Sterling sits with his shoulders hunched, his hands clasped on the table in front of him. The only item on the table is a box of tissues. His prison-issue denim shirt, two sizes too big, billows around his lanky frame. The sleeves are voluminous; the gaping cuffs make his wrists look delicate. He is holding prayer beads, or worry beads, between the fingers of his left hand, the hand with his wedding ring. His head is bowed, his eyes behind the big, serious, black-rimmed glasses fixed on the table, staring, as he tries to gather himself for what is to come. I am studying his face as it appears on my computer screen. Like the other almost seventy people attending Sterling’s much-anticipated resentencing hearing, my attendance is remote. It is late October 2020, eight months since the pandemic forced the prison to shut itself off to all outsiders. Since then there have been sixteen COVID-19 deaths inside.
Sterling’s lead attorney, Ryan O’Connor, is Skyping in from his law office. The other members of his legal team, a trio from the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School, are gathered, masked, in a distant classroom. They have worked together tirelessly—a clichéd phrase that could not be more apt—these three women and Mr. O’Connor, to prep for this day, developing a strategy, conferring for months with Sterling, collating decades of legal documents and court decisions, gathering more than eighty letters of support, and selecting from those supporters three people to testify at today’s hearing. With Sterling’s active involvement at every step, they have amassed a 311-page dossier to present to the parole board.
In the three hours it takes me to read through that dossier, my eyes barely leave the page. That’s how compelling the documents are, from Sterling’s résumé-style introduction that details his achievements—education, publications, honors, workshops and events he has led—to the lawyers’ crafted narrative of his life, a tale that extends from his Texas childhood, through troubled adolescence in Arkansas and Oregon, to his terrible crime, to his imprisonment, and twenty-six years later, to his transformation into the tense, earnest man with the worry beads I see on the screen.
I read the story of his childhood with particular care. It is story I know well, a story I learned bit by filtered bit as Sterling trusted me more. Everything included in the lawyers’ recounting is factual, but what is not included tells a tale of its own. The lawyers’ version, one Sterling told me early on, is of a happy early childhood guided and overseen by a loving “Momma” with all the trappings of a conventional upbringing: school, sports, chores at home; structure, accountability, love. This version sets the stage for the contrast, the shock, that happens when Momma unexpectedly dies and Sterling, age twelve, is farmed out to relatives who are, in turn, uncaring, abusive, and alcoholic. At best, they are feckless; at worst, criminals. What this version of his early childhood omits is a darker, tangled tale. Sterling’s Momma, the woman he thought was his mother, was actually his grandmother. His biological mother—a woman he grew up thinking was his sister—the one who gave birth to him while she was serving a prison term, never had custody of him. He was an adult before he knew that she was actually his mother. His father was a Black man about whom he knew nothing. What the young Sterling did know, however, was that he looked different than the white relatives he grew up around, different than the white kids he went to school with.
When Sterling had told me about “Momma,” I pictured an older, kindly Black woman. That image fit the stereotype I had of what it meant to grow up in the warm embrace of a single mother in the South. And it made sense to me because Sterling, although light skinned, clearly identifies and presents as African American. I assumed, incorrectly, that his Italian surname was his father’s name, that his father was white and his mother was Black. But just a month before today’s hearing, Cheryl, Sterling’s wife, sent me an image of an old photograph. It was of a ten-year-old boy, reddish-brown afro, café au lait skin dusted with freckles, being hugged by a slender, big-haired, very young-looking white woman. This was Sterling next to his Momma. He was born into pretense. He was born an outsider.
I continue to make my way through the dossier delivered to the parole board. The most compelling section is the extraordinary collection of letters of support, eighty-three of them, arguing for Sterling’s release. Dozens are from former university students who were his classmates in restorative justice courses taught inside the prison. They were inspired by him. They learned from him. Now they are in law school, medical school, graduate school. One is working for UNESCO. They write about how he touched their lives. “Sterling is one of the reasons I have decided to pursue a career in the criminal justice system,” wrote one young woman, now a doctoral student. “He has dismantled my stereotypes and perceptions of who people behind bars are.” There are letters from professors, clergy, business people, attorneys, from one of PEN America’s program directors, from Cheryl’s mother and sister, from five staffers within the Department of Corrections. There’s a letter from Arnoldo, who writes that Sterling was “a mentor to me throughout my personal transformation.” That letter highlights the principles of restorative justice—love, trust, care, and humility—that the two men worked together to help propagate throughout the prison, the principles that are part of Arnoldo’s reclaimed life. Arnoldo is listening to the hearing this morning from his office at Latino Network.
The sole issue before the board at this morning’s hearing is setting a projected parole release date. That means revisiting Sterling’s original sentence from 1994, which mandated two life terms to be served consecutively with the earliest release date in 2048. Sterling will be seventy-one then and would have spent fifty-four of those years behind bars. His legal team, backed by Supreme Court and U.S. Circuit Court rulings and state statutes, citing scientific findings about the teen brain, and amassing evidence of Sterling’s growth, change, and transformation, is hoping for a restructuring of those sentences that would allow for a much, much earlier release. His attorneys want the board to see Sterling’s life as a resounding success story for juvenile rehabilitation.
The hearing is set to begin promptly at 8:30, but clearly that’s not going to happen. There are more than the usual technological glitches. Close to seventy people are attempting to join the proceedings, some with video feeds, others audio only, some Skyping in (the DOC deems Zoom a security risk) via computer, others by phone, some veterans of cyberspace, others flummoxed at every click. There are long moments of listening to cross talk and chatter, the rattling of pots and pans, doors closing, street noise, office noise, as people slowly discover the mute button. Sterling remains on screen, almost motionless. In all our many times together, during the close to one hundred writing group sessions we have sat around a table, I have never seen his face so absent of life. I know what he is thinking in this moment because he tells me a few days later when we speak on the phone. He is thinking: This is a legal case, but I need to show my heart. I am full of emotion, but I can’t be emotional. I need to be logical, but I must be my authentic self. I need to be fully present even in this moment when I feel completely disconnected. And then, working those worry beads, he thinks: This is it. My future rides on this. This is my best chance. This is the best board will get.
The four members of board who are Skyping in from different locations this morning face an unenviable task: balancing the evidence meant to show that Sterling is a changed man and should be set free against the deep and unhealed pain suffered by the victims’ families who want him to remain imprisoned. Whatever they decide, someone will suffer.
Michael Hsu, the chairperson, a decade younger than Sterling, is a serious, intense man, quiet, measured, thoughtful, a former public defender with a backstory worth repeating. The governor appointed him to the board in mid-2017, three months after he received his green card. He had been living as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-two years. In a magazine profile commending him for winning a Rising Star Award from his law school (coincidentally, Lewis & Clark, home to Sterling’s legal trio), he related that his own family’s experience with the law had been deeply troubling. His mother had hired an attorney in the hopes of securing a green card for her son. Thousands of dollars and several months later, she discovered he had failed to file any of the necessary paperwork. His office was vacant. She never reported the incident, fearing deportation. When he was admitted to the bar in 2012, he was told he was the first undocumented person in America to have become an attorney.
Vice chair is Greta Lowry, a former assistant district attorney from a mostly rural county along the southern Oregon coast. As a prosecutor she represented the interests of the state at trials, sentencings, probation violation hearings, and release hearings for a wide variety of crimes. Her final duties before she joined the board in mid-2019 focused on determining which individuals could be safely supervised in the community, always a big issue in these board decisions. James Taylor, the third member, is a long-time banking executive, erstwhile sports agent, and chair of an audit committee that oversees the state’s youth correctional facilities. A “military brat” who lived in Turkey and Spain before his father settled in California, he attended a small private liberal arts college in the late 1970s. He told a writer for the college’s alumni publication that he remembers fellow students telling him he was the first Black person they had ever talked to. The experience, he said, taught him to reach across cultures and backgrounds to connect and communicate. The fourth member of this diverse group gathered to hear Sterling’s case is John Bailey, a former parole and probation officer with the state’s most populous, most urban county. He holds a bachelor’s degree in criminology and a law degree. I look at their faces in the tiles across my screen: Asian, Black, white, male, female. They will determine Sterling’s future, Cheryl’s future. They come to this moment from such different backgrounds, such different ways of working with and thinking about the criminal justice system. That, I think, is their true diversity. How will that play out today?
Finally the tech issues are settled and, twenty minutes late, the hearing begins. All of us sitting at home or in our offices, in New York, California, Colorado, Indiana, Washington, Oregon, listen as O’Connor, the lead attorney, states the legal case, and a law student from the legal clinic begins questioning Sterling. Her job is to first guide him through a retelling of his youth and then through the crime itself, a necessary part of all these hearings not so much for the details themselves—these are part of the record—but for how the person who committed the crime recounts it: the tone of voice, the emotion or lack thereof. The board is looking for insights into the way the person understands the crime. It is looking, most importantly, for remorse, for evidence that the burden of guilt weighs heavy.
Sterling, looking straight into the camera, his hands clasped tightly, begins this way: “The reason we are here today is that Ian and Bridget are not.” That’s the young couple Sterling and his friend shot and killed on January 15, 1994. “Anything I share will be difficult and traumatic for their families to hear,” he says quietly. “With that awareness I commit to speaking from my heart and being transparent.” What follows, under methodical questioning, is first a recounting of his childhood and adolescence, the influences and experiences that made him into a sixteen-year-old who could commit murder, and then a minute-by-minute retelling of the night of the crime. The details of the crime should come as no surprise to me. When he first joined the writers’ group years ago, Sterling handed me fifty pages of an autobiography in progress, a part of which focused on the night he and an older friend, a fellow escapee from a group foster home, carjacked a vehicle with a young couple inside, the night that ended in a double murder.
What became clear in this retelling of the crime and what I hadn’t realized before, was that the murders themselves were not “just” the result of callous, adrenaline-fueled, pseudo-gangster, teen behavior. They happened by horrible happenstance: a security light came on; a dog barked. They happened because the boys had no plan about what to do with the passengers in the car they had stolen. Sterling and his friend drove around for hours looking for a place to drop off the couple, a location remote enough so that Ian and Bridget could not easily run to a phone and call the police. They stopped at two places—the one with the motion-sensor light and the one with the dog—got scared and drove away. Hearing this made the whole terrible crime even more senseless than it was.
I know Bridget and Ian’s parents are watching and listening. I can’t see them on the screen right now, and I’m glad of that. Watching their faces as Sterling recounts all of this would be unbearable. “There’s nothing a person can do that’s worse than killing,” Sterling says after the final question about that night. “I did that. This will haunt me to my grave. They had their whole life in front of them.”
Sterling is now guided through a recitation of his incarcerated life, his work as a hospice volunteer, his work in the prison chapel with restorative justice and mediation, his education, his writing. All of this must be impressive to the board. Few people, in or out of prison, have accomplished as much as this man. But I also imagine how this extraordinary résumé might sound to the parents of the two murder victims. How they might be replaying Sterling’s words of a few minutes ago—They had their whole life head of them—and thinking: That’s right. And you took that away. You have had the opportunity to make a life. They did not. My child’s life could have been one of accomplishment too. The damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t cliché couldn’t be more apt. If the team does not highlight his accomplishments they fail to make the strongest case for his rehabilitation. But when they do highlight these, they are confronting the victims’ families with evidence of a life fully lived by the man who robbed their children of a chance to live their lives.
Three carefully selected witnesses then give testimony on Sterling’s behalf. One is his wife, Cheryl, for whom being in the public eye does not come naturally. A wife would be expected to support and believe in her husband, but Cheryl does more with her careful, measured words. She does not play on emotions—hers or the board’s. She begins by acknowledging the searing pain the victims’ families feel and says that her advocacy for Sterling neither excuses nor ignores what he did. She talks about what she knows from her seventeen years as his wife: his transparency, his honesty with himself and others, his ability to communicate, his conscientious decision making, his desire to find common ground and work through thorny issues. She sketches a picture of a mature man living an ethical life. Melissa Michaux, the university professor, speaks briefly about Sterling as a student in her restorative justice class, his contributions, his leadership, his effect on other students, his commitment to conflict mediation and nonviolence.
I have also been asked to speak based on my five-plus years as his editor, writing mentor, and increasingly, his and Cheryl’s friend. I spent long hours thinking about and then carefully crafting my testimony, writing it out, editing, revising. I read it to the legal team in a witness-prep Zoom session two weeks ago, feeling anxious but also oddly disconnected, like I was in an episode of a television series. I don’t know what weight my words might have. Maybe the board has already made its decision. Maybe they dismiss supporters’ testimony as biased. Regardless, I feel an enormous responsibility. When I admit this to O’Connor, the lawyer, he laughs. “Welcome to my world,” he says.
I am on camera now, alternately looking down to read from my testimony and staring into the screen of my laptop in an attempt to make eye contact with people I cannot see, with the board, maybe even with the families of the two victims. I conclude with words I hope will stick: “The boy who killed has become a man who heals.” I truly believe that. I truly believe that Sterling has remade himself, rewired his brain, redefined his masculinity, that although he can never make up for what he did, he might be able to, as they say, “pay it forward,” to do some good in the world. I truly believe he should be released. What would I believe, how would I feel if it had been my daughter, my son whose life he had taken? I don’t know. And I hope I never have to find out.
We are now in the final hour or so of what will end up being a six-and-a-half-hour marathon of a hearing. I learn later that this is one of the longest such sessions ever held. I sat in on one other board hearing several years ago, in person. The man in question, who was nearing sixty with bad hips, bad knees, an extra fifty pounds on his frame, and a quarter of a century behind bars, was not deemed “rehabilitatable” enough to be considered for parole. That hearing lasted barely two hours. It turned, I thought at the time, on the testimony of the family members. It was not so much what they said. It was their presence in the room, the palpable pain of it.
It is time for the board to hear from those who do not support Sterling’s release. The first, representing the state, is the chief deputy district attorney from the county where the crime was committed. He has been practicing law for almost as long as Sterling has been behind bars. On the screen I see a clean-shaven, square-jawed man dressed as if for court in a conservative business suit. He speaks slowly, deliberately, and without emotion. He is arguing for the board to let stand Sterling’s current sentence and far-in-the-future release date. In the face of all the court cases and decisions that are stacked against this, the DA’s strategy is not a legal one. As I listen, a biased supporter of Sterling’s release, I bristle at his words. But I also admire his tactics. He is using Sterling’s accomplishments against him. He is reiterating what Sterling’s supporters—and Sterling’s proven record—said, that he is a talented and award-winning writer, a persuasive speaker, an artist. But here’s the twist. Sterling, the DA tells the board, is “an actor” and a “storyteller” who has “regaled people with tales of his troubled upbringing…convincing many people that he is a reformed man.” But he is not a reformed man. His rehabilitation is not sincere, not real. He is a guy making up a story. This story is motivated only by his desire to get out of prison. The DA is making the case that because Sterling is such a good storyteller, he should not be trusted. Part of me thinks that’s brilliant. The DA also says, several times, in that same near monotone, that “the sentence needs to be proportional to the crime” and that “the only way justice can be served is if Sterling spends the rest of his life in prison.” I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think any of us do. Short of “an eye for an eye,” what is a life “worth”? How much punishment is enough? Is any punishment enough?
Bridget and Ian’s families are being represented by the executive director of a nonprofit victims’ rights center, a former prosecutor and one-time newspaper reporter. She sets the stage for the families’ testimony by focusing on their ongoing trauma and loss, the pain they suffered and continue to suffer. Like the DA, she reiterates the seriousness of the crimes and the appropriateness of the life sentences. She then introduces the fear—a fear that every victim or victim’s family must feel and that the board itself must always consider in every case it hears—that Sterling, if released, could commit additional crimes. Of all the reasons to argue against release, this seems to me to be the weakest. I wonder if she believes it herself.
The families’ testimony is the hardest to hear, the most searing. On-screen they look haggard, careworn, old. Ian’s mother wants to make the point that her son’s murder a quarter of a century ago affected and continues to affect the entire family. His older brother still struggles with the loss, she says. The lives of her subsequent children, “born into a living nightmare,” have forever been affected. About Sterling’s many accomplishments, she has this to say: “Of course you now claim to be a fine upstanding citizen. You have had time and resources that the average person does not have,” that her son did not have. She does not believe Sterling has changed. She begs—“beg” is the word she uses, her voice catching—the board to not order an early release. There is a long silence after she stops speaking. I cannot see Sterling on the screen, but I can imagine his face.
Bridget’s father is now on-screen, a seventy-ish man with thinning white hair and a bony face. His wife, shoulders hunched, eyes trained on the screen, sits next to him, immobile. He begins by reminiscing, talking about his daughter and Ian as a couple, how they met, what they did together, the fun they had, snowball fights in the driveway. His memories are specific and vivid, as if all this happened last week. He recounts the night of the murder, how when Bridget didn’t return from work at the usual time—she had a part-time job at a local pizza parlor while taking community college classes—he and his wife joked that maybe the couple had decided to elope. He remembers where he was, what he was wearing, when the police came to tell him they had found his daughter. He puts his face in his hands and begins to sob. His wife, frozen, looks forward. He tries several times to collect himself, apologizes, starts again. Finally, he says to the board, to Ian’s parents, maybe to Sterling: “Don’t forget about these two young kids.” Another long pause. “We thought we would be planning a wedding, not a funeral.”
It is clear that the twenty-six years Sterling has spent in a maximum security prison has not eased the pain of these families. Will more time—another decade, two decades, the rest of his life—alleviate any of their suffering? Is there such a thing as “restitution” for the crime of murder? If Sterling is released and goes out into the world and does good, will that help balance the karmic score? Bridget’s mother talked about how kind and compassionate her daughter was. Ian’s father talked about Ian as a peacemaker. What would those two kids want from Sterling?
Hsu, the chairman, sitting alone, masked, looking weary, closes the proceedings by saying that the members will not make a decision today. Apparently it is common in these resentencing hearings to offer same-day decisions. But there are too many documents to read, too much testimony to consider, and the statutes and legal rulings underlying the case are complex. There is also so much emotion in this moment that it is impossible to imagine making and then announcing such a momentous decision right now. It may take the board up to a month to decide, he says.
Back six and a half hours ago, when the hearing first began, someone walked into the room reserved for Sterling at the prison and placed a sealed envelope on the table in front of him. When he went to reach for it, a voice instructed him not to open it until there was a break in the proceedings. He pushed it away, off-screen, but not before he glanced at the return address. It was from one of Bridget’s cousins. He learned later that it had arrived just minutes before the hearing started. He read it during one of the short breaks that long morning. Two days later, when we spoke on the phone, he read it to me. “My family wants Mr. Cunio to suffer,” it read. “But all we can do, separately and together, is heal.” She wrote that the notion of exacting “payment” for the murder of her cousin was “nonsensical.” It is not a debt that can be repaid. “Bridget would have wanted to sit down and talk about it.” Sterling thought the letter was one of the bravest things he’d ever read.