A Sheriff Arrested Me in a Diner Without Knowing Who I Was, Then His Deputy Opened My Wallet and Found My Federal Judge Badge

The grand jury in Macon returned the indictment eleven months later.

It was sixty-three pages long. Dalton Voss was charged with nine counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, the federal civil rights statute that makes it a crime for anyone with a badge to violate a person’s constitutional rights. The counts included my arrest, the arrests of Deacon Earl Simmons and Rufus Tate, and the death of Hattie Greene.

He was also charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and honest services fraud, for using his office to steer land into Pinecrest Holdings in exchange for kickbacks. There was a count of theft of government property for the cash missing from the evidence room, and two counts of obstruction of justice for ordering deputies to falsify reports.

Wade Purcell, the brother-in-law, was indicted on the fraud and conspiracy counts. So was a Pell County tax commissioner’s clerk named Darla Fenwick. The FBI found that she’d been tipping Purcell off about which properties were heading to tax sale and making sure the notices to the owners went to the wrong addresses.

Two deputies, Briggs and a man named Hollis Tate, who was no relation to Rufus, were charged with obstruction for helping write the false report on Hattie Greene’s death. Both pleaded guilty within a month and agreed to testify.

Deputy Caleb Miller was never charged with anything.

AUSA Delgado told me why. “He reported what he saw, and he preserved evidence at real risk to himself,” she said. “Did he wait too long? Yes. He’ll carry that. But the law doesn’t punish a twenty-four-year-old for being afraid of his boss. It punishes the boss.”

The trial began on a gray Monday in March, in a federal courtroom in Macon with dark wood paneling and a great seal of the United States on the wall behind the bench. The case was assigned to a senior judge from Alabama, brought in so that no Georgia federal judge who might know me would preside.

I testified on the second day.

I wore a navy suit and no jewelry. I sat in the witness chair and looked at the jury: seven women and five men, from farms and small towns all over middle Georgia. I told them exactly what happened in the Magnolia Diner. I didn’t add anything, and I didn’t leave anything out.

Gerald Fontaine cross-examined me for two hours. He asked why I hadn’t identified myself. He asked whether I’d come to Pell County hoping to be arrested. He asked whether my aunt had a grudge against the sheriff.

I answered every question the same calm way.

“Judge Whitlock,” Fontaine finally said, leaning on the podium, “isn’t it true that you could have ended this entire incident in five seconds simply by telling my client you were a federal judge?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I could have.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

I looked at the jury.

“Because the Constitution doesn’t only protect federal judges, Mr. Fontaine. It protects waitresses, deacons, seventy-one-year-old men with canes, and eighty-one-year-old widows who need their heart pills. If the only thing standing between your client and a person’s rights was the badge in her purse, then nobody in Pell County was safe. I wanted to know whether they were. They weren’t.”

Fontaine sat down.

Caleb Miller testified on the fifth day.

He wore a cheap gray suit that didn’t quite fit in the shoulders. His mother, Sylvia, sat in the second row of the gallery with Aunt Lorraine beside her, both in their Sunday church hats. Aunt Lorraine had insisted on coming, walker and all.

Miller read his notebook entries out loud to the jury, one by one. When he got to Hattie Greene, his voice broke, and he had to stop and drink water. The judge called a ten-minute recess.

When he came back, he finished.

“She asked for her pills four times,” he told the jury. “I counted. I wrote it down because I knew someday somebody would need to know the number. I asked the sheriff twice. He said, ‘She’ll live.’” Miller looked down at the table. “She didn’t live.”

In the gallery, a young man in his late teens with a fade haircut and a tight jaw put his face in his hands. That was Jaylen Greene, Hattie’s great-grandson, the boy who’d written one of the thirty-one letters on yellow legal paper. He was eighteen now and a freshman at Fort Valley State University.

The jury deliberated for two days.

On the afternoon of the second day, they came back. Dalton Voss was guilty on all counts but one. They acquitted him on a single count of theft of government property because the prosecution couldn’t prove exactly which bundles of cash in the filing cabinet had come from the evidence room. Everything else stuck.

Four months later, the senior judge from Alabama sentenced him to seventeen years in federal prison.

She also ordered him to pay restitution: $8,400 to Terrence Holloway for the tuition money taken from his glove box, and $187,500, the amount of the kickbacks, to be forfeited to the United States. She ordered the cash from the gray filing cabinet forfeited as well.

Wade Purcell got eight years. Darla Fenwick got three.

Before the sentencing ended, the judge asked whether any victims wished to speak.

Jaylen Greene stood up.

He walked to the podium in a white button-down shirt that still had fold creases in it from the package. He unfolded a piece of yellow legal paper and smoothed it flat with both hands.

“My great-grandmama was Hattie Mae Greene,” he said. “She was eighty-one. She raised me after my mama got sick. She taught me to read with the Bible and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, because she said you need both to understand the world.”

He looked across the courtroom at Voss.

“I wrote a letter about her when I was seventeen. I sent it to the governor, and nobody answered. I sent it to the GBI, and nobody answered. I sent it to the newspaper, and nobody answered. Then my great-aunt’s friend, Miss Lorraine, said she knew somebody in Atlanta who might know where to send it.” He swallowed hard. “I didn’t think anybody would ever read it.”

He folded the paper back up.

“Somebody read it,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to say. Somebody finally read it.”