Marlon Howell in eighth grade
Without any physical evidence linking Howell to the crime, Rice's identification became the most important piece of evidence in the state's case against Howell.
The lineup: Howell, third from left wearing a blue shirt; Robert Harris, farthest to the right wearing a white shirt.
New Albany
As is common for defendants in murder trials, Howell did not testify, and jurors I spoke with told me that the alibi his defense team constructed struck them as creaky, at times even contradictory. Howell's father told the jury that he had opened the door to let Howell in at some point in the middle of the night—certainly while it was still dark out, he said—and Howell's sister Miriam said that she had heard Howell ring the door bell, come into the house, and turn on the TV in the living room. This was all the jury heard from Howell's defense team about his whereabouts that night. They never heard an alternate story of when and how Howell parted ways with his co-defendants.During jury selection, Hood had struck the only two potential black jurors, and the all-white jury that heard Howell's case was impressed by Hood's performance. "It was like you were part of it," one juror, an elderly woman who could remember almost nothing else of the case, told me of Hood's vivid presentation.On the trial's fifth and final day, Hood stopped calling Howell by his name, referring to him instead as the "Big Chiefa," derived from Howell's teenage nickname. Hood painted Howell as a gang leader who coerced his acolytes into violent crime. "You heard his voice breaking," Hood said of Lipsey's testimony. "Scared to death of the Big Chiefa." When the jury read the guilty verdict, Howell's mother fainted and was removed from the courthouse on a stretcher.In the days after Pernell's murder, some New Albany residents wanted Howell lynched.
The New Albany police station where Howell was first questioned
*Howell's is not the first death-penalty case that Richardson has litigated. In 1989, he helped to win the exoneration of Tim Hennis, a soldier who had been convicted of raping and killing a mother and murdering her two daughters. After DNA evidence later re-incriminated Hennis, he was placed back on death row.
Miriam Howell, Marlon's sister, near her home in Myrtle
Lipsey and Ray's interrogations also provided the basis for Hood's descriptions of Howell as a gang leader. Friends and acquaintances of Howell's I spoke with said that Howell, whose prior criminal record consisted only of the marijuana conviction, never belonged to anything resembling a gang, much less served as a gang leader. "There are no gangs in New Albany, so I'm not sure what gang he could have been leading," said Taliah Hasan, who is now attending law school in Michigan and knew Howell through a close friendship with his sister Miriam. "It was a tactic for his prosecution," she said. "People called him 'Chiefa' because he smoked a lot of marijuana," Hasan said. "'Chiefing' means smoking. [Hood] completely misinterpreted the name."The notion that Howell was seeking to rob Pernell was also bolstered by Hood's repeated assertions that Howell refused to work for an honest living.Yet, as Howell's sister Apprecia Prather pointed out, in the years before Pernell's murder, Howell had in fact kept a variety of jobs. While on house arrest, for instance, Howell had done temp work at a Walmart distribution warehouse; his application to work full-time was denied because of the pot conviction."The picture [Hood] painted was of a law-abiding Mister Pernell, an innocent man who worked for a living and had a family, versus a black boy, lazy and not working." —Howell's sister, Apprecia Prather
Reverend James Howell and Linda Howell, Marlon's parents, at church in Falkner
The courthouse in New Albany, where Howell was tried for the killing of Pernell
B-Quik in New Albany, Mississippi, where Lasonja Gambles says she picked up Howell before the shooting