FOUR

A PASSION FOR THE LAW

NOW THAT I KNEW I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, I set about trying to figure out the best way to do that. As a little kid growing up, I always wanted to be one of two things: an airplane pilot or a lawyer. My dreams of being a pilot died in the military when I took an eye examination and they determined that I had difficulty focusing on illuminated objects in the dark. You had to have perfect vision to get into flight school, so I ended up as an army helicopter repairman and crewman.

As far as being a lawyer, my childhood idol was Perry Mason. I used to watch that show with my mom; he was my guy. Somewhere along the line, those dreams died, of course, as my drug addiction created an ever bigger barrier to realizing my aspirations. While I was incarcerated, the guy that took over for Perry Mason in my mind was Ben Matlock. Matlock had some serious fees, but there were a lot of times he represented people who could not afford his asking price, folks who just got railroaded by the system or by the police. Matlock became a role model for what I could imagine for myself (especially since there weren’t any Black lawyers on TV then). I thought that the better understanding I had of the law, the more useful I could be to people who couldn’t pay very much.

The law is so intertwined in all aspects of our lives. Whenever you buy a cell phone, you sign a contract. If you get a traffic ticket, you’re dealing with the law. If you buy a home or rent a home—even if you make a purchase at a store—all of that is governed by laws. I wanted to understand the law well enough to help people navigate the different challenges that they may face, and especially because most of the people in my community didn’t have lawyers, I saw this as a powerful way to help people.

WHEN I WAS CONVICTED OF POSSESSION OF A FIREARM BY A KNOWN FELON, I THOUGHT my life was over. The judge handed me down a sentence of fifteen years in prison. I got sent to what they call a reception center, which is where they process folks coming into the system. I knew I had to start working on my appeal, but weeks passed, and I didn’t hear anything from my attorney, who was a court-appointed public defender. I wrote a couple letters. I tried to make some phone calls. I never received any response, and I started getting very nervous.

I knew you only had a certain period of time in which to file an appeal of your conviction, and that is typically done by the public defender’s office. There should have been some type of communication between me and my representative. I couldn’t even find out who my public defender was. It was not my initial public defender, because by then my case had been transferred to the appellate division. Somehow I had fallen through the cracks.

Eventually, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went into the law library at the reception center, asked a few questions, and got some guidance; they actually had law clerks working there to help people like me, which was unusual. I drafted my first legal document, which was a writ of habeas corpus petition for belated appeal.

Basically, it was me writing to the courts, saying, “Hey listen, I know I had a certain amount of time to file the appeal. I know that time has expired, but I have some good reasons why I was unable to file that appeal in a timely way. So because of these reasons, I’m asking you to allow me to file an appeal even though it’s late.”

Not too long after I submitted that, I received word that my petition was granted. That first document that I drafted got approved by the courts. That was huge for a couple of reasons. Number one, I had never drafted a legal document before—in fact, I hadn’t done any writing of any kind since high school, decades previous—so to do so successfully was amazing. But the other thing was, when you’re in prison during the appeal process, it’s very rare to get the courts to move in your favor.

Once the court granted my petition for belated appeal, they set me up with someone in the public defender’s office who specialized in post-conviction appeals. I was already working on my case by the time that attorney was assigned. I had a taste for it now. I was deep in the law books at the library and had come up with about six or seven different grounds for why my conviction should be overturned. Out of the six or seven, I put emphasis on four or five of them. I put all my arguments together and sent it to my lawyer, saying, “Hey, I don’t know what you’re doing, but this is what I have.”

He wrote back, “Okay, great. We’ll work together and make sure that we’re in communication with each other.”

When my attorney filed his initial brief, he chose to put emphasis on one thing that I didn’t even think had a shot: an argument around the selection of the jury. But that was the thing that got me free. My case actually made the law books, so it’s printed case material that people cite to this day. That is how I ended up being released after three years instead of having to serve the full fifteen-year term.

WHEN MY FIRST PETITION IN PRISON WAS GRANTED, WORD GOT OUT. A FAVORABLE ruling was news on the inside. You can imagine the number of people that were coming to me, asking me to work on their case.

I didn’t work on many, but every case that I worked on when I was incarcerated received some type of favorable response from the court. I guess that made me kind of valuable there. If there were inmates who had an issue with me or wanted to fight me, there would always be some key person who stepped in and said, “You’re not gonna mess with that dude. That’s my lawyer.” I think that helped my experience in prison not be as violent as it could have been. I was afforded some degree of protection. If I got sent to confinement, I wouldn’t be able to continue working on anyone’s case, so naturally there were some folks who were invested in me not getting into any trouble.

I remember one case in particular where the gentleman was convicted of possession of cocaine. This guy was really cool, like quite a few of the guys that I met on the inside. You could see that deep down inside—as opposed to the broad brush that all convicts get painted with—he was a nice person, really down to earth. He just had a problem with drugs. I noticed that with the overwhelming majority of folks I met when I was incarcerated; they were either under the influence of drugs at the time they committed the crime, or they were trying to get drugs when they were caught. This was one of those guys who, if you took away his drug addiction, could have been your neighbor, and a good neighbor at that.

Anyway, he was caught with a small amount of cocaine and was sentenced to a few years. When he approached me, he told me how it wasn’t him. He didn’t have the cocaine. He was just a passenger in the car. I shrugged that off; there is a running joke that everybody’s innocent in prison. But then he asked me to look at his case, and I decided to do it because I thought he was an all-right guy. When I read the transcript of his trial, I noticed something in one of the officers’ testimonies that stuck out. It was when he was describing a broken taillight. I remembered some months back when I was in the law library reading trial cases and came across a similar story. I looked up the case, and sure enough, the cases were basically identical. In the printed case, an officer had used a standard traffic stop to pull someone over. But in his testimony, he articulated that when he approached the defendant’s car, he noticed the light emanating from the broken taillight. So the light bulb was still operable, but the taillight assembly was cracked. And that was enough to let the defendant in the law books off the charge, and it worked for my guy as well.

It was a technicality, sure. But I never had an issue with using anything in the purview of the law to help someone, especially when the odds were stacked so high against Black and Brown people or underserved communities in general. There are certain parts of town where they don’t run routine traffic stops. Or if they do pull someone over for a missing taillight, it’s with a smile and a wave and a Don’t forget to get that checked out as opposed to Hands where I can see them and a full search of the car. If the police were to search every car with a missing taillight, you never know what they might find. But as countless reports have shown, you’re much more likely to be pulled over for driving-while-Black then for actually having a taillight out, and the consequences are much heavier if you are a person of color, and far worse if you have a criminal record.

None of this has changed, by the way. I remember getting pulled over during the campaign for the ballot initiative, and it was a traumatizing experience. The police officer approached my car with his hands on his gun. He had pulled me over for nothing; he made some excuse about the car, but it was a rental car. There was nothing odd about the car. I know that even after I’ve changed my life around, every time I get pulled over there is going to be a heightened interaction, an encounter that I might not emerge from fairly.

What that leads to in our society are good men and women languishing on the inside for years. Typically, when somebody goes to prison, the main places they hang out are the rec yard, the dorms, or in the weight pile lifting weights. They resign themselves to having to do their time and go about trying to adapt to prison life instead. You wake up, do your chores, and go to your job, or you’re out in the yard walking around. In Florida, we have blue prison uniforms. I remember looking at the people, thinking we were just a bunch of blue cows grazing in the grass.

There are so many people out there lifting weights, but when you walk into the library, you can count the people in there on your fingers. Some prisons don’t even have complete libraries; you have to write for the materials that you want and then wait and try to keep your momentum up on your own in the meantime. Other libraries are very small or have outdated casebooks. Your access is handicapped, and that cuts into the desire or willpower for people to actually go and work on their case.

There was one case in particular where I helped some law clerks with a young man . . . well, he was young when he came to prison at the age of seventeen. At that time, he had just fallen right into the routine of being a blue cow grazing. In fact, he had done fifteen years before he asked somebody to look at something in his case. When we did, we found out he should have never been incarcerated. He ended up going home, but thinking about how he wasted a decade and a half of his life makes me cry every time.

When I wasn’t in the law library in prison, I worked as a math tutor. It was another way to help people. Everyone who goes into prison is given an exam. Your reading and math scores determine where they place you for employment, whether you get a job like custodian or cutting the grass or can do something of more substance. If I could help inmates raise certain scores, they could stop working in menial roles like digging ditches, which could also help raise their self-esteem. They were appreciative of me for that.

Monday through Friday, I would go to the classroom with other prisoners and help them master mathematics, not for the GED or any external educational purpose but to get them to a point where they were able to score high enough on the math section to get a better job inside the prison. I would sit in the front of a room full of students, and when people had problems, they would come up to me and ask my help in certain areas.

I remember one day I was looking at this guy. He would not come up to ask me for help, but I could see that he was struggling and getting frustrated. Finally, I decided to approach him and ask him what was wrong. His name was Cedric. He told me, “Man, I never could get these fractions.” It was frustrating him.

I told him to follow me to my desk, where we could have some privacy. I asked him what he was incarcerated for. As it turns out, he was a mid-level drug dealer, not necessarily the guy who was on the corner but definitely not the guy bringing in the kilos; he was somewhere in between.

I asked him, “If you have a kilo of cocaine and you have four friends that you want to break off and give some work to, how would you do it?”

He said, “Man, I’d break them into quarters,” and he got very animated, explaining the drug trade to me. “Not everybody’s going to be equal though. Some people are going to have more connections or work harder. So, I might give one guy a half, and one guy a quarter, and two other guys an eighth each.” He was able to actually put the whole system together.

At the end I told him, “Bro, you just did math. You just did fractions.”

That taught me something important. You have these standardized tests that supposedly measure a person’s intelligence or propensity to learn. But in reality, different people come from different environments. If you put someone in an environment they’re not familiar with, they’ll think they’re stupid. When they come to understand the core concepts, on the other hand, because they’re in the right environment, one would see an increase in their confidence level.

I decided that I was going to continue to teach this man math using the drug trade. When we got to the lesson about negative and positive integers, I gave him the example where he just fronted someone a kilo of cocaine.

“How much are you charging him?” I asked.

“Eighteen thousand dollars.”

“So, is he eighteen thousand dollars to the good or to the bad?”

Cedric said, “Oh, that’s eighteen thousand dollars to the bad.”

I said, “That’s eighteen thousand dollars. Now, if a week later the guy gives you nine thousand dollars, what’s his status?”

“Oh, he’s only nine thousand dollars to the bad, now . . . so negative nine thousand dollars?”

After that he was able to work with integers and divide and multiply, positive or negative, it didn’t matter. The interesting thing about Cedric was that I had seen him before. He was in my dorm. When I first noticed him, it was because you couldn’t help but notice him. He was a very loud and boisterous person. He walked around with his pants hanging low, his hair looking crazy, and a mouth full of gold teeth. He had this rough voice and would always act like he was mad at the world.

What I noticed was that every time we successfully completed a section of math, it was almost like a layer was peeled away from him. Eventually he got to the point that he was getting ready to take his GED. He had already elevated past the occupational testing by this point. Now when you looked at him, he was more clean-cut, pants on his waist with a belt, talking in a normal tone of voice, and walking around with a smile on his face.

I was able to witness a transformation in this man. At the beginning of our relationship he talked about how when he got out he was going to tighten up his game in the drug trade. Now he was talking about how he could have a different way of life when he was released, and he could see himself doing other things, even entrepreneurship.

As I saw this new Cedric emerging, it really hit home that a lot of these guys who were incarcerated had these macho tendencies, but it was all a façade. When you peel away those layers, what you find inside is a scared boy who was told that he would never amount to anything, so he suppressed those insecurities with this sense of bravado. If they don’t do well on a standardized test, they get labeled remedial, and no one expects them to go to college or be successful. If they want a job where they can make good money, they’re not thinking they can be a doctor or a lawyer. They’re thinking the only profession open to them is dope boy. That’s the way to get the clothes and the car and the girls.

Someone who is in that situation puts on layers to protect his insecurities and at the same time minimizes the importance of education. The guy that’s smart, we call a nerd or a square and belittle him so we won’t feel as bad. At the same time, because deep down inside we don’t feel significant, we need to become more aggressive. We can’t let somebody try us. We can’t let anybody see that we’re soft. We end up fighting because someone stepped on our tennis shoes or shooting someone over a trivial dispute. But the whole time, we just want to feel like we are somebody. We just want to be loved. That was me, as well. I saw some of myself in Cedric. That experience with him planted a seed in me that would eventually bloom a few years later. As much as I enjoyed helping someone else become more successful, to really tap into their inner potential, I couldn’t hide behind that forever. The time would come when I would have to step out.