Dubious conviction of a black man in Alabama

The end of Valerie Findley’s life began with a single shot from a 9-mm hand gun. But it took years for her to die. She had been on the phone with one of her best friends, her sister, when there was a knock at the door of her home in Whistler, Ala. It was March 2, 1992 between eight and nine in the morning.

The two men outside were there under false pretenses. That there were two men is not disputed. Their identities are. The reason they were there is also not in question. They came to steal the gun collection belonging to Mike Finley — Valerie’s husband — and they did. They stuffed the guns in a pillowcase and before both men left, one of them tried to snuff out Valerie’s life with a single gunshot in the style of an executioner. But to their chagrin, and to the surprise of many others, Valerie Finley lived. She lived long enough to remember, speak of, and testify about the crime.

At the end of it all, Rodney Stanberry was jailed for the crime. He was Mike Finley’s best friend. They collected guns together and had many of the same guns. After so many years, two questions remain: Why would Rodney Stanberry have an interest in stealing the guns of his best friend — many of which he already owned — and, why would he condone the shooting of his best friend’s wife?

The answer, according to Stanberry, is that he didn’t. He wasn’t even there when the crime happened, he says. At the time, Rodney Stanberry was a driver for BFI, the waste disposal service. Documents and statements from Stanberry’s bosses show that when Valerie Finley was shot, Stanberry was miles away at a BFI facility having his sanitation truck repaired. While those documents and testimony from a BFI manager were considered by the jury Rodney Stanberry was convicted anyway — some three years after the shooting of Valerie Finley — of being an accessory. While the jury saw that evidence, something they did not see was the confession of a man who admitted in a recorded conversation to being in Valerie Finley’s home when she was shot. Those two issues, and many more discrepancies contained in court records and witness testimony over several years, reveal that this man may now be in jail for a crime he did not commit, though certainly some would argue that is just not the case.

Not Quite Perfect

In the background I can hear the meanderings of a prison cellblock. Rodney Stanberry is on a prison phone with me, taking me through the day Valerie Finley was shot. I have questions — a lot of them. I ask him about getting kicked out of Mary Montgomery High School shortly after moving to South Alabama from New York. Stanberry, a young black man was dating a young white girl. This is not a practice that would seem to go over well at the time in Semmes, Ala., I tell him. He agrees and admits to being expelled for skipping school with the young lady he’d taken up with.

Aside from the race component, Rodney Stanberry is guilty of being a hormonal teenager. But there is nothing else on Stanberry’s record. Unable to go back to school, Stanberry found a job. He worked for the sanitation company, BFI. He drove a truck emptying those big, green dumpsters familiar to businesses around Mobile. By all accounts, he was a model employee.

A ‘Black Redneck’

When Rodney was 17, his father moved the family from New York to the community of Axis. The elder Stanberry feared the emerging street culture of New York City and the effect it might have on his son. Rodney reveled in the move, taking up hunting and fishing. A self-described “black redneck,” he loved guns and shooting and quickly became familiar with a South Alabama way of life. After having trouble with his infatuation with a white girl and finding work as a sanitation truck driver, he settled down to enjoy life. Then he met Mike Finley, a kindred spirit. They enjoyed guns, ate dinner on Sundays, went shooting as much as they could, and owned many of the same types of weapons. Valerie knew him as part of the family. Mike and Valerie lived in a small house at the end of a cul de sac in Whistler.

Rodney says it was simple happenstance that caused his former New York friend Rene (pronounced Rennie) Whitecloud Barbosa to call. Barbosa was looking to come south from New York and he had a friend he was bringing along — Angel Melendez. Melendez, known as “Wish” was also connected to Rodney’s past life in New York. Stanberry had gotten Melendez’s sister pregnant and had a child with her as a teenager. Now, Barbosa and Melendez were headed to Mobile, for a Mardi Gras visit with their old friend.

Their visit was fast and furious. Stanberry was not a happy host. Reluctantly, he introduced his old friends from New York, Melendez and Barbosa to his new southern friend, Mike Finley. Stanberry says at some point during the visit, Finley, Barbosa and Melendez went to a shooting range and Finley showed off many of his guns to the visitors, even though Stanberry says he admonished him not to bring more than one or two. Stanberry was not at the shooting range at the time.

The record of Barbosa and Melendez’s visit to Mobile is a gray area. However, Stanberry says at some point they became acquainted with a man named Terrell Moore. But it’s not just Stanberry who confirms that Moore met Barbosa and Melendez. Moore’s own tape-recorded statements also confirm that he knew the visitors from New York and that he was at Valerie Finley’s home at the time she was shot.

By all accounts from Stanberry’s defense team, Moore should have become a prime suspect at least as an accessory in the shooting of Valerie Finley. But he didn’t. In fact, he was never arrested or charged for any crime connected with Finley’s assault. Moore’s account of what happened on that March morning was recorded by Mobile private detective Ryan Russell.

Russell, a middle-aged white man, says he made a late-night venture into an all-black nightclub in Prichard in order to detain Moore to question him. The private eye who was working for Rodney Stanberry’s defense lawyer, said he was shaking and sweating as he initiated the confrontation. In the end, Moore went with him peacefully.

The Crime

Stanberry says he went to work early in the morning the day Valerie Finley was shot, waking up the neighbors of businesses, pounding the big BFI dumpsters on the rim of his truck, emptying the trash, then moving on to the next one. He says later in the day, perhaps noon, he heard about Valerie being shot. In the morning, he says, he’d been to several businesses before the hours of eight and nine when the shooting reportedly happened. Documents from BFI that were introduced as evidence at his trial show that Stanberry was having a tire repaired in the BFI shop during the hour Valerie was believed to have been shot. Afterward, he was reportedly at Degussa, a plant far south of the Whistler community, where Valerie lived.

This was the day Barbosa and Melendez were supposed to be leaving Mobile by bus to go back to New York. They had been staying at a Beltline motel. Another friend of Stanberry’s, a man named Taco, was to drive them from their motel to the bus station on Government Boulevard. Taco was there at the appointed time, but he was forced to wait on one of the two men to show back up to the hotel. It is unclear, even today which of the two men, Barbosa or Melendez, he was waiting for.

A few miles up I-65, something else was happening. According to witness testimony, a man who was working on a car in front of the Finley home described two other men. Court documents reveal those two men matched the description of Terrell Moore and Angel Melendez. The witness described the car in which the two men arrived, and it matched the description of the car driven by Moore.

The witness said the two men knocked on the door of the Finley home and entered. Court documents of the eyewitness testimony reveal a short while later the men emerged from the home carrying something similar to a pillow case, consistent with Moore’s confession that the stolen guns were stuffed into a pillow case from the Finley’s bedroom.

Moore acknowledged in his interview with private investigator Ryan Russell that there were people working on a car in the middle of the cul de sac in front of the Finley home. “I noticed that it was a man working on his car in the circle,” Moore said.

But, also of importance is what happened while the two men were inside the home. Moore described how Valerie, screaming and yelling at the two men, led them to Mike Finley’s gun safe and opened it for them. Her sister, Brenda Gay, reported hearing on the phone what sounded like someone going through drawers in the house. She said she hung up because it took so long for her sister to return to the phone.

Moore also told how Melendez held a gun on Valerie while Moore retrieved a pillow case from the couple’s bedroom and stuffed the guns inside of it. The two men began to back their way out of the house, Valerie still screaming at them. Then, Moore said, he heard the shot. Valerie was quieted.

News accounts at the time say she was found at about 11:20 a.m. by the son of a neighbor, with one gunshot wound to the head.

The Confession

Russell says it was months after Finley’s shooting when he interviewed Moore. He provided the videotape recording of that interview in which Moore described who was at Valerie’s home on that March morning in 1992.

Russell: “You and Wish were there, right?”

Moore: “Yeah, just me and Wish.”

Russell: “Was Rodney Stanberry there?”

Moore: “No he wasn’t.”

Russell: “You never saw Rodney at all that morning?”

Moore: “Right.”

Russell: “You never saw him at all that day?”

Moore: “Right.”

Terrell Moore told a private investigator Rodney Stanberry had never been involved in Finley’s shooting and that he had been one of those inside her home when she was shot. For some reason his testimony was never admitted in court.....

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