A Knock at Midnight(37)
At the close of their meeting a few weeks later, Sharanda asked Murphy straight out: “I appreciate you listening to me, I really do. But I just want your best legal advice. Do I have to accept this? Or do I have a chance to win?”
“Sharanda,” Murphy said, leaning earnestly toward her over his desk, “if I thought you should take a deal, I’d tell you to. In my view it would be foolish to do so. The government really has no case. They have nothing on you. They don’t have any surveillance or confidential drug buys. They haven’t found any drugs or money in your possession. Look, we’re going in with ‘Show me the money!’?”
This all sounded good to Sharanda.
With Clenesha’s dad’s help, Sharanda hired him. She would go to trial and would do so with the confidence that only a person na?ve about drug laws could possess, a confidence that only finally deserted her the moment she saw the marshals coming into the courtroom to take her away to county jail to await a living death sentence.
* * *
—
I LEARNED SHARANDA’S story over the course of many letters, emails, and conversations. Again and again, I was moved and inspired by Sharanda’s resilience, her devotion to her family, her stoic positivity in the face of the inanity of what she’d been through, and the grinding gray reality of prison life. Our bond continued to deepen. But our journey together began on that very first visit.
Before I left Carswell that first day, I leaned across the barrier between our chairs and took her hand. Outside the prison, a winter’s dusk was approaching, and most families had already reluctantly said their goodbyes and shepherded crying children out toward the cars. Sharanda and I had spent all evening visiting together, our first of many, and still I too felt reluctant to leave. I was twenty-five years old and a second-year law student. I knew next to nothing about the way the law worked in the real world. The only thing I knew after that first visit was that Sharanda Jones did not deserve to spend the rest of her life in prison.That day, I spoke to her with all the passion and conviction of a budding attorney.
“I will get you out, Sharanda,” I said. “I will see you free. Even if I have to take this case all the way to the White House.”
Sharanda looked me in the eye and was quiet for a long time. Then she leaned toward me and smiled.
“Well,” she said, “I guess I’m getting out, then.”
Chapter 8
LOOKING FOR A KEY
In the quiet of a Tuesday evening in the spring of 2010, a long day of classes behind me, I knelt on the floor of my apartment before a large postal box, pausing before I split open the packing tape with my key. I wanted to mark the occasion, if only with a moment of stillness. Sharanda had sent me her trial transcripts. Even though I still had another year of law school and the grueling bar exam to go before I could officially call myself an attorney-at-law, Sharanda had granted me complete access to her case. Her trust in me was a great honor.
Taking a deep breath, I opened the box. One by one, I lifted out the six volumes of transcripts, each one ranging from sixty to two hundred pages. They were ten years old—the paper thin, the font bearing the uneven ink of a typewriter. Almost reverently, I carried the first volume to my kitchen table, where a brand-new yellow legal pad sat waiting. There was no question or doubt in my mind about the task at hand. Somewhere in these six volumes of transcribed testimony, I believed, was the key to Sharanda’s freedom. The thought filled me with nervous anticipation and purpose. Eagerly I began to read, pen poised for the notes I couldn’t wait to take.
By the end of the first volume of transcripts I was gripping my pen so hard my hand ached, my furious handwriting almost illegible on the page. Over the past few weeks and months, Sharanda had shared every detail of her personal story with me, including her decision to serve as an intermediary between Spider and Baby Jack and Julie—a bad decision, to be sure. But the case before me exaggerated her role to grotesque proportions. Federal prosecutors painted Sharanda as a queenpin drug dealer who called the shots. I had been offended when Keyon’s prosecutor portrayed my old friend as a callous street thug, but the picture Sharanda’s prosecutors had conjured was nothing short of unconscionable. There was no physical evidence for any of it. In fact, most of the prosecution’s absurd allegations were discredited throughout the trial by their own government witnesses. The more I read and understood, the more incensed I became.
From the beginning, Aaron Wiley and Bill McMurrey employed a prosecutorial strategy I’d learned about from Professor Lacey called “stacking”: Prosecutors add on charges in order to increase the odds of a harsher sentence and to bully defendants into accepting plea bargains. Here’s the prosecutors’ version of events: Sharanda was a criminal mastermind and a drug queenpin, who supplied the greater part of Terrell with crack and powder cocaine. Not only was she the primary supplier for Baby Jack and Julie but also for Cooter, Weasel, Genice, and Mitchell. The prosecution said that Sharanda delivered crack cocaine to her quadriplegic mother and to her brother in duffel bags, so that they could distribute and run a crack house out of her mother’s home. Wiley and McMurrey even used Sharanda’s law-abiding, industrious spirit against her, arguing that Sharanda filed her tax returns, ran her hair salon, managed and served as head cook of Cooking on Lamar, and earned professional certificates in cosmetology and culinary arts because she was “smart” and wanted to “appear legitimate.”