Sunday, December 20, 2015

 

Sunday Reflection: The sad call




On Friday, just before leaving DC for a few weeks in California and Hawaii, President Obama announced 95 sentence commutations.  When the news hit, I was at the new Surly Brewpub for  lunch with  two lifelong friends, Sleepy Walleye and his brother (shown above)-- it was SW's birthday, and we had special reason to celebrate his life.

My phone blew up with calls and messages. I sat in the car and took a deep breath. It is, I guess, like being 18 and getting an email that says "admission decision"-- just more important.  I knew that one of the 45 emails I had gotten in ten minutes would have a link to a list of those who had received clemency. I found it, and clicked.

I ran down the long list and my heart sank. Two of our clients at the Clemency Resource Center were a part of this set, but many people I have worked for were not. In fact, there are about 8,000 people, many with great equities for release, who have petitions pending but were not on that list.

Feeling overwhelmed, I checked again, looking at the A's and the B's and the F's and the L's. Their names were not there, all of them small-time long-ago drug dealers who have turned their lives around after a decade or more in prison. I drove back to work quietly, thinking about the list, the winners of the freedom lottery.

I had grading to do, but as I sat at my desk with the set of tests, I dreaded the phone ringing. It rang anyways. I looked at the screen and it said what I feared it would: "Unknown," which is how calls from prison always come up.  I let it ring once, twice, three times before pressing "answer."

And they did call. Not in anger, but in sadness. And each time I talked to them about what had happened, how I did not know how they picked the lucky ones.  They told me, in heavy voices, what they would miss: a son's graduation, the last days of a mother in fading health. And each time I hung up and sat in silence. When it got dark around four-thirty, I neglected to turn on my lights. Outside my window the city transformed in the dusk. There is a small hotel across the street. It bustled with activity as people returned from shopping. A man walked out and stepped into a cab, and it drove off taking him wherever he wanted to go. It looked effortless, normal.

In the shroud of quiet, I mourned. This can't be how the movie ends. There has to be more, in the months to come.

I guess that sometimes that is Advent, too. The time is not yet here, and may never come.

Comments:
I grieve with you over the small number and the unfairness of the whole process.
 
It is so bittersweet. Two of the nonviolent marijuana inmates with life sentences that I have written to, thought of and worried about for years were released.

Of course you have all my gratitude for your work for Billy Dekle. Billy had a sentence that did not fit the crime - there are others like my brother John Knock. I feel a special urgency for the inmates over 65 whose run way is short.

The thought of these nonviolent offenders dying in a federal prison without their families and friend to ease the transition into the next phase of life is obscene.

Thank you so much. I do prey that there will be thousand more and that the promise that was made is kept. I will tell you that all the inmates who have known Billy over the years in various facilities were celebrating about his release, as they nursed their own disappointment. He was liked by all and kept his humanity through all the years. Thank you Beth Curtis
 
How long? Not long.
 
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