A Knock at Midnight(96)

Judge Sharp had been a working-class kid from Memphis before he signed up for the military and started going to the library. “I saw myself in him,” he said of Chris. “I used to read all this history, Greek and Roman stuff, and I sounded those names out in my head as they were written, just as he did. So-crates. He was entirely self-taught. It was just remarkable. The difference was, the GI bill gave me the opportunity to go further than that library. And Chris—encountering this knowledge for the first time, sucking it up like a sponge—had just as much potential as I did. The difference was, he was locked up in a jail.”

    Judge Sharp was a tall man with a silver head of hair and mustache and attentive, green eyes behind his glasses. He took me on a tour of the construction site that was his future office and spoke with emotion and conviction about Chris and his case. He’d been hesitant to interrupt Chris once he started, he said. “I didn’t want to mess him up, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. And, in truth, I wanted to prolong the inevitable”—having to sentence Chris to life in prison.

Over the years he’d thought incessantly about Chris. He told me the story of an American soldier who’d been captured in the Vietnam War and held in a camp. “The man memorized the name of hundreds of POWs who came through the camp for more than two years,” the judge recalled. “When he was finally rescued, he recited the names from memory for the officers. He did it to the tune of ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm.’ When they tried to get him to stop and simply recite the names, he couldn’t do it. Chris’s speech, the way he rattled it off from memory, the rhythm he had to attain to do so, reminded me of that POW.”

That made total sense to me. “In a way, Chris is a prisoner of war, too,” I said. “A prisoner of the War on Drugs. The damage this war has inflicted—there is no overstating it. In Chris’s case, it’s like he’s being punished for surviving.”

Judge Sharp shook his head. “At some point I cleared the courtroom except for the defense attorney. ‘Give me something,’ I told her. ‘Give me something so I don’t have to sit here and do this.’ She had nothing. None of us had anything. I was a federal judge with a lifetime appointment and I was completely powerless.” Sunny Koshy’s sole discretion to levy the 851 enhancement had essentially bound Judge Sharp’s hands. His next words were emphatic, spoken with utter conviction: “There was no justice in that courtroom that day,” he said. “As long as these laws are on the books, there never will be.”

    I took this moment to press the question that had fascinated me ever since Taylor Dolven pointed me back to the article she’d written about Chris. “But you resigned your judgeship,” I said. “Walked away from a lifetime appointment. Was it really because of Chris?”

Judge Sharp paused, as if he were weighing his words carefully. Then he took a deep breath and looked directly at me. “The three least culpable guys in that conspiracy charge—of which Chris was one—went to trial. They thought, and rightfully so, that more than ten years for their low-level involvement was absurd. But they’re the ones with life sentences. All three of them. I don’t know how to fix that. Looking at Chris, I thought, here was someone who was obviously intelligent, had so clearly been denied opportunity to make anything of himself, would so clearly have gone in a different direction were there one available. There was no justice present in the courtroom that day. The only way to explain that sentence was as an act of revenge. And I wasn’t in the business of revenge. Or at least, I did not want to be. So I left the bench.”

He looked down at his hands. “It was just so foolish, so unnecessary,” he said. “A waste of human life. If there’s anything I can do to help get that young man out,” he said, looking up at me, “I’ll do it.”

I left Nashville moved that a middle-aged white man with a lifetime federal appointment would give that up to seek true justice for a young Black man like Chris. I knew that it didn’t matter who was in power. Chris was in prison—a hundred thousand Chrises are in prison. Come hell or high water, we had to get them free.





Chapter 17


DAWN WILL COME


I leaned forward from the backseat of a sleek black Escalade as my driver approached a three-story red brick building. You could’ve mistaken the place for a college dormitory were it not for the razor wire and noticeable absence of windows. We parked in front, and I took a long look at the Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution in New Jersey. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and there was a lot to be thankful for. Corey Jacobs would be walking out of that prison at any moment.

Those first steps of freedom are a sacred moment that I’d always reserved for my clients and their families. So when Corey asked me to be there for his, I was honored but also a little nervous. Staring at the front door of the prison so as not to miss a single moment, I ran through scenarios in my mind and how I would respond to each. “What if the guards delay his release because we are parked too close to the front door? Can I hug him when he walks out? What are the rules? Do I have all my files?”

Diddy was determined to make Corey’s release special, and he was texting me the whole time, wanting the play-by-play. LET’S GO!!!!!! This is crazy. I can’t believe this. I gotta speak to him right away.