A Knock at Midnight(80)
What scares you the most?
Losing myself, Corey wrote. Being forced to do something in here to survive that is contrary to my very being. My whole life I’ve been about bringing pleasure to people, especially to our people. Whether it was in the form of fashion, or a great artist, or a party to dance their pains away—I’m a lover, not a fighter. I’m for Black excellence, Black joy. So that’s my biggest fear: having to do something to survive that’ll kill me in the end—if not my body, then my soul.
During his stint at Pollock USP in Louisiana, overcrowding had led to a hideous rise in violence. Corey had been stabbed in the back while writing an email, suffered a collapsed lung, and almost died. After that, afraid for his life, he’d had to defend himself from attack twice. To live in the face of that kind of violence is terrifying. Other than those two incidents of self-defense, Corey had one of the most exceptional programming records during his incarceration that I had ever seen. He completed three major residential programs and earned more than a hundred certificates in courses to substantially enhance his education and personal development. He wrote an antibullying children’s book series called The Good Bully and a book on domestic violence called Unmasking Mr. Wrong. He also designed a prototype for Square Up Now, a reentry program he wanted to launch that was tailored to provide assistance to men and women transitioning back into society from prison.
Despite Corey clearly exceeding the Clemency Initiative’s criteria for an exceptional record through his rehabilitation efforts, any record of misconduct in prison—almost impossible to avoid—can jeopardize clemency. We would have to account for the self-defense incidents at Pollock. Given how volatile the environment, that wouldn’t be hard to mitigate. I filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act and received extensive data on the excessive incidences of violence at Pollock. A further complication was the high quantity of ghost dope arbitrarily attributed to him at trial—over 850 kilograms of crack. These were the main reasons his current attorney gave him for not applying for clemency.
Corey’s attorney worried me. A well-respected clemency expert with three decades of experience, she wasn’t likely to welcome direction from a pro bono corporate lawyer, no matter how successful. And I understood that. I certainly wouldn’t have liked it if one of my clients had brought in another attorney after I’d spent months working my butt off on their case.
But the more I spoke with Corey, the more it seemed his lawyer had barely been working at all. I was shocked to learn that after negotiating a top pay rate for taking his case, with Corey’s friends pitching in to help cover costs, Corey’s clemency attorney had essentially handed the bulk of the work back to Corey himself, telling him to write his own narrative explaining why he should receive a commutation. When Corey asked for guidance or feedback, he said, she was dismissive. When he eventually submitted his work to her, she took weeks to respond. And when she finally replied, all she told him was that he should not apply for clemency—at least not now. Despondent, Corey asked to meet with her in person. Reluctantly, she agreed.
Corey had a list of questions about his written narrative that he wanted to discuss with her, as well as several ideas about how to garner more support for his petition. But when he got to the meeting, his lawyer spent the first twenty minutes reeling off legal issues that seemed confusing to Corey. When she mentioned a prosecutor from a district court in North Carolina, he realized why.
“Hold up,” Corey said. “That’s not me. That’s not my case.”
“Oh, my mistake!” she said, laughing. “Of course it’s not! I must be jet-lagged. Let me start over.”
Corey’s heart sank. This fancy lawyer wasn’t even familiar enough with his case to discuss it. When he sat back in his chair, he had a single thought in his head: I’m gonna die in here. Struggling to maintain his optimism, he pressed on.
“I heard the judge in my case wrote a letter supporting Clinton Matthews’s clemency petition,” he said. “He’s serving life for drugs like me. I think we should ask the judge to do it for my case, too.”
“What makes you think that just because Judge Morgan did that for Clinton, he’ll do it for you?” she said dismissively. “That’s not an avenue worth pursuing.”
“That’s why I knew you were my last hope,” Corey told me. “That whole time after we talked and you weren’t sure whether you were going to take my case? I couldn’t sleep. I mean, I had torn out your article and put it in my vision board folder. I believed in my heart it would manifest. But maybe you’d say you couldn’t do it. And that would be it. That would be it for me.”
The more I thought about it, the more frustrated Corey’s attorney made me. Her behavior wasn’t just negligent—it was exploitative. After making a few phone calls to people I trusted, I told Corey I wouldn’t be able to continue unless she was off his case altogether. He moved swiftly to make that happen.
That Monday, I sent a letter to Corey’s original sentencing judge, the honorable Henry Coke Morgan, Jr., detailing Corey’s case and significant accomplishments while incarcerated, and asked him to write a letter in support of Corey’s clemency petition. His old lawyer had been skeptical that Judge Morgan would do for Corey what he had done for others, but it took only two days for the judge to reply to me: