Former death row inmate
William "Billy" Neal Moore is a man consumed with gratitude. After
spending nearly 17 years on Georgia's death row, the
prisoner-turned-Pentecostal preacher says he is living proof that a
wasted life can be revived for the good of humanity.
Moore wound up on Georgia's
death row after being convicted for the 1974 robbery-murder of a
77-year-old man. It was a crime against another Black man that,
amazingly, elicited a decade and a half campaign by the murder victim's
family to set Moore free because, as the family noted, the robbery
attempt was masterminded by a relative who was not charged in the crime.
Moore will never forget the
night that led to his 17-year ordeal. He had gone to the home of an Army
buddy. The two got drunk, and the man encouraged Moore to rob the man's
uncle, who, he said, kept $20,000 to $30,000 stashed in his house. Moore
stumbled through the house in the darkness. The uncle's bedroom door
creaked open, and the barrel of a shotgun peeked out and fired off a
shot. Moore panicked and shot through the door. He heard someone
crumple to the floor, and when he pulled the string of an overhead light
the body of his buddy's uncle lay dead, face down.
"When I found out that I had
actually killed somebody, I couldn't believe it," says Moore, now an
ordained minister for the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, who was
22 at the time. "I felt sick … as if a part of me had died. I was at
the lowest point that somebody could reach."
His court-appointed attorney
provided poor representation, and as a result, there were countless
court appeals over improper legal procedures, which ping-ponged through
state courts, eventually gathering the support of not only the murder
victim's family but the likes of Mother Theresa and Jesse Jackson.
Moore's case eventually landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled a
30-day stay of execution in 1990. Georgia's State Board of Pardons and
Paroles subsequently commuted the sentence, and he was released on
parole.
Moore now lives in Rome, Ga.,
with his wife, Pastor Donna Moore, and he speaks regularly at colleges
and universities, including such prestigious campuses as Harvard and
Yale, about the tribulations of the death penalty.
Many of his stories these
days elicit smiles, even chuckles, from listeners as well as himself.
But back in the day, they were anything but funny.
Take, for example, the story
about the Jefferson County, Georgia sheriff who, told him 17 years ago
as he awaited execution, "If you'd paid me the $9,000 you paid your
lawyer, you wouldn't be here now."
Or his remembrances of the
guards at Riedsville Prison who he says were "generational Ku Klux
Klan."
"It would not be unusual to
run into a grandfather, father and son on the same shift – all members
of the Klan," Moore says. "They would routinely lock down and search
all the Black prisoners, confiscate weapons and then give all that they
found to the White prisoners to use against us."
It was at Riedsville that
Moore met Stephen Bright, a workaholic firebrand of an attorney who
headed the Southern Center for Human Rights. At the time, Moore was a
condemned man obtaining a bachelor's in Theology and studying law to
defend himself at the numerous hearings he and activist organizations
instigated on his behalf. The Center became involved in Moore's appeals
process.
Over the years, Bright's
group has taken on individual death penalty cases and gotten them
reversed, and filed class-action suits against prisons on health issues,
such as HIV/AIDS, overcrowding and deprivation of crucial medication.
This list of the Center's
victories is copious: Among the many are Gary Drinkard, imprisoned for
five years on Alabama's death row for a crime he did not commit is now a
carpenter in Morgan County, Ala.; Tony Amadeo, condemned at 18 to die in
Georgia's electric chair in 1977, graduated from Mercer University in
1995. And then there is William (Billy) Neal Moore.
"Had Billy Moore been
executed, this world would be a poorer place and it would have been a
mark of shame for the people of Georgia," says Sara Totonchi, of the
Center. "Saved by the lack of a jury trial and pleas for mercy from
members of the victim's family, Moore is not merely an example of the
ability of the Georgia prison system to rehabilitate criminals but an
agent of the rehabilitation of others. His case is a prime example of
the importance not only of clemency and of second chances, but that
rehabilitation from even the most egregious crimes is possible."
