A Knock at Midnight(27)
The online PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) federal records system gives public access to electronic transcripts, and since Keyon’s case was so recent, I could access his court transcripts that way. To prepare my final paper and presentation, I pored over almost a thousand pages of them. What I found blew my mind.
When a police raid in Keyon’s hometown of Paris, Texas, led to the indictment of thirty-two individuals on drug charges in 2004, Keyon was sitting in his sociology class at Texas A&M in Commerce, where he lived and went to school. His name wasn’t on the original indictment and didn’t come up in any ensuing investigation. And for a whole year after a federal grand jury returned the indictment, it would stay that way.
But a year later, six of Keyon’s childhood friends—whom I also knew from around the way, and who were facing serious time—suddenly produced Keyon’s name as a key player in the drug game. Based on these men’s word alone, Keyon was indicted and wrested from his campus life three months before graduation and charged with conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.
Drugs were never found on Keyon, or even in his vicinity. Nor was any physical evidence presented at his trial. There were no large sums of money, no controlled buys, no surveillance of any kind to implicate him. The entire prosecution was based on the testimony of the six guys Keyon knew from the neighborhood, all of whom had extensive arrest records to their names. And it wasn’t just the nonexistent evidence that was shocking, or the blatantly farfetched, self-serving ways that those on the stand tried to implicate Keyon. As I turned the pages of the transcripts, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. In the nature of the questioning, and in its content, racial bias was on full display, so obvious as to be absurd.
A Black woman prosecutor used every racial stereotype she could muster to portray Keyon to the all-white jury as a beast, a slick kingpin drug dealer, the type of irredeemable, inhuman thug that exists only in America’s racist imagination. In tones sometimes goading, sometimes mocking, sometimes sisterly, she asked witness after witness countless questions about their clothing, their jewelry, their shopping habits. She was particularly obsessed with Air Jordans, how many pairs the young men on the stand owned, how often they went to the mall to purchase new ones, whether they’d ever gone to the mall with Keyon, and which mall? I shook my head. Could an extensive collection of Jordans or throwback jerseys really be used as government evidence that someone was a leader of a drug syndicate? If the nearly thirty pages of official court transcripts devoted to the issue were any indication, the answer—in East Texas, at least—was yes.
The prosecutor’s ridiculous line of questioning didn’t stop there. Keyon’s dad owned an auto shop and Keyon had customized cars his whole life, but according to the prosecutor, his newly installed woofers constituted evidence of drug trafficking—in spite of the fact that no investigation turned up an ounce of even so much as weed. His gold chain, too. Even after the defense established that he’d bought the chain used from a pawnshop for a fraction of its market price, the prosecutor tossed it around like a smoking gun.
Jordans, gold chains, and a subwoofer. The testimony of other young men who had accepted plea deals for turning on Keyon. This was the “evidence” that earned my friend a life sentence. I kept going back through the transcripts, thinking I must have missed something. But I hadn’t. There was no evidence connecting Keyon to the two kilos. Unbelievably, the opposite was true for those who testified against him. We’re talking videotaped transactions. Wiretaps. Individuals caught red-handed with drugs. Confessions. It didn’t seem to matter to the court. For their trouble, the men who’d snitched on Keyon received a reward for their cooperation, lesser sentences of five to seven years in prison. And on no evidence but their word, Keyon Mitchell received a life sentence.
Keyon’s trial transcripts shook me to my core. These were young men’s lives at stake—not only Keyon’s, but all the people caught up in the indictment. All of them Black, all of them from Paris, Texas, where the Klan had recently rallied to protest the city council’s debate about potentially removing a Confederate statue. And while it’s unlikely that anyone involved in the indictment—including Keyon—were one hundred percent innocent, the court’s reliance on hearsay was beyond disturbing. I thought about what Professor Lacy had said on the first day of class—that racism was a part of the very fabric of our society, inseparable from the institutions that guide and shape our lives. As I read through Keyon’s transcripts as both a student of law and a friend of the accused, nothing seemed more true.
At the time of Keyon’s trial, the jury had to establish the quantity of drugs in question as well as the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Ultimately, the jury refused to go along with the forty kilos the prosecution was pushing, but they did find Keyon guilty of conspiring to distribute two kilos of crack cocaine. Under federal law in 2006, the punishment for selling two kilos of crack was the same as for selling two hundred kilos of pure cocaine.
The 100-to-1 ratio was the first extreme-sentence trigger for Keyon, and that was bad enough. But in Keyon’s case—and most I would handle in the future—disparate sentencing turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. Under federal law, a sentencing enhancement means more time. And the prosecutor in Keyon’s case laid on the sentencing enhancements like there was no tomorrow. By the time the enhancements were added up, the judge couldn’t have avoided giving Keyon a life sentence even if he’d wanted to.