A Knock at Midnight(66)

As the reality of their father’s health condition set in, so did the weight of the life sentence. With Mike’s health in jeopardy, his sons were even more determined to see their father free.



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A FEW MONTHS later, on September 16, the judge finally ruled on my motion. The court’s order was short and to the point: “The defendant’s previously imposed sentence of imprisonment of life is reduced to 365 months.” I tried to quickly do the math in my head. Three hundred sixty-five months divided by twelve was a little over thirty years. Mike had already served more than twenty-two years, and now that he no longer had a life sentence, he was eligible for good time credit, which meant he had to serve only about 86 percent of his sentence. Factoring in his time served, Mike would be out in four years.

    We’d given back his sentence of death by incarceration. Mike would no longer die behind prison walls. We’d won!

After leaving an urgent message for Mike at the prison, which was once again on lockdown, I called his mother. Now seventy years old, she was still living in South Dallas, serving as the strength and backbone for her grandchildren, silently grieving the separation for over two decades from her only two sons. She hadn’t been able to visit Mike since 2008, when he had been transferred halfway across the country. When she heard that he would be coming home, she couldn’t contain her emotion. “Thank you, God! Oh Lord, thank you!” she cried. “Brittany, you are an angel on this earth. You just don’t know what you’ve done for this entire family. May God bless you, and abundantly so.”

Marc was overjoyed, too. “Four years and he’s out?” he repeated. “Are you serious, Brittany?”

“I’m so serious!” I said. “No more life sentence!”

“Man, this don’t seem real,” Marc said. “It’s been so long without him that I just can’t believe it.” I could hear him holding in his tears and wanted so much to tell him to let it all go. His dad was coming home.

I couldn’t wait for Mike to hold the sentence reduction order in his hands, to hear his voice on the phone when I gave him the news. His life sentence had been lifted. Soon he’d be free! Communication with the prison was slow as usual, and I had to leave a couple of messages. Finally, just when I thought I couldn’t wait another second to give Mike the good news, he called me.

Instead of the joy I expected to hear, he sounded flat. Deflated. “You mean,” he stammered painfully, barely getting the words out, “I’m not getting out?”

“You’re getting out!” I said. “It’s just four more years. We handed back that life sentence!”

    I could hear how disappointed he was, hear the pain in his voice as I explained again that he’d earned the reduction but had still been sentenced to the high end of the guidelines. It became clear that in his mind he had connected a favorable ruling with immediate release. “This is great news, Mike!” I said. “You have a date. You’re coming home! It’s…”

“This is a call from a federal prison…”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.” He would never say it, but his voice ached with disappointment. I felt the weight of the twenty-two years he had already served through the line. By the time we got off the phone he could barely summon a word, although he tried again to thank me. He wasn’t elated, wasn’t overcome with happiness. He was a man who’d already suffered far more than I could imagine, facing four more years of hard time.

After we hung up I sat in my office, slumped in my chair, staring at the phone in my hand. The adrenaline I’d felt when I first heard his voice had drained away. For a moment, I felt frustrated. To get someone off life through the courts was near impossible. This was a victory. Surely Mike could do four more years after what he’d been through.

But the longer I sat with it, the longer I realized how petulant that sounded. Who was I to say what four years meant to someone serving that time? I wasn’t in a concrete cage. I wasn’t separated from my family by thousands of miles and shackles. I didn’t have to stand at four o’clock every afternoon so a guard could count me off like a piece of livestock. I thought again of the pain of my mother’s incarceration. I tried to imagine multiplying that feeling by ten. And then adding two. It was an absurd exercise. Just as it had been absurd to imagine that four years in a hellhole like Victorville was something Mike could just “do.”

I had no idea what to do next. No one else I asked seemed to have any ideas, either. Then I reached out to MiAngel Cody, a federal defender in Chicago I had met the year before at a FAMM event in D.C. celebrating Obama’s first clemency recipients. She was a fellow Black woman lawyer at a conference where we were scarce, and something about her poise, confidence, and manner had drawn me to her in the way that you are drawn to someone who the universe intends for you to meet. MiAngel listened thoughtfully and said, “The only thing I can think of is to file a motion asking the judge to reconsider Mike’s reduced sentence. Honestly, though, motions to reconsider are rarely granted—you’re basically asking the judge to overturn a decision they just made.” MiAngel’s advice and encouragement felt like a lifeline. “It’s a long shot,” she said. “But these are Black lives on the line, sis. You have to try.”