse evil for us, for society . . .” said the NAACP’s Thomas after an hour of laboring to synthesize contradictory thoughts.

Almost 30 years ago, he studied medicine out of state because Alabama schools wouldn’t have him. “The day shouldn’t come when blacks cover up crimes on the basis of race. . . . Fair is what we want in this case, just like in the workplace and housing and everywhere. It’s too bad that the past indicts the present, and it does. I know when police mistreat people, when people pay for crimes not committed. But we’re not talking about that now. Might he not be treated fairly? Yes. But does that mean he shouldn’t pay for his crime? No.”

Of course, this sentiment sounds not all that different from what O. M.’s defenders have been saying. Amid the waves of feeling and posturing aroused by the case, however, few here at present can see that both sides in this troubled exchange have been yearning mightily for much the same thing--the triumph of right over wrong.

Nor can many people here just now see how far the debate has strayed from its beginning issue--the death penalty. O. M.’s defenders wanted only a promise against the executioner. There is irony here, for most of the lawyers believe O. M. has never seriously faced the prospect of the electric chair.

The man Jimmy Hedgspeth truly wants for a capital offense is O. M.’s uncle, Yul Guice, better known as Bobo. Forced by speedy trial requirements, Hedgspeth in recent days took Bobo’s case to the county grand jury, but without O. M.’s testimony failed to get an indictment. It seems clear that Hedgspeth feels he needs to dangle the threat of a death sentence over O. M.’s head to persuade him to plea bargain and testify. The district attorney simply is not inclined to give up this leverage. He’s squeezing O. M.

There is no way to tell how far the squeeze might go if O. M. won’t cooperate, for this is not the sort of subject Hedgspeth is inclined to discuss. In fact, he’s never indicated what he intends to do with O. M.

“It’s up to the grand jury and judge,” he tells people when they ask. “I’m just a player in the system.” On occasion, he also says: “My momma didn’t raise no fools.”

So these days, Hedgspeth sits and waits for distant court rulings, from time to time pulling the reassuring sheets from his desk drawer and looking once more at the modern-day Gadsden voter tally--figures that document both his support in the black community and the changing times in a small Alabama town.

“You know, truth is, this is just another homicide,” the prosecutor said one morning recently. “We get six or eight of them a year here, mainly family fights. This is just another case.”