A Knock at Midnight(85)
When I interned for a federal judge in Houston, I’d watched mass incarceration operate with rubber-stamp efficiency. It was like witnessing a factory dismantle car parts rather than human lives and families. But the clemency process, intended to undo some of the worst instances of oversentencing, seemed unable to process the sheer numbers of those affected. The system was experiencing a circuit overload. So much so that in the spring of 2016, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates sent out an urgent message for lawyers to submit petitions by mid-May in order to give the DOJ time to review any new petitions before Obama left office. Her announcement jolted the clemency work to a fever pitch.
I amped up my commitment with the Clemency Project, which was facing problems of its own. The same massive swell of hopeful clemency petitioners that had overwhelmed the Pardon Attorney’s office had maxed out our capacity. Despite being the largest pro bono effort in history, even four thousand lawyers were not enough to handle the thirty-six thousand people who ultimately applied. Hopeful petitioners had been waiting months just to be assigned a lawyer.
I was still volunteering on the project’s screening committee, still supervising and training lawyers to get petitions completed and submitted, when they asked me if I could help recruit and train more lawyers. But where to find them? I had been a student when I’d first won reductions for Keyon and started fighting for Sharanda; what I lacked in experience I made up in dogged determination and the passion and energy only the young and unfettered possess. Maybe I could tap into that same energy among the students at my alma mater, SMU.
I reached out to Jennifer Collins, the dean of the law school, and proposed a pop-up clinic. I would teach a class of law students everything I could about the executive clemency process. Instead of reading case law, teams of students would draft actual clemency petitions under my supervision, to be submitted to the White House. Forty students signed up. Instead of the one or two cases we were urging lawyers to take on through the Clemency Project, we were able to take on twenty.
Knowing that the window for clemency was rapidly closing, I also took on three new clients of my own, Darryl “Lil D” Reed, Charles “Duke” Tanner, and Trenton Copeland. Barely out of his teens, Darryl was arrested at the age of twenty in Oakland, California, and had served twenty-eight years in prison by the time I took on his case. His presence in the Bay Area was legendary. Even from behind bars he mentored Bay Area rap legends MC Hammer, E40, and Too Short, and worked to empower inner-city youth. Duke Tanner was a former professional boxing star, swept off the mean streets of Gary, Indiana—one of the poorest cities in the Midwest—in his youth by wealthy investors to train. Boxing was his way out of poverty and he eventually compiled a 19-0 record as a pro. He supported many in the old neighborhood, paying for youth gyms, rent, childcare, school supplies; whatever people needed, Duke tried to provide. But when an injury disrupted his rise to stardom and both his parents were diagnosed with a terminal illness, he got into the game. Set up with a fake buy that never took place, Duke was arrested at the age of twenty-four and sentenced to life without parole, despite an outpouring of support from trainers, sponsors, and the community. Trenton was my exact same age, and from Pensacola, Florida. He’d received a life sentence for drugs at the age of twenty-seven and was entering his sixth year in prison. He reminded me so much of the guys I’d grown up with in Commerce.
Each case struck a personal chord for me. Each man was an individual, with his own essential story. And each man was a victim of the disastrous policies stemming from the War on Drugs. Our inhuman drug laws had stolen the prime of their lives. I worked to file petitions for all three, and when another lawyer dropped the ball on a case, I took on the case of Burnett Shackleford as well.
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IN JULY, I traveled to Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention. I wasn’t on any panels, didn’t have a speaking engagement lined up. But I had made a targeted list of attendees that included members of Congress, influencers, and advocates. I was determined to make a personal appeal to anyone in a position to help Corey and my new clients.
In a gathering that large, and in an atmosphere as charged as the 2016 election season, it was hard to get anyone’s attention. I didn’t quite know where to start. But I was there. I networked as though my life depended on it. After all, my clients’ lives did. In the bustling confines of the Wells Fargo Center, I talked up senators and congressional aides. I told Corey’s story to anyone on my list who would listen. I got business cards and email addresses, phone numbers and names of other people who might be able to help. I handed out one-pagers, sent emails, made plans for conference calls.
But the most impactful moment of that trip came when I attended an art for social justice installation featuring a panel called Truth to Power, focused on criminal justice reform. Before the panel, I was sitting in a chair, scrolling through my phone, looking to see if any of the morning’s contacts had emailed me back, when an energetic white guy with a shaved head approached me.
“You’re Brittany Barnett, aren’t you? I think I met you and your client Sharanda at the White House,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m Michael Skolnik.”
I knew who he was. At the time, he was Russell Simmons’s political consultant. I knew him for his work connecting social justice causes with celebrities and pop culture. He’d been the guy to get “I Can’t Breathe” shirts to LeBron James and other NBA stars following Eric Garner’s death, and to help plan President Obama’s screening of the Vice Media film about criminal justice reform, Fixing the System.