A Knock at Midnight(60)
I reached out more formally, too, to the former judges and prosecutors on the cases, asking them to weigh in on the harsh sentences that, under new sentencing guidelines and laws, would no longer be mandatory if the cases were tried today. Sharanda’s prosecutors and judge were nonresponsive, but to my great surprise, Jennifer Bolen did respond—and wrote a letter on Donel’s behalf. “I always thought his sentence was too harsh based on the evidence of his involvement,” she wrote. “But under mandatory minimums, our hands were tied.” In some ways, Bolen’s admission was twenty years too late. Still, I was extremely grateful for her letter, and for the time she took in order to help right that wrong.
I also sought public support. I sent emails to national and local news outlets, print media, late-night show hosts, and radio stations, outlining the details of Sharanda’s case and asking them to devote some airtime or column inches to her story. No one bit. Clemency wasn’t popular, and nobody seemed interested in my clients. I worked with Clenesha, who was notoriously shy but beginning to seek avenues to be a more vocal advocate for her mom. She wrote a beautiful letter that we used to start an online Change.org petition as a means of garnering more public support. Every signature we received was empowering. Each one represented another person who knew about Sharanda’s case and was moved by it.
I reached out to my pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, which had a congregation of over twelve thousand people. Pastor Frederick D. Haynes III had always been committed to community transformation and social consciousness. His sermons on social and economic justice always rejuvenated me. I was extremely grateful when Pastor Haynes invited me to speak during both services that following Sunday to raise awareness of my clients’ cases.
On the Sunday of my speech, I sat in the third row between my mom and Clenesha and listened to Pastor Haynes introduce me to a packed audience, his voice booming through the far reaches of the megachurch. I made my way to the pulpit and looked out over the sea of black and brown faces before me. It felt so good to be able to address my own community, to be able to share stories I knew they would recognize, to speak truth to power in the halls of what has for centuries been the hearth and foundation of our fight for justice—the Black church.
Afterward, people lined up in the foyer to sign letters of support for Sharanda and Donel. I collected over a thousand signatures that day. We had begun to gather up our belongings when an older Black woman in an eggshell-blue suit and matching hat approached me, tapping my hand gently but insistently in a gesture I recognized from my own grandmother. She held her Bible in one hand and her purse over the crook of her arm. With her free hand, she pressed a trifolded twenty-dollar bill into my palm. She was a petite woman and must have been in her eighties, her walnut-brown face etched with time, but her smile conveyed a pride and strength that radiated through me. I politely declined the bill, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted to help. Saying no too many times to the tapping hand would be disrespectful, so finally I took the money.
“I promise I’ll use this toward the petitions. Thank you so much.”
“You keep doing what you’re doing, young lady. We love you.”
Moments like that kept me going. For every day like the one at Friendship-West, there were long stretches of time when nothing seemed to give. But then, in March 2013, an email I had written the year before to Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, asking her to take note of Sharanda’s case, paid off for my clients in a huge way. Michelle put me in touch with Ezekiel Edwards from the ACLU, who passed on Sharanda’s and Mike’s stories to his colleague Jennifer Turner. Jennifer was preparing an extensive report on life without parole sentences for nonviolent offenses that would eventually be titled “A Living Death.” The ACLU planned to distribute the report to members of Congress, state legislators, and journalists in an effort to reform state and federal sentencing laws. Jennifer reached out to me and I sent her detailed information on Sharanda’s and Mike’s cases.
To meet an ally as deeply committed and thoughtful about the work as Jennifer meant a great deal to me. Young, passionate, and super sharp, Jennifer shared my core belief that humanizing those lost to draconian drug sentencing laws was key to transforming the issue. Her final report was an incredible document that highlighted the injustice of life without parole sentences in a profound way.
When the report was published in November 2013, I was moved and delighted to see that Sharanda’s was the second profile featured and Mike’s came soon after. Sharanda had reached out to Jennifer herself to make sure her friend Alice Johnson’s case was included as well, in what proved to be a tremendous turning point for Alice. The report contained beautiful portraits of incarcerated men and women within its pages, including a great picture of Mike and his sons from the late nineties, the boys and their half-brother hanging off their dad’s strong arms, Mike’s smile splitting the sky. Sharanda and Clenesha beamed from its pages. With the report’s appearance, Mike’s and Sharanda’s and Alice’s plight received a huge boost from one of the most renowned social justice organizations in the nation.
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AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS of working on both Sharanda’s and Donel’s petitions, they were almost ready. Still, I’d been holding off on submitting them. I was hyperaware of my own inexperience, of how much I didn’t know. I wanted to keep adding and adding to the petitions, wanted to make sure that anyone reading them would feel the outrage I did when confronted with these cases. To me, their stories were compelling enough. But I had always felt pressure to get one more signature, one more letter of support, to reword that sentence one more time. Now, finally, that feeling had eased. Sharanda’s clemency petition was as polished as it could be, and I was waiting on just one more document for Donel, an updated progress report from the prison.