By Scott Graber
It is Tuesday, and I’m at Bricks Bar and Grill on Boundary Street. Normally I would be sitting at the bar with a mushroom swiss burger; a Blue Moon beer; and an eye on the Cooking Channel. But today I’m in a booth with Charles B (Mike) Macloskie.
Mike Macloskie is a lawyer — a trial lawyer who often begins his working day saying, “Good Morning ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” Mike has been saying those words for the past 60 years.
Forty-five years ago I happened to be standing in the Beaufort County Courthouse — the old, cream-colored building that still stands at the corner Bay and Bladen streets — waiting for Macloskie to give his closing argument in the case of State of South Carolina vs. Clemmie Moultrie.
I was in that linoleum-tiled, spittoon-accessorized Courtroom — jam-packed with spectators who were following this trial —knowing Macloskie’s closing would be in the same rhetorical category as the (fictitious) Atticus Finch closing in “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
Would it be enough to turn this jury away from the death penalty?
Clemmie Moultrie was a 64-year-old Black man living in Walterboro, S.C. He lived in a ramshackle house that he believed he was buying. He made payments every month and was angered one day when several men showed up and began systematically removing his roof.
Moultrie threatened them with his Winchester 32/20 rifle and they retreated.
Thereafter the owner, a magistrate, side-stepped the normal eviction process issuing an arrest warrant. When the Sheriff’s deputies came swarming onto Moultrie’s property, the Black man opened fire killing a well-known, well-liked deputy named Stephen Breland.
I was not there when this happened, but newspaper accounts report hundreds of rounds were pumped into the house. Somehow Moultrie survived the tear gas and the lead-based broadside that effectively took down what remained of the dilapidated dwelling.
The lawyers in Walterboro did not want this trial in their small town believing this explosive issue that would lead to riots. They petitioned the Court to remove the case saying that Moultrie would not get a fair trial in Colleton County.
And so the trial was moved to our bluff-side courthouse on Bay Street.
Mike had the obvious self-defense argument but was fighting the fact that Deputy Breland arrived on the scene with an arrest warrant issued by a sitting magistrate.
That magistrate could have used the eviction process that comes with written notices posted on one’s dwelling. And, of course, that process would have come with a hearing. But that was not done;
the magistrate in question happened to own the house in question.
Macloskie’s motion to dismiss on basis of self defense was rejected by Judge Clyde Eltzroth. But the lawyer also made yet another motion based on the fact that Blacks had been historically under-represented on the grand juries in Colleton County.
Macloskie needed help and reached out to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Atlanta. They responded by sending down a young lawyer, Dennis Balskie, who showed the Court that Blacks were under-represented on Colleton County grand juries by more than 12% between 1971 and 1977.
But 12% was not enough — and would not be enough for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that would eventually uphold Eltzroth’s dismissal.
This meant that Macloskie would have to win with a Beaufort County jury. He would have to convince the mostly white jury that the death penalty was not warranted. And I can report he came within 2 jurors of acquittal; some of the jurors visibly sobbing as Mike made his closing. The dead-locked jury eventually settled on manslaughter; Judge Eltzroth awarding 30 years.
But if you want to watch a jury trial you had better hurry on down to the courthouse — one study in 2002 found that cases reach a jury less that one percent of the time; and these rates are even lower today.
In civil cases we have court required mediation as well as lengthy of pre-trial discovery (that tease-out the issues) and a growing distrust of juries who remain inscrutable in spite of experts and Artificial Intelligence.
Today’s young lawyers lose out on the experience that comes with a full-blown, weeks-long jury trial. And, of course, judges also lose out on lessons learned in the heat and haze of head-on legal debate.
Jury trials were once a big part of small town entertainment and, of course, a staple of Southern fiction. Some, including myself, despair at the silent hallways and darkened courtrooms.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.