A Knock at Midnight(79)
What was I agonizing over this for? I knew what I had to do. I pulled out my phone and texted Sharanda.
I’m taking the case.
A few seconds later I had her reply.
Well, I guess he’s getting out, then.
* * *
—
JUSTICE IS BLIND —she’s also slow. There was nothing I could do to make the wheels of justice turn faster, or sometimes at all. And for my clients and all of the desperate individuals who’d been buried alive by the draconian drug laws of the eighties and nineties, time was running out. President Obama had less than a year remaining in office. As some critics of the clemency process had already pointed out, he would have to grant the total number of clemencies from his first seven years in office every single week to get even close to the numbers the Clemency Initiative had originally promised. And Corey was going to be a tougher case than most. He didn’t have just one life sentence. He had sixteen.
From the beginning I was struck by how similar Corey’s case was to Sharanda’s. Like Sharanda, the feds had no physical evidence against him—no drugs of any kind, no evidence of buys, no assets or large sums of money to seize. The entire case was based on the testimony of codefendants who received vastly lesser sentences than Corey in exchange for their testimony. And Corey had received the exact same eight points in sentencing enhancements as Sharanda: a four-point leadership enhancement for his alleged role in the conspiracy, a two-point gun enhancement for a gun codefendants said he used to carry, though no allegations of violence were made, and a two-point enhancement for “committing perjury” while testifying on the stand in his own defense. No matter how many times I came across the issue, the fact that enhancements in federal cases could be based upon the uncorroborated word of a snitch continued to blow my mind. Learning about Corey’s case was like watching the same horror movie over and over again.
Corey may have been sentenced like the ruthless leader of an international drug cartel, but in fact he was far from it. Born in the Bronx, he had been raised by his grandparents. After graduating from Mount St. Michael Academy in the Bronx, he’d enrolled as an engineering student at Norfolk State University in Virginia when some friends from home approached him about getting into the game. They had the hookup in New York and could really make some money in Virginia, they said. Corey made a choice he’d regret for the rest of his life.
“For real, Brittany?” he told me on one of our many subsequent phone calls. “I was immature. Paying for college was a struggle, but it wasn’t only that. We were trendsetters, know what I’m saying? Taste makers. I wanted to be the flyest kid out there. And I was what, nineteen? I stuck my toe in the game for a minute. Then bam. Quicksand.”
His childhood friend Sean “Puffy” Combs, who was like a brother to Corey and with whom he’d promoted parties and shows for years, was interning at Uptown Records. Whenever they were together, Puff used all his powers of persuasion to get Corey out of the game. “Leave that shit alone, fam,” he told Corey. “I’m telling you, the music industry is where it’s at. Being in the pocket. Hittin’ that beat. And I need you. It’s time to get all the way out of that game and all the way into this one.”
Corey knew Puff was right. He left Virginia and moved back to New York.
Where culture, music, and commerce met, that’s where you’d find Corey. A creative visionary, he seized the moment, applying all the entrepreneurial insight he’d learned from dealing to legitimate businesses. He silk-screened tees and jackets with hip-hop slogans, cutting his costs by working with an artist who taught silk-screening to kids in Harlem. He secured a traveling booth at the Black Expo for his wares. He cofounded a basketball program for underserved youth. He also threw parties and managed rap artists—he had an incredible gift for spotting talent. One of his biggest producing credits was the classic Lost Boyz album Legal Drug Money.
When the feds arrested Corey, he hadn’t sold drugs for years. But their case against him dated back to his college days. And at the turn of the century, they were hanging Black men in Virginia for federal drug cases.
On May 22, 2000, the courtroom was somber. Judge Henry Coke Morgan, Jr., addressed Corey at sentencing: “Do you understand that you are facing a mandatory life sentence in prison? There is not a great deal of flexibility as far as sentencing is concerned.” The judge’s hands were tied by the mandatory sentencing laws. Despite this being his first criminal conviction, Corey was given sixteen life sentences, one for each substantive crack cocaine charge.
* * *
—
TO CREATE A compelling narrative and give Corey a real shot at clemency, I needed to get to know him as a person, and fast. I emailed him a questionnaire of lighthearted get-to-know-you questions: how he liked his eggs, his favorite color, whether he preferred sunrise or sunset. I needed to capture the man behind the sentence for the petition, and for myself. Corey’s responses were engaging, full of the enthusiasm and joy that were clearly hallmarks of his being. He liked his eggs fried hard, missed the flaky, buttery taste (My God, he wrote) of a freshly baked croissant, preferred sunrises to sunsets and the ocean to lakes. He loved the color blue and the book The Count of Monte Cristo. But my more serious questions received carefully considered, thoughtful answers, which hinted at the daily struggle of incarceration in a maximum-security prison.