A Knock at Midnight(71)
I was so proud of Clenesha’s courage that day. “I want to do more for my mom,” she said when I told her so. “It’s just so hard for me to talk about it to people I don’t know. I hate the attention. But I want to do more now. It’s time.”
Sari and Nikki’s diligence and the promise of the forthcoming story lifted Sharanda’s spirits. She hadn’t been too happy about moving cells, and I felt for her when I got an email with the subject heading “Moved Today.” When I opened it, though, I found a lovely surprise.
Guess what. I moved to my new cell today…and it’s got a window with a view, trees and everything. I can see them from my bed. Never been able to see trees from my cell before. One step closer to freedom!!!
From her new cell window, Sharanda could see the wide green branches and knotted brown trunks of a cluster of elm trees. At night, with light from the hall peering into her dark cell, the elms’ black silhouettes stood starkly against the inky Texas sky. If Sharanda lay just right, she could watch them until she fell asleep. During the daily four o’clock count, their vibrant green leaves called the eye away from the endless prison palette of khaki, beige, gray. Those trees looked like freedom. And they were so close. Sharanda’s spirits lifted, and so did mine. Hope eased all of our burdens.
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ON JULY 13, 2015, Obama announced forty-six clemencies, his largest number since the launch of the clemency initiative. All of the recipients of the president’s mercy that day were people who’d been oversentenced as a result of now outdated drug laws; fourteen of them were serving life.
Sharanda was not on the list.
We weren’t the only ones feeling passed over. Obama’s announcement fell far short of the expectations raised when the clemency initiative was first announced. The Department of Justice had initially estimated that more than ten thousand might be released. So far, only eighty-nine had made the cut. The process was moving at a snail’s pace. Still, despite the crushing disappointment we felt for Sharanda, it was heartening to see Obama speaking directly to the camera, his words giving credence to every line of our clemency petition. “I believe that at its heart, America is a nation of second chances,” our president said, his hair graying a little now at the temples, the lines in his handsome face deeper, the conviction and idealism conveyed by the tenor of his voice untempered by the weight of his position. “And I believe these folks deserve their second chance.”
“Sharanda fits these criteria,” I said to the screen, feeling half foolish and half like Obama might be able to hear me if I willed it hard enough. “Please say her name. Please show her mercy.”
President Obama did not say Sharanda’s name, but The Washington Post did. Two days after the blow of the clemency announcement, Sari and Nikki’s amazing work was on the front page. The headline couldn’t have been clearer: FROM A FIRST ARREST TO A LIFE SENTENCE: CLEMENCY IS THE ONLY WAY OUT FOR SOME NONVIOLENT DRUG OFFENDERS. Inside the paper, an entire page and a half was devoted to Sharanda’s story and Nikki’s stunning photographs of mother and daughter. On the front page was a striking close-up of Sharanda, her lips turned up in a small, pensive smile, her dark eyes luminous and thoughtful, full of everything that might have been and everything that might still be.
Both the article and the response were tremendous. Suddenly, after years of fruitless emails and pleading phone calls to journalists, television and radio stations, and other media outlets to please, please pay attention, Sharanda’s face was everywhere on social media and my phone was ringing off the hook. Sari had included a photo of me sifting through legal documents in my home “office”—the floor of my living room—and suddenly people knew who I was. Reporters and television stations called about Sharanda and our efforts. Grandmothers and parents, sons and daughters called about family members who were facing a similar plight. Please, could I help?
I tried to talk to everybody, to explain to each person that I was a full-time corporate attorney, that Sharanda and Donel and the others were cases I worked on in my spare time, that I wished I had capacity to help more but I couldn’t. I steered family members to FAMM or the ACLU and other organizations who might be able to help raise awareness or point them in the direction of a pro bono lawyer. Sharanda’s case had seemed incredible to me when I came across it, but what I had learned in the past six years was that there were tens of thousands of Sharandas whose lives were being wasted in prison as a result of the War on Drugs.
The momentum generated by the Washington Post article was tremendous. Because of Sari and Nikki’s article, two more phenomenal Washington women reached out to me, Chani Wiggins and Tiffany Moore. They were high-profile political lobbyists, and they volunteered to contact members of Congress to support Sharanda’s plea for clemency. By the end of the month, Sharanda had been featured on John Oliver’s late-night HBO show, and Larry Wilson of Comedy Central discussed her case in detail. Her Change.org petition garnered 280,000 signatures from supporters as far away as England and South Africa. Incredibly, former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder himself tweeted the article. I knew Eric Holder was behind many of the White House’s criminal justice reform initiatives, and to garner this level of support from him meant everything.
After years of media blackout, suddenly we were everywhere. And Sharanda is Sharanda. Her plight, and her tremendous dignity in the face of it, moved everyone who came across her story, as I had always known it would. Now millions of people did come across it, and millions were moved. I had filed her petition before the initiative was announced, and filed a supplement to match the condensed format months before. Surely her petition would surface at the DOJ. There was no way she wasn’t going to be on the next list.