A Knock at Midnight(87)
Attorney General Holder was delighted to hear that I had followed my passion and was pursuing justice full-time. He was also deeply moved by Corey’s story, and disgusted by his life sentence. And he was impressed by the fact that a federal judge was writing in support of his clemency. More than that, he identified with Corey.
“We’re both New York kids at heart,” he said. “A Queens kid and a Bronx kid. And he’s been behind bars as long as I’ve held any kind of office.”
There was a pause.
“Do you think he’d mind if I used his story in my op-ed?” the attorney general asked me.
“Mind?” I answered. “He’d be honored.”
Eric Holder’s op-ed, “We Can Have Shorter Sentences and Less Crime,” appeared in the August 11, 2016, edition of The New York Times. The morning I saw it, I stood on my doorstep in Dallas and cried, thinking of Corey, and Sharanda, and all the other people trapped behind bars. I wanted to get them all out, and it seemed like the political machine might finally be moving in that direction.
But it wasn’t moving fast enough. Energized by Holder’s op-ed, and in an effort to share the national platform of #ClemencyNOW with the families and advocates who needed it, I began to plan and organize my first multiday, nationwide social justice event—#ClemencyNOW’s Hope for the Holidays. As director of the campaign, I would gather more than seventy-five family members of clemency seekers to converge on Washington in November, along with activists and attorneys. During our first D.C. visit, deputy attorney general Sally Yates had told the clemency recipients and their guests that the administration viewed every clemency petition as a heartbeat. I wanted them to experience each petition as multiple heartbeats. I wanted the administration to know and feel, as I did, the ripple effect of each unjust sentence—the sons and daughters, wives, mothers, grandmothers, and husbands, who suffered alongside their incarcerated loved ones.
Putting together an event of this magnitude would require a massive effort, and as September turned to October, my days and nights were taken up with quarterbacking an incredible team in everything from nuts-and-bolts logistics to invitations to program design. Jon Perri of Change.org came through again, and Nkechi Taifa and Amy Povah helped us fundraise. Michael Skolnik’s team helped us with production and secured D.C. permits. Phone2Action created a text campaign and my friend Breon Wells got Congressman Hakeem Jeffries to agree to speak. Corey’s friend Karen worked with Mindy, GEM’s program director, to coordinate travel for dozens of families and organize the hotels, food, and charter buses for everyone who we confirmed could attend.
Most important to me was making sure that the people in prison could in some way be present and have their voices heard. I set up legal calls with eight men and women in federal prison and recorded heartfelt messages to their loved ones and direct pleas to President Obama. I taught myself how to use the program Audacity in order to overlay the audio over a picture of each person to create a video that would help it seem as if they were actually in the room with us. And I had T-shirts made with the slogan I’d used since my first campaign for Sharanda: THERE IS NOTHING MORE URGENT THAN FREEDOM. Our efforts swiftly gained momentum, trumped only by the increasing pressure and anxiety we all felt.
The clemency process is maddeningly opaque. After all, there is no exact formula for mercy. Essentially, you send a petition to the president and then you wait. And then you wait some more. For months, we’d operated on edge, never knowing when Obama would order more people free, never knowing when we might get a single call from the Pardon Attorney’s Office that we’d been among the lucky ones. Now, with weeks to go before the election and just a few months until Obama would leave office, I was afraid to put down my phone even for a second. I was afraid I’d miss the call and they wouldn’t call back. My clients suffered even more, calling me every day to hear if there was any news, any inkling that they would be next. Sadly, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for who got clemency and who didn’t.
Then, less than two weeks before we would bring the families of incarcerated people to D.C. for an action directly in front of the White House, Donald Trump was elected president.
The idea that a candidate who had run on a far-right, law-and-order, nationalist platform—a man who had, in the nineties, taken out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the execution of the Central Park Five—was about to become the president of the United States was deeply upsetting to anyone involved in prison reform. In our minds—and probably his—Trump was the antithesis of Barack Obama, a compassionate, evenhanded man who wanted to fix a system he saw as deeply flawed. Obama wanted to put fewer people in prison, not more. Trump, if his speeches were to be believed, wanted the opposite.
The day after Hillary Clinton conceded, I fielded calls from concerned family members, some of them in tears, asking if our event was still on. How could we possibly free people when a man like that was president? Of course it’s still on, I said. They’re still in prison, aren’t they? That means we still have to get them out.
In retrospect, I think a part of me was just numb that November. Trump’s election wasn’t really a surprise to me the way it was for a lot of Americans. I was deeply saddened, of course. And ashamed. But in the short term, the election didn’t really change things. If anything, the prospect that one of our most enlightened presidents was going to be followed by potentially one of its most oppressive only heightened our resolve to push on through the end of Obama’s term. Those few months had been important before. But now we knew they might be our last hope.