A Knock at Midnight(25)
“If there was anything I could do, I’d do it, Mr. Mitchell. I just don’t think—”
“They took his life, Brittany. His life.” His voice cracked with emotion. “Just take a look at the case. You’ll see.”
When we hung up, I stood on the sidewalk for a minute before gathering myself to hustle into court. Keyon’s situation had turned Mr. Mitchell, a respected community figure with twenty years at a local factory and a thriving auto shop in Paris, into an activist fighting to save his son’s life. He’d done everything he could to help Keyon, gone through multiple lawyers, even organized street protests. He would have resorted to calling me only because he was desperate. Not being able to help stung. Mr. Mitchell was right. I wasn’t a lawyer yet.
And I wasn’t even interested in practicing criminal law when I did become a lawyer. I’d glimpsed the fruits of finance at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and my sights were set on joining the big dogs in corporate. It was what I’d always imagined—at first from the images of power and prestige I saw on television, and then through my own work at PwC. That was what I wanted—to be the very epitome of efficiency and capable power, to be the one calling the shots or at least guiding them.
But appeals like the one from Mr. Mitchell were already coming to me with some regularity, each one a desperate SOS from someone looking for legal help or advice that might free a friend or family member. Each time, I explained that I had just started school; that I was studying corporate law, not criminal law; that I didn’t have a license; that I couldn’t file a motion even if I wanted to. Each time, I could hear the disappointment in their voices, the kind of piercing desperation that hits the inner ear and ricochets to the heart. It was hard hearing it, but nowhere near as terrible for me as for the person on the other end of the line. This I knew from personal experience. My mama had served over two years in prison, and every day had felt like a decade.
And so when people like Mr. Mitchell called for help, I always listened. There wasn’t anything else I could do.
But after I hung up with Mr. Mitchell, I couldn’t stop thinking about Keyon. Charismatic, funny, good-looking, a successful student, Keyon had been the epitome of popular, the one all the girls had a crush on. We’d worked together one summer at a call center and become friends. He went to Texas A&M in Commerce and pledged Omega Psi Phi, a historical Black fraternity. The Q-Dogs threw the best parties, and whenever I drove down for one during my first year in college, I’d see Keyon flexing with his frat brothers, stepping in line to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” in their royal purple silk jackets and gold boots, repping their organization with pride and exuberance. By 2005, he was president of his fraternity chapter and a spokesman for the local NAACP. Keyon was twenty-three years old, proud father of a little girl, and months shy of graduating from Texas A&M Commerce with a dual degree in criminal justice and sociology. But he never got the chance to wear that cap and gown.
On his way to one of the last classes of his college career, squad cars screeched onto the A&M campus in Commerce, sirens blaring, and blocked Keyon in on all sides. With his peers looking on, the police threw Keyon against a car and read him his Miranda rights. Eventually, he was convicted of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. Instead of walking the stage for his diploma, Keyon walked into federal prison with a mandatory life without parole sentence.
I was an undergrad at UT Arlington at the time of the verdict, and Sissy and I would sit on the phone in the evening after classes, trying to make sense of it all. We knew Keyon had probably dealt some drugs, but how could he get life? It didn’t seem possible. This was someone we knew, who we hung out with. Growing up, Keyon was supposed to be one of the ones to make it, go to college, become somebody important. Keyon was no drug kingpin. He was a college kid with a bright future ahead of him. Yet some judge had determined that he was unfit ever to set foot into society again? It made no sense. We didn’t have to know much about the case to know something was horribly wrong.
For a while Keyon’s sentence was all we talked about. But although his family did everything they could to keep his name in the media, eventually the shock of the news faded and we went on with our lives. This is one of the effects of prison. People locked up are out of sight and often, no matter how unjust their situation, out of mind.
The summer that Keyon’s father called me about his denied appeal, I was working as an intern in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. I sat through all of Judge Nancy J. Atlas’s sentencing hearings. The cases were already concluded, most often without trial. The defendants had already pleaded guilty, and the proceedings I observed would determine the length of their prison sentence. Most of the hearings were deeply disturbing. In case after case, I saw men who resembled my father, my uncles, my friends, stand before the court and plead for their lives. Often, their harsh sentences made as little sense to me as Keyon’s.
To make matters worse, the judges I observed handed down sentences in months, not years: 120 months, 264 months, 360 months. I had a master’s degree in accounting and it still took me a minute to compute the numbers in my head. I watched these men stand there, marked as prisoners in their jailhouse jumpsuits, hands cuffed in front of them, trying desperately to work out the math in their head. I saw the horror and pain on their faces as the months, divided by twelve, became decades of their lives. I will never forget that sight for as long as I live. There is absolutely no reason for this, I would think each time. No possible purpose but to strip these men of their dignity and humanity.