A Knock at Midnight(88)
While the election had put much of America into a shocked stupor, it jolted urgency into the clemency movement. Obama would be leaving office in just eight short weeks, and with the clock ticking, we had to save as many lives as we could. And there were so, so many still buried alive.
That is why on November 14, 2016, as the final moments of Obama’s presidency ticked down, I stood shoulder to shoulder with those families, advocates, and formerly incarcerated men and women, a megaphone in my hand and Sharanda by my side. Every person there represented a person locked in prison.
I’d planned #ClemencyNOW to be a two-day event. On opening night, major news outlets had covered us in front of the White House; a daughter would be giving a Vice News interview about her father’s life sentence while a mother was interviewing with NBC imploring the president to free her son. Waiting for a loved one serving a virtual life sentence “is like waiting for someone in a coma,” said Angela Warren, whose husband and father had been locked away for over a decade. “You know the person is breathing, but will they ever return?”
We’d also held a panel discussion at Google’s headquarters called “Life After Life,” where Sharanda and five other clemency recipients shared their stories in the hope that it would ease the passage to freedom for those who still awaited presidential mercy. Everyone on the panel had been freed from a life sentence. I even arranged for Alice to Skype in from prison to share her story in her own eloquent and powerful words. When Alice’s round, smiling face appeared on the screen, Sharanda’s eyes filled with tears. Despite her prison khakis, Alice looked regal as ever, her hair pinned in a forward-combed natural slant, reminiscent of Nefertiti’s crown. Calm and poised regardless of whatever indignities she’d been put through at the prison to make it to the computer screen, she beamed out at all of us.
“My greatest pain,” she said after sharing her remorse for her involvement as a telephone mule in a conspiracy, “is having been separated from my children for over two decades, and now missing out on my grandchildren.”
“Ms. Alice,” I said, my own voice quavering, “I’ve known you since I was a baby attorney, as you all used to call me, a law student trying to help a woman facing the same fate as you are now. Tell me, what is the mood among the women where you are?”
“Very somber,” Alice said. “Because they know that President Obama is committed to granting clemencies. And time is truly running out. However, I felt a shift in the atmosphere. Hope is in the air, because it has spread like wildfire in the compound that this event is taking place in. Thank you all.”
By the morning of November 15, the Washington power structure had gotten wind that a major clemency event was unfolding. That’s when we took our rallying cry right to the front steps of the Department of Justice, where we would deliver two million signatures to the DOJ. Moments after we’d reached the steps, passing cars began to honk in support, media cameras flashed. A twelve-year-old girl tearfully clutched a sign emblazoned with the image of a father she knew only through fifteen-minute phone calls. A forty-five-year-old woman held the photograph of her four children’s grandmother, twenty years in prison. Fathers, daughters, wives, grandparents—the families of the incarcerated stood strong as we rooted ourselves into the concrete steps of the Department of Justice, the very picture of dignified determination mixed with pain.
I called my sister MiAngel Cody to the microphone, the federal defense lawyer who had pushed me to file Mike’s motion to reconsider. MiAngel was such a force, hazel eyes flashing from a face of flawless brown skin. She spoke with knowledge and power about the very issues about which I sometimes felt I was shouting into the void. Her passion lit the crowd as she called the names of those still waiting for mercy. Ferrell Scott. Alice Johnson. Corey Jacobs. Eric Wilson. William Underwood.
My client Darryl “Lil D” Reed stood next to me, his survivorship propping me up. On August 30, Corey’s forty-eighth birthday, Obama had granted 111 more clemencies, with Lil D’s among them, just two months after I’d submitted his petition. Darryl is small in stature but gigantic in charisma, intelligence, and personality. A California man, he stood shivering in the D.C. cold, no doubt still in the throes of disbelief at his recent release. Only two weeks after walking out of the prison gates, he stood in front of the DOJ with the rest of us, determined to leave no one behind.
Jason Hernandez took the mic next. Sentenced to life in his early twenties, Jason studied the law and wrote his own clemency petition from a federal prison cell. He’d been one of the “Obama Eight,” the first people President Obama had ordered freed. He had since become a tireless advocate for those he left behind, still incarcerated, a breathing reminder of the possibility of redemption. “I’ll be honest,” Jason said, his breath visible in the frigid November air. “With the passing of the guard, the passing of the torch from President Obama to Trump, I feel that I’m at a funeral. And that the death is going to be clemency. I feel that urgency, and I’m pretty sure the president feels it as well.
“Now, I love the president like a father,” Jason continued, his voice rising and cracking with emotion, “and I can’t thank him enough for what he’s done for me and what he’s done for my family. But dammit, Mr. President, you got to do more.”
A young man raised his fist and kept it in the air, no matter the bitter cold. Serrell and Skyler Scott, the son and daughter of Ferrell Scott, who was serving a life sentence for a marijuana conviction, leaned on each other. I saw my client Trenton Copeland’s mother turn and bury her face in another mother’s shoulder. Ebony Underwood, whose father, William Underwood, had been incarcerated for twenty-nine years, stood with her face turned to the sky, tears spilling down her cheeks. Not in despair, but with the relief that comes when an unbearable burden is lifted by a sharing of pain. It was as though each time someone stepped to the mic, we all breathed a sigh of relief. We were not alone. And with voices this loud and a message this pure, how could those in power fail to hear us?