A Knock at Midnight(39)

I asked Sharanda about the tapes once when I went to see her. “When I heard them before trial, I wasn’t worried, and neither was my lawyer.” If anything, she thought they exonerated her. “I told Murphy that’s just how we talk,” Sharanda told me, shaking her head at the memory. “Everybody talks like that. Go anywhere in Terrell right now, I said, and somebody’ll be having the same conversation. It’s not even about anything we did. How does that prove anything?

    “The jurors were starting to look at me funny because of how the prosecutors were spinning it. When I told Julie ‘Let me see what I can do,’ I was trying to get her off my back! What else do you say to someone who you’ve already said no to a million times? But Murphy wasn’t even worried about those tapes. I remember clear as day what he said—‘Smoke and mirrors. Don’t worry, they’ve got nothing. And the burden of proof is on them.’ I believed him.”

Baby Jack’s testimony didn’t go well for the prosecution, either. At one point, in Murphy’s cross-examination of Baby Jack—one of his best moments in the trial, in my mind—Baby Jack basically gave up the whole reason for his testimony. Julie had testified that during the time of the indictment, Sharanda was their main supplier, even though that contradicted both her own and Baby Jack’s testimony as to how often Sharanda delivered a kilo. Murphy pushed Baby Jack on this further.

“Isn’t it true that Nathan Bivens is your nephew?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And so aren’t you providing this testimony today in order to protect your nephew, who is in fact your main supplier?”

“Yes,” said Baby Jack.

Nothing could have been more transparent.

On my next visit to Sharanda, I couldn’t stop my questions. She was patient with me, although I’m sure it was hard for her to relive the trauma of that time. We sat side by side in the padded mauve visiting seats, twisted toward each other so we could make eye contact. I was filled with detail-oriented legal questions about the case itself, but I was also captivated by Sharanda’s resilience and her positivity. I’d always been taken by this part of her character, but now that I’d had a front-row seat at the circus that led to her incarceration, I was even more impressed.

    “Baby Jack, Julie, Spider—these were people you knew. How did it feel, sitting there and hearing them tell these lies on you? How did you stand it?”

“When Baby Jack walked in there—I mean, we’ve known each other since we were little kids, grew up together. We’ve always been cool. He just looked and shrugged at me on his way to the stand, like, ‘It is what it is.’ It hurt. It did. I just tried not to feel nothing. Just watching them lie on me like that, though—it was sickening for real. I try to understand it from their side. Someone offered them a lifeline and they took it. They hung me with it. I wouldn’t do anybody like that, not even somebody I didn’t know.”

“And Spider?”

“He was slick with it. I mean, that’s Spider. Smooth, always in control. But let me tell you what he said the feds did to him. Cooter saw him while they were both at the county jail and Spider told him straight-up that he was sorry for what he was doing to me. He told Cooter that the feds said if he didn’t testify against me, they was gonna go after his mom, indict her for being a part of his drug dealings. Now ain’t that grimy.”

My stomach turned at the thought of the lengths the feds would go to obtain convictions. I thought about what extraordinary fortitude it must have taken for Sharanda to be staring a life sentence in the face and refuse such a possible pathway to freedom—especially after people she’d known for years had done the same to her. As I continued to study the transcripts and talk to her about them, my admiration for her strength and for her grace grew.



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TO THEIR GREAT credit, the jurors were also largely unimpressed, and unswayed, by the government’s case. They found Sharanda not guilty on all six of the possession and aiding and abetting counts. But they found her guilty of the charge of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. I had come across conspiracy in Keyon’s case, too, and was having a hard time getting my head around it. The law seemed so broad as to ensnare anyone charged. How could Sharanda be given a life sentence on a charge that seemed so all-encompassing?

    I needed to understand federal drug conspiracy. I couldn’t bear to read the sentencing transcript yet, not while still reeling and trying to process the trial itself. So I read through and studied dozens of drug conspiracy cases, trying to get a better grasp of what the law meant in practice.

Added to the books at the height of the drug panic in the late eighties, federal drug conspiracy laws exemplified everything that was wrong with the War on Drugs. The laws, I discovered, were incredibly broad. When I thought of drug conspiracy, I imagined vast international drug cartels, but Keyon’s and Sharanda’s cases painted an entirely different reality. A federal drug conspiracy has just three simple elements: (1) an agreement to traffic drugs in any amount (2) between two or more people who (3) join the agreement voluntarily. The government did not need to prove that Sharanda knew all the details of the conspiracy or even that she knew all the other people involved.

Still trying to wrap my head around the law, I sought help from the best source I knew. Professor Robert Udashen was one of the most sought-after criminal defense attorneys in Dallas. He served as an adjunct professor at SMU and I was taking his criminal procedure class that semester in my efforts to better understand the criminal justice system. In his office, I conveyed the frustration I’d felt while reading those transcripts.