A Knock at Midnight(45)

Eleven years after her release, De-Ann was still desperate to find support for her friends. From the moment she got out of prison, all De-Ann could think about was freeing her codefendants. She had reached out to dozens of lawyers over the years to help the guys, even shelling out her own money for legal fees when she could. Most of the lawyers charged too much money, or simply just strung her along. But De-Ann was unrelenting in her fight to see her codefendants freed. In typical De-Ann fashion, she would fall down seven times and get up eight.

“Mama Lena told me you were a lawyer,” said De-Ann, “and I was hoping you might be able to do something for these guys. The law has changed since we went in, a few times. I think that might help. Even if it doesn’t, though, there’s clemency. After they deny all your appeals, clemency from the president is the only chance. It’s a long shot, but shoot, if I got it, why can’t they?” She paused a minute. “I mean, I know I’m white. And racism is real. But still. We gotta try.”

    “I hear you, De-Ann,” I said. “But I’m a corporate lawyer. I don’t have much experience at all with criminal law.”

“Brittany, you’ve got to help me,” De-Ann said. “You gotta help them. Here I am, out now for more than a decade. Meanwhile, they’re still locked up in that hell, set to rot. They been in there twenty years. Twenty years. And Mike’s sick. He had a stroke last year and they are not even trying to help him in there with his medical needs.” Her usual joyful, laughing voice was filled with pain and desperation. “It just ain’t right. Brittany, if we don’t do something, they’re gonna die in there.”

I got off the phone overwhelmed. I was still searching for an avenue for Sharanda while shouldering a heavy load at Winstead. I felt ill-equipped and unqualified to take on a case in which the lives of four men hung in the balance. But this was De-Ann asking. And there’s no way I could say no to Auntie De-Ann.

In the hours following that call, a single thought kept spinning around in my mind. Clemency. Why hadn’t I made this connection before? President Bill Clinton had granted De-Ann clemency. I hadn’t known what it was then, and I didn’t much care; I was just thrilled to see De-Ann again, a loving face from my childhood. But now, as it all came rushing back to me with the sound of De-Ann’s sweet country twang, I felt an idea stirring. A kernel of new hope began to germinate and seed.



* * *



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IN THE MEANTIME, I had work to do. In the space of a single phone call, I had more than doubled my pro bono clientele. I knew that if I was going to take on the Wilson case, it was going to be all or nothing. I wasn’t going to play. I would have to get to know each man as intimately as I knew Keyon and Sharanda. I didn’t know how to approach the work any other way, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. These were people’s lives in my hands, and I never wanted to forget that. I needed to get a full picture of their lives in Dallas before they caught the case and after so that I could better understand the situation, and build the relationships and trust it would take to go up against the beast of draconian drug laws.

    Over the next few weeks I took advantage of the brief lull between deals at work and dug into the case. I had more calls with De-Ann and, when we could, with the guys themselves. When De-Ann gave me the name and number of Mike’s former attorney, I couldn’t believe it.

“Robert Udashen?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Udashen. He represented Mike. He was real good, too,” De-Ann said.

“That was my law professor!” I said.

De-Ann and I had a good laugh over that. “No such thing as coincidences in this world,” she said.

Professor Udashen met with me in his office once again to go over what he recalled of the Wilson case. “It’s been nearly twenty years, but I’ll never forget that case,” he said. “Mike was a good person, and now he would die in prison. You never forget a life sentence. I’m so glad to hear you’re on this. I still have all my old case files archived in storage. I’ll have my assistant request them for you. All of the trial transcripts are there, too.”

Unlike Sharanda’s, which came through snail mail in a single box, the Wilson transcripts and case documents were neatly filed and tightly packed into several legal boxes. I lugged them all to the car and into my apartment. Late at night, after completing my Winstead workday, I sifted carefully through the files, determined to get the best and most comprehensive picture possible of my newest clients’ stories.



* * *



—

    I HAD NEVER met Mike Wilson back when he was dating De-Ann, but I knew about him. Laid-back and generous to a fault, he loved chilling at the lake with some lawn chairs and a cooler of Miller Light, spending hours at the water’s edge, dreaming up new details for souping up the latest old-school car he’d salvaged. When I first talked to him on the phone, his vibe was exactly that—soft-spoken, low-key, and gentle. Not the voice of a man who should be spending the rest of his life in prison.

By then, Mike had been locked up nearly twenty years, and the time had taken a terrible toll. His stroke made speech difficult, and there were long pauses as he tried to get his thoughts into words. He was patient with himself, but I could sense the underlying frustration, mixed with what was likely embarrassment. Mike was locked up in Victorville, California, nearly fifteen hundred miles away from his brother, Wayland, who was serving his time in Texarkana, Texas. Their mother’s only two children and two years apart, they’d been super close their whole lives, much like me and Jazz. By now they’d been separated for twenty years. It was like losing their other half.