A Knock at Midnight(81)

    In reviewing my comments at the sentencing, I am certain that I would not have imposed a life sentence had Fourth Circuit jurisprudence, at the time, not virtually mandated it….I also agree that under the present sentencing jurisprudence I would not have imposed a life sentence on Mr. Jacobs and therefore support your request for clemency on his behalf.

Mr. Jacobs’s behavior while in prison reinforces the merits of his clemency request. I hope that you are successful in this endeavor.

Sincerely yours,

Henry Coke Morgan, Jr.



    I was ecstatic. A letter of support from the sentencing judge was a huge deal. We’d hit the ground running. Which was good, because Corey’s case was complicated and the clock was ticking. This time, I didn’t have a year to meticulously prepare the petition, or fret and fuss over every aspect the way I had with Sharanda’s and Donel’s. President Obama would be out of office within the year, and I knew too well how much time it took for the Pardon Attorney and Department of Justice to review and consider petitions.

I gave myself one month.



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AT THE SAME time I tackled Corey’s clemency head-on, more than half my life was consumed by ORIX’s current deal to a acquire a Brazilian financial services firm. It was intense, detail-oriented work on which millions of dollars could turn on a single mistake. It wasn’t just that the ORIX work was hard or around-the-clock. It was that it was still consistently pushing me, challenging me, testing the limits of my confidence, forcing me to step up. I was often the only woman at the table and the only Black person anywhere in sight, and I took great pride in completing each new task with an excellence my foremothers would have been proud to witness.

I would work at the office until around ten and then come home to work on Corey’s petition until the early-morning hours. Knowing how important public support had been for Sharanda and Donel, I was building him a website, too. His friend Karen helped me gather personal photos, old case files, and support letters from Corey’s many, many friends and supporters. He and Karen had known each other since high school in the Bronx, and she was a terrific help in bringing Corey to life on the website. I knew that the clemency process—in fact, the entire effort to transform the criminal justice system—required people who were otherwise detached from the issue to have real empathy for those behind bars. To do that, they had to be able to see them as human beings. Sixteen life sentences would make Corey seem like a monster on paper. Making sure everyone got to see all sides of him was absolutely essential.

    Corey quickly became more than a client. By virtue of his experience, and his boundless energy, he became a mentor and friend, talking me through difficult moments at work, sharing his own strategies for mental focus. We emailed through Corrlinks almost daily, discussing things we’d read and were thinking about. We talked about his latest chess match, our childhoods, and our grandmothers, who’d played such a central role in our young lives. We started studying books together, beginning with The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, about a brilliant young microbiology student struggling to fit in at Yale while maintaining his roots and home life in poverty-stricken Newark, New Jersey.

“How are you doin’, Britt? Tell me about your world,” Corey asked during one of our early conversations.

I babbled on about a difficult problem at work, getting so technical and in the weeds I was sure I had lost him. But no. Corey was right there, with insightful guidance on how to work with strong personalities and creative solutions for issues that had seemed to reach a dead end. His business sense was intuitive, gifted. Not for the first time, I wondered what entrepreneurial heights he might have surpassed if he hadn’t spent the last sixteen years locked in a metal cage.

When we had only five minutes left on our allotted fifteen-minute call, he switched gears. “So okay, Britt, that’s work. But what about you? What are you doing to keep your mind right? You exercising? Do you meditate?”

I laughed it off, made some joke about running on autopilot, the weeks it would take to quiet my racing thoughts. But in reality I had never thought about it.

“Britt, your mind might be a lethal machine, but even machines need oil. I’ve seen way too much genius just burn down to empty. You need a plan to take care of you. Meditation is the key. I’m gonna send you some articles on it tomorrow. You gotta put yourself first.”

    As we hung up the phone, I thought about how my clients took care of me in all the best ways. How Mike showed up for all my speaking engagements, his kind face giving me hope when it was thin on the ground. The hours I spent laid out at Sharanda’s house, listening to her counsel, letting her fuss over me. And now Corey, dropping Yodaesque knowledge from maximum security, reminding me to seek mental sanctuary so I could replenish. My clients were forever thanking me for my role in their lives, but it paled in comparison to the role they played in mine.

On February 19, right as dawn was breaking, I put the finishing touches on Corey’s petition, both a two-hundred-page full-length version and the condensed petition required by the Clemency Initiative. I had met my one-month deadline. Now all we could do was file it and wait.

In the next weeks, I studied more books to discuss with Corey, and I threw myself back into my work at ORIX. I started to shadow the business guys, and at night I dug into books from pioneers in the private equity and venture capital worlds, determined to perfect my craft. But something was off. Instead of the rush of focus and adrenaline I had anticipated, I felt unfulfilled. My work at ORIX was still thrilling, everything that I thought I wanted. But I found myself missing the daily sprint of Corey’s last-minute clemency appeal. My mind wandered. I’d start watching a CEO’s YouTube lecture and find myself checking Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative website instead, or returning to a heavily marked-up section of The New Jim Crow. I even asked for more petitions from the Clemency Project to screen, unable to ignore that the clemency window was closing for thousands of incarcerated people still buried alive. Nor could I ignore what these new feelings told me about myself: Increasingly, it was the social justice work I did in the silent midnight hours that fed my heart and soul.