thirteen
PHILLIP’S STORY
Crazy Hot Day
AUGUST 2008
The day Phillip Seiler gets out of prison, he doesn’t have time to shave in his cell. After twenty years and thirty-four days, he has run out of time. Far below on the first tier, a guard has yelled up into the cell block, “Seiler! Roll it up!” That’s prison lingo for “You’re going home.”
Phillip’s cellie, the man with whom he has shared a thirty-six-square-foot cell, helps him carry the first of a half dozen cardboard banker’s boxes down the twisting stairs that bookend the tiers to the bottom of the cavernous cell block. As they pile the tattered boxes on a metal dolly, each step Phillip takes is one step closer to his last in San Quentin.
If it was another day, the lifers of North Block would be standing outside their cells, patting him on the back, even following him out in a pack. But a few days before, Sam Robinson says, a prisoner got beaten up pretty badly. As a result, all the white prisoners have been put on racial lockdown and have to stay locked up in their double-bunked cells twenty-three hours a day until things calm down. A day, a month. Longer. That’s the way it is.
Heading for the one open steel door at the south end of the cell block, Phillip glances over at the bank of old phone booths lining the wall. For most of his adult life, they have been his link to the world outside the walls. Now he won’t have to wait his turn to make collect calls to his mom, his girlfriends, or his sons. He’ll get a cell phone—a contraption that was bigger than a brick the last time he breathed free air.
Just before Phillip steps out of North Block, an officer standing at the far end of the tier bellows out, his voice bouncing and echoing its way down the cavernous walls. “Behave yourself,” he says.
Phillip looks back down the long tier, smiles, and is gone.
Sam and I meet Phillip at R&R, Reception and Release. He’s waiting for his parole officer to come pick him up. (Not all prisoners being released from California prisons have to wait for a parole officer to escort them out the prison gates to their first moments of freedom. Only men convicted of murder must do so.)
As we walk up to the front door of the mobile home–style R&R office, a bus full of new prisoners wearing bright orange jumpsuits has just arrived. Handcuffed, disheveled, the men tumble out of the bus and into a line where they blink in the sun as they survey their new world. The cycle begins anew.
Just inside the back door we see Phillip, standing at a small sink, shaving with a twinkle in his bright blue eyes. “How ya doing, man?” Sam says with a half chuckle.
“Rollin’, man, rollin’,” says Phillip, a contagious smile across his face. “Just shavin’ and gettin’ ready to go see my family and friends. They’re all waiting for me at home. Got a little party for me.”
He turns the tap, slaps his face with warm water, and lathers up. Carefully pulling a disposable razor over the stubble, feeling the results with his free hand, he looks out at the ever-present gaggle of wild geese scattered across the prison’s yard. He stops shaving and smiles: not a little smile, but a massive, blinding grin. Then he lets out a laugh, his shoulders and his whole body shaking with an irrepressible anticipation. Watching, it’s hard to measure what this moment means to this man. It’s the golden ring. The lottery. It’s winning something more precious than money. It’s a second chance back out in a society that locked him away twenty years before.
From the other end of the trailer, an officer calls out, “Hey, Phillip, are you really getting out of here?”
“That’s right,” he yells back, turning to the window and laughing again, the sound echoing through the long trailer. Even for the guards, this isn’t just another day inside R&R. Phillip pulls a paper towel out of the dispenser on the wall and wipes his face and chin dry. Turning to me, he asks, “Do I have any blood or shaving cream on me?”
“No. You did a good job.”
Before walking back down the hallway, Phillip grabs another towel and carefully wipes around the sink area, making sure to leave it as clean as he found it. Opening the trash can, he pauses. There’s no trash bag in it. He puts the wet paper towel back on the counter, reaches inside the short double doors of the cabinet beneath the sink, finds a trash bag, shakes it open, pushes it down into the can, drops the wet paper towel in, and closes the lid. Satisfied, he trips down the long hall.
“Have you said good-bye?” I ask.
“Oh yeah. Everybody’s been saying good-bye. Lot of my volunteer friends have been coming by.”
“How did you actually find out?” asks Sam.
“I found out the day before yesterday. My counselor came up with a piece of paper. It was just a small little fax. It was from the Board of Prison Terms to the warden, I think. It was, like, one line. I can’t remember exactly what it said. The board was saying to release me. I couldn’t believe it. My cellie said, ‘Man, you’re going home. You’re going home.’ I thought, ‘Nah. They’re going to appeal it. This is nothing.’
“I’m ready. I got tons of support out there. Family, friends, cars, jobs, places to stay. I’m fortunate. A lot of guys don’t have that. But I spent these last twenty years keeping close connections and helping out in any way I can. I’m really fortunate that I got a lot of good people. A lot of people I knew before prison and a lot of people I met in prison. I’ll be calling all of them.”
Stepping back into the guards’ office, Phillip takes a chair opposite the door. Placing his hands firmly in his lap, he is ready to go.
Phillip says he knows from observing the few lifers who have left San Quentin over the past twenty years that he has anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to wait for his parole officer to come to drive him home. Until he sees the parole officer’s car, he says, it will be difficult to believe it’s really happening—there have been so many false stops and starts over the years. But if all goes as planned, he will go with the officer to a parole office, hear the conditions of his parole, and then drive with the officer to his parents’ place, where he’ll live for now.
“Then what?”
He takes a deep breath. “Well, my girlfriend is going to be there. She’s waiting for me. So, that’s all I’ll say.” A little mischief escapes from the corner of his smile. “Then just connecting with family and taking it easy. I don’t drink. I don’t use drugs. I don’t get into drama. I’ve got tons of support out there. They [the state] made a good choice. And they’ll know that next month and next year, and ten years from now they’ll know that.
“I’m going to go out there and be a good citizen and work with at-risk youth. I’ve been doing that for fifteen years in here; I’m not stopping now. There are youth agencies that want to hire me right off the bat, plus a plumbing company I used to work for twenty-five years ago. He’s hung with me all this time, and he says I’ve got a job as soon as I get out. But he already knows. I’m not showing up for two months. I’m giving myself two months to reconnect with family and friends.” Then he repeats, “As soon as I get home, there’s going to be a party.”
A young officer sitting at a desk against the far wall turns. “How are you going to celebrate your first weekend out?”
“I’m going to Cal Expo!” Phillip says, sounding a lot like a teenager planning his summer vacation. “I always went to the state fair when I was a kid, and that’s what I’m gonna do. Can’t wait. It’s been a long time. Hang out for one, two hours.”
The guard leans back in his beat-up swivel chair. “The Sacramento fair? There’s nothing but trouble there now. I ain’t been to the fair in years. Too much trouble.”
“Is that right?” Phillip asks, his voice dropping. “Cops are probably all over the place?”
“They need to be all over,” the officer shoots back.
“I’ll stand by them,” Phillip says with a nervous laugh. “Okay, here’s one over here, there’s one over there. I’ll make my way through the fair like that.”
“On opening night, there was gunfire and all that,” the young officer says.
“Maybe I won’t go to the fair,” Phillip concedes. “That’d be just my luck. I get out of here and I die the next day getting shot. Man.”
The officer smiles back. “Days are cool. Just don’t go at night.”
“I want to live a long time,” Phillip says. “I want prison to become a smaller and smaller and smaller part of my life. I was twenty-seven when I came to prison.”
An officer standing against the doorjamb is looking hard at Phillip. “How long you got?”
“Twenty years and change,” Phillip answers, straightening up in his chair.
“Twenty years,” the guard repeats, reaching his hand out to Phillip.
“Yep,” Phillip continues. “I did a little over twenty in here and now I want to do another forty or fifty so it will just be a piece of my life and not all bad. I’ve had some wonderful times in prison. I’ve met some beautiful people. Had some great experiences. I’ve been through some drama. Some tough times and some scary times, but I’ve also had a lot of good time in here thanks not only to the guys but the volunteers and free people that come in here and give us their time, from their hearts. Came in to help us and help us with our programs.” Phillip’s voice cracks. The air in the room is electrified.
Collecting himself, Phillip asks one of the officers to use the office phone to call his mom. “She wants to know whether it’s really happening or not. She wants to know if I’m really getting out today.”
“Sure,” the officer says, motioning to a phone sitting on a desk in the far corner of the room. Phillip walks over and dials. Beep, beep, beep. A misdial. The officer helps him get an outside line. Standing with the phone in his hand, the room grows quiet.
“Ma. Yeah, it’s me. . . . I’m in R&R. . . . Yeah, it’s really happening. . . . I’m just waiting for the parole officer to come and get me. I don’t know, I think he’s driving me to the PO office in Sacramento, then home. . . . Maybe a couple of hours. . . . I’m fine. Really. Are you okay? . . . Who’s there? . . . Wow. . . . I know. . . . Sure. Hey, sis. Yeah, I know. Hey, would you mind if a reporter comes home with me? . . . Yeah, she’s all right. . . . Okay.” He looks over at me, smiles, and gives me a thumbs-up.
After he hangs up, I ask if we can talk. “Sure,” he replies. “What do you want to know?”
Even though I have spent hours with Phillip in the VOEG program, I have never had an opportunity to talk to him privately.
I lean in close and lift my microphone. Amid all the celebration and good wishes, there’s a reason Phillip is here. He killed someone. Now he’s so close to getting out, I almost hesitate. He’s paid his debt to society, lived almost all of his adult life in a prison cell, volunteered in prison self-help programs, worked as a clerk, taken classes. He’s done his time. Is it fair now, in front of these officers, to ask him to talk about the murder that got him locked up in the first place?
I push on. “I’ve never heard about your crime. What happened twenty years ago? What did you do?”
He takes a mountainous breath and pulls his chair forward, closer across the tile floor. The room is pin-drop silent. A guard on the far side of the room moves a piece of paper, an attempt to cover up what everyone else knows: they are all waiting to hear the story.
“I was a good provider,” Phillip begins, leaning into my microphone. “I worked hard, made good money. Took care of my family. So in that respect, I was really responsible. But when it came to emotional stuff, when it came to interacting with my wife, in a sharing from something deep inside me, I never made it to that point. I just kept everything to myself. Smashed everything down, for all my life, whatever it was, ever since I was a kid. And that’s a big reason I ended up shooting Charlie. That’s where it all exploded: on Charlie.”
Phillip stops, his voice dropping as though it’s weighed down by rocks. He takes a breath, looks up, continues. “About two years before all this happened, my ex-wife now, my wife then, had got back on meth. She didn’t like it. We didn’t like it. She just got hooked. I set up appointments for her to go to drug counseling, and I’d come home from work to pick her up to go, and she’d be gone. The deepest talk we ever had was we thought, ‘What if we move out of town and you won’t be around it?’ I quit my job. Got another job in Roseville, and she quit cold turkey. Great job. We was doing fine for a couple of years.
“We moved back to Sacramento because there was a big job in carpentry. Didn’t seem to be a problem. Not even a year after that, she hooked back up with the same [drug] house, the same people. The difference was that the first time, she was going and doing the drugs and coming home. This time Charlie came in the picture, so she was going and doing drugs with another guy.”
For months, Phillip says, he suspected his wife was having an affair with Charlie Horner, a thirty-four-year-old local drug dealer and gang leader. “None of this is an excuse for what I did. I don’t blame it on Becky or Charlie or the circumstances. There was a lot of nonviolent things I could have did. We could have moved. I could have divorced her. I could have got some help for me and talked about my issues, dealt with my own stuff. They only knew each other for a couple of months. She was coming and going. She’d come home for a few days and then go over to the house he was staying at. Back and forth, few days here and there.
“Then one day Charlie threatened me with a gun. Told me don’t interfere with their relationship: him and my wife’s relationship or him or one of his boys would take care of me.”
Phillip says he tried to put it out of his mind, but in a moment that changed everything, he did what a man with two children at home never should have done. “That was where I made the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. I had a couple of guns, a couple of rifles. Me and my buddies used to go target shooting, never hunting.” He clears his throat. “And so, after he threatened me, instead of calling the cops and saying, ‘This guy threatened me; he’s a scary guy. What do I do?’ I put my gun in my car. That was the beginning of the end.
“Who knows. Maybe if I’d called the cops, they’d have felt the desperation in my voice and maybe hooked me up to a psych. I mean, I was lucky. I was never molested as a child. I was never beaten. I went through some childhood drama. I grew up in tough neighborhoods. The only white kid and new schools all the time, and things like that,’cause we moved a few times. Been through a lot, never knew my dad, but I never shared none of that with nobody.”
Suddenly a phone rings in the guards’ office. It sounds like a shot. Everyone jumps a little, startled. A guard picks up the phone and quickly gets rid of the call. With all the guards’ eyes back down on paperwork, Phillip resumes his story.
“July 20, 1988, three days after Charlie threatened me, started out like most summer days. My wife dropped our two little boys, Phillip Jr. and Anthony, over at her mom’s house so she could hang out with Charlie.”
That was the day the wheels came off. Midday at his construction job, Phillip says, he was laid off. He desperately needed the job and the money that came with it. Worried about where the next paycheck would come from, he got in his van and drove home.
“When I came home, Charlie and Becky was driving away. They was trying to get one of my cars. They called it her car, but it wasn’t her car; she didn’t have a license. I had four cars. Of course, in California marriage law everything is half-and-half, but she didn’t have a license and didn’t normally drive around. As far as the court was concerned, it was her car, and they was going to get her car. Charlie had tried to hot-wire it, and they was leaving and that’s when it just—whooo.” His voice sounds like the rush of a backdraft. Now the pattern of turning away from what was happening right under his nose, the drugs and the lies, was broken.
Watching them get in the car and pull away, Phillip did what he knew he shouldn’t do. He made a split-second decision that led to another split-second decision. He jumped in his car and chased after them. “I just went berserk. I started following them around the neighborhood. I was trying to show them how serious the situation was. I was trying to chase them out of the neighborhood, and once we hit the main street, I was just going to turn around.”
Phillip stops and looks up, his eyes pleading. He knows what’s coming next. He takes a breath. It was so long ago and today is his day of freedom. After a short inner conversation with himself, he keeps going. He has lived with this moment for twenty years, played it over in his mind from every angle, color, sound. Telling everyone in the room exactly what happened won’t add to or diminish the pain. He has accepted responsibility for the life he took, and today’s telling won’t change anything.
“This is where I really lost it. I wasn’t thinking. I just lost it. That’s no excuse, but that’s what happened. We was coming up to stops, and the driver wasn’t stopping. They were just slowing down and going. And then the last stop, they stopped real abruptly, and I was right behind ’em. And so I bumped the back of the car. I didn’t slam into it or anything, but I was too close, and I bumped the back of the car. And then, um, they pulled over and I pulled over. I reached behind the seat and grabbed my shotgun. Becky had told me he always carried a gun with him, so I was thinking Charlie had his gun. But for some reason he didn’t have it with him that day.
“We all got out and exchanged a few words. I had the gun pointed right at him: sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. Charlie said, ‘She’s not yours. She’s mine.’ When he said ‘mine,’ he was right there in my face. And, uh, I shot him. Shot him in the chest. Shot him in the chest and he was probably dead before he hit the ground. Hit him right in the heart.”
The gun blast filled the summer air with heat. Horner went down. It was done. Phillip lowered the gun and turned away. “I jumped in my van. Went to my mother-in-law’s, where my two boys were, two and eight years old. And I just, I called the cops and turned myself in, told them where I was and went to sit on the couch with my boys and cried.” Phillip’s voice cracks. Caught without air, he sobs. “I just held onto them, told them Daddy did a terrible thing and he was going away for a long time and I was sorry. And then the cops came. And I went.”
Within minutes Phillip was arrested, taken to Sacramento County Jail, and booked on murder charges. A year later, just before jury selection in his first-degree murder trial was to begin, Phillip says, his lawyer, Jan Karowsky, encouraged him to take a plea bargain of second-degree murder. “He said it was the best he could do. If I went to trial, there was a good possibility I would be found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years to life or worse.”
Phillip pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to fifteen years to life with possibility of parole, with two additional years’ enhancement for using the gun. That’s when Phillip Jay Seiler’s life as a convicted murderer began. His name was replaced by a CDC number. To other lifers, Phillip Seiler became simply “PJ.” Based on PJ’s calculations, he wouldn’t be eligible for parole for ten years. In his mind, he settled on doing fifteen before he would even begin hoping for freedom. By then his oldest son, his namesake, would be twenty-three, his youngest seventeen.
“It’s been twenty years,” he says. “I’m going to be there for my boys. I’ll help them out of their mess. They’re in a big mess. Phillip Jr. is twenty-nine. Anthony is twenty-three. Both of them in prison.” Phillip struggles to keep talking, to hold back the gulps. “I’m going to do my best if they want to. They have to want to. I can’t make them. If they want to go to drug rehab and go to anger management, I’ve got all the connections in the world and they’re all right there, people I’ve met right here,” he cries out, realizing his two worlds are going to come together. “And if they’re willing, I’m going to do the best I can to help them get back on track. Because if they’re not willing, I have to back off. I can’t,” he continues, realizing what he’s saying, “be around drugs or drama. Nothing like that. Because I’ll be on parole and they’d return me to prison if I was caught around drugs. I’ll have to stand aside and let them know I’m there when they’re ready. I can’t even be around somebody that’s on drugs. So, I’ve done a lot of work around that”—his voice recovers—“around being prepared to tell’em I can’t go to their house if they’ve got drugs there. And I can’t have them come to my house if they’re under the influence of drugs, or drinking. I’ve already told them and I’ve wrote them a lot. But most of the mail never gets to them because they’re in a prison and they stop it [the mail]. But they know that it’s ‘cold turkey’ time and I’m there for them 100 percent. I’ve got some good psychologist friends that I’ve met here and they’ve offered to sit down with us three to go through a healing process because”—his voice breaks again—“their dad left them at two and eight years old and killed a man. And they’re hurtin’ and I want to heal with them.” He’s crying openly now.
An officer reaches for a box of tissues and hands it to Phillip. Like a runner on a last lap, he breathes out and in, in short, strong bursts of air.
“What are you most looking forward to?” I ask, trying to cheer him up. “On the outside?’
“Camping. Me and my boys used to go to Yosemite all the time, camping, picnics, swimming. That seems like the most fun. Out in the wilderness. Good family, good friends, having a good time. Yosemite is top of the list for us three.”
Even so, it’s clear it’s going to be awhile before Phillip and the young sons he left behind are free, all at the same time.
It has now been more than an hour since Phillip finished shaving the stubble off his deeply dimpled chin. He looks around. “Where is that parole officer?” His wide blue eyes begin to turn from raw anticipation to veiled fear. He has never been this close to getting out before, but that doesn’t mean he’s out.
“Don’t worry,” Sam says. “I’m sure he’s on his way. It’s only eleven-thirty. It takes a good hour or more to drive from Sacramento.”
“Yeah, sure. I know,” Phillip says, looking at his watch, then out the office door at the dozens of new arrivals in bright orange jumpsuits locked up in large cages waiting to be processed. It’s been a long twenty-year journey from the day he wore one of those jumpsuits.
“While we wait, tell me: How did you get to where you are today?”
“San Quentin has more programs than all the other prisons,” Phillip says. “There’s nothing at the other prisons. You just sit in your cell, walk around the yard, and do time. I didn’t graduate from high school, so when I got to the county jail in 1988, I began taking classes and got my high school diploma. Then I kept going and once I got here, there were programs.”
He enrolled in Patten University, an inside-prison satellite branch of a local Christian institution offering college-level courses to inmates. He joined IMPACT (Incarcerated Men Putting Away Childish Things) and Squires, a national organization that brings troubled teens into prisons to hear from the other end of the road they are traveling on. Phillip says if he couldn’t be there for his own locked-up sons, he would be there for the boys he could reach.
By 1998, after serving five years at San Quentin and a total of ten years behind bars, Phillip became eligible to appear before the California Board of Parole Hearings, for what’s known as the initial hearing. The commissioners gave him a two-year denial, meaning he would have to wait two years before going before the parole board again.
Over the next two years he joined IPP, the Insight Prison Project. He attended counseling sessions with a group of men dedicated to turning their lives around by taking a head-on look at the psychological walls and emotional problems that led them to their acts of violence and the impact their crime had on the victims.
In 2000, Phillip says, the Board of Parole Hearings was so backlogged, he had to wait not two but three years to go before the board again. Again the commissioners found him unsuitable for parole and gave him another two-year denial.
Then, in 2003, after presenting his case to the Board of Parole Hearings for a third time, the commissioners determined Phillip was no longer a threat to society and found him suitable for parole. One of the commissioners, Carole Daily, was on the board that had denied him parole back in 2001. This time she said he was ready to go home. “The board doesn’t go from a two-year denial to a date,” Phillip remembers Daily saying at the hearing, “but you’ve made such a change you are ready to be released.”
But like Don Cronk and Jesse Reed, before being released on parole, Phillip had to wait 150 days for the governor of California to decide whether to reverse his date. Governor Gray Davis was in office. As Phillip’s file made its way through the 120 days of review inside the Board of Parole Hearings, he watched the calendar, hoping his file would be one of the first to reach the governor’s desk just as Arnold Schwarzenegger took the chair.
But in a simple twist of criminal fate, in his last week in office, Governor Davis took Phillip’s date and sent a fax to the warden of San Quentin announcing he was reversing Phillip’s parole. Devastated, Phillip knew how much the decision would hurt family and friends who were waiting for him on the outside. He would have to wait two more years to go before the Board of Parole Hearings again.
One month after Phillip’s parole date was reversed by Governor Davis, his eldest son, Phillip Jr., was arrested, beginning the first of many prison terms to come. Within a few years, Phillip’s second son, Anthony, would also be arrested on drug and violence charges and sent to prison.
Inside San Quentin’s North Block another lifer and jailhouse lawyer, Sterling Scott, convinced Phillip not to give up. Now that Phillip had been found suitable by the board, Scott said he would help him fight for parole in the courts, free of charge. Later, when Scott won his own appeal and was released from San Quentin on parole, he continued to help Phillip with his appeals from outside, sending documents back and forth, inside to out, out to in, through legal mail.
With Scott’s help, Phillip filed his first writ of habeas corpus with the Marin County Superior Court, suing Governor Davis for reversing his parole date. In his filing Phillip argued, “The Governor overstepped his bounds by reversing my parole date without probable cause.”
The Marin County Superior Court reviewed his writ, found the governor did not have cause to reverse, and ordered the state attorney general’s office, representing the governor, to show cause for the governor’s reversal.
The attorney general representing the governor appealed the ruling to the state court of appeal, which agreed with the superior court, that the governor did not have cause.
The attorney general appealed the state court of appeal decision to the California Supreme Court. The California Supreme Court ruled Governor Davis did have cause for reversal.
Phillip then appealed the California Supreme Court’s decision to the US District Court for the Northern District of California, which upheld the California Supreme Court decision that the governor did, based on Phillip’s original crime, have cause for reversal.
In a writ Phillip wrote by himself, he appealed the US district court’s decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Then, in 2005, two years into his court battle, Phillip was again scheduled to go before the Board of Parole Hearings. Hours into the hearing—after he spoke with the commissioners about the crime, his prison record, his work in programs, his remorse and reformation—the three commissioners again found Phillip suitable for release.
Again, five months later, on the last possible day he could issue his decision, Governor Schwarzenegger sent a fax to the warden of San Quentin announcing he was reversing Phillip’s parole date.
This time Phillip’s response to the reversal was radically different. Instead of falling into weeks of despair, Phillip responded to the governor’s multiple-page fax by filing another writ of habeas corpus, this time in Sacramento County Superior Court, which had previously denied his writ.
The Sacramento County Superior Court denied his appeal. So Phillip appealed the superior court’s denial to the California Court of Appeal, which remanded his writ back to the superior court, asking the judge to reevaluate her decision.
A year later, in 2006, with both cases working their way through state and federal courts, Phillip appeared before the Board of Parole Hearings again, for the fifth time in eight years. By then Phillip had amassed more than four hundred “chronos,” chronological reports documenting good behavior, in his file. And yet the two commissioners on the parole board gave him a two-year denial.
“After doing nothing wrong and only good stuff, I was denied,” Phillip says, shaking his head, eyes wide.
This time Phillip filed a writ of habeas corpus with the Sacramento County Superior Court suing the Board of Parole Hearings for denying him parole. In December 2006, a judge in the Sacramento County Superior Court said she wanted to see Phillip in her courtroom. At the end of the hearing, she ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to release him.
Surprisingly, freedom for Phillip would remain out of reach. Governor Schwarzenegger refused to release him. Phillip attempted to appeal the governor’s refusal to the California Court of Appeal, but the judges on the court of appeal told him to go back to the superior court and file a new writ.
The Sacramento County Superior Court judge again ordered Phillip released from prison, and again Governor Schwarzenegger refused to release him. The battle was still going on when, on August 21, 2008, the California Supreme Court issued its ruling In re Lawrence.
“And that’s why I’m getting out today,” Phillip says, sitting inside San Quentin’s R&R, waiting for his parole officer to arrive. The guards, who have been listening quietly to his story, shift in their chairs. As if someone hit the play button on a paused movie, the guards go back to work, pretending they weren’t listening. Now that he’s told his story to the men, who for the past twenty years have held the keys to his life, Phillip looks relieved. He has accepted what he did, paid the price, and cleared the table.
Phillip gets up and walks out the front door to join the few lifers allowed out of their cells standing vigil, waiting for the parole officer’s car. Then, a little after noon, a dark blue sedan appears at the far corner of San Quentin’s lower yard. Someone calls out, “He’s here.” Phillip turns and stares at the approaching car. It has that official state vehicle look.
“Yep, that’s him,” Phillip says, half under his breath. “I hope he’s cool.” Guards and inmates alike turn to follow the car as it inches its way slowly, deliberately past the guard tower and along the forty-foot wall. I take a quick look at Phillip’s face. He looks anxious. What will his parole officer look like? Will he be a fair man, or will he make his first thirst-quenching moments of freedom a living nightmare, handcuffing him in the car and treating him like an unreformed prisoner?
The inmates and officers standing with Phillip on the ramp watch as the car door opens. Wearing a loose-fitting, short-sleeved casual shirt, slacks, and aviator sunglasses, the officer, a tall, brawny man, gold badge clipped to his front pocket, gets out and walks up the ramp toward Phillip. Phillip steps forward, smiles, and holds out his hand.
“CDC number?” says the officer, humorless.
While Phillip recites his number, the officer looks down at a number printed on a form in his hand.
“Okay, let’s get you signed out,” the parole officer says, pulling open the door to the R&R office. “You got any boxes?”
“About eight,” Phillip says, following him inside the modular double-wide.
“We don’t have room for eight,” the parole officer says, looking at Phillip with a “What were you thinking?” face. “We can take a few; you’ll have to get the rest mailed to you later.”
Boxes, number, a parole officer with a little attitude. Now that it’s really happening, Phillip allows himself to change out of his pale blue button-down shirt with its drooping pocket and repaired buttonholes and into the civilian clothes his family bought and sent to him inside. Holding a brand-new light gray Gap T-shirt and a fresh pair of jeans, Phillip steps into the bathroom at the back of the R&R trailer.
Actually leaving will still take a little while longer. Turns out, the parole officer who has come to collect Phillip was once a corrections officer at San Quentin, and now that he’s back, he wants to check in with the men on duty, getting the latest news on changes at the prison and the gossip firsthand.
At about one in the afternoon, the door to R&R swings open wide. Phillip’s parole officer emerges, catches Phillip’s eye, and says, “Let’s go.” Lifers standing around help Phillip push the dolly stacked with his boxes to the open trunk. After some shifting and shoving, the officer announces half the boxes will have to be left behind. A woman who works as a volunteer at the prison walks over to Phillip and hands him an envelope. He carefully pulls it open. Inside is a good-luck card covered with hand-scrawled messages from the volunteers he’s known and worked with and is now leaving behind. No longer a lifer, now in the care of the Parole Division of the CDCR, Phillip gives the slight, gray-haired volunteer a kiss and a hug.
Turning, he walks to the back door of the four-door sedan, takes a quick last look at the men, prisoners and officers standing side-by-side on the ramp, and with a bounce, jumps into the backseat.
Just like that, the dark car backs up, swings out, and begins making the long, slow drive around the yard, past the baseball backstop and the education building and through the farthest gate. As they watch the car disappear, there is grief among the band of brothers left behind. Phillip is gone. Like mourners leaving a burial, they turn, look back, and then walk away. It’s over. Guards go back to their desks. Lifers head back to their cells, their heads low. They all know that unless they too get out on parole, they will never see their friend again.
