At 21, I was a full-time college student. I also sold drugs and carried guns. In the early-morning hours of April 7, 2007, I was shot on a Bronx street, along with two other people. I survived. One person didn’t. The third, who was badly injured, gave testimony at trial that suggested I shot everyone, including myself. Based on that, I was convicted of all charges.
I maintain my innocence, but I am not here to convince you of that. Innocent-man narratives often discount the need for reforms to help all people, including guilty people. I want to tell you instead about the person I have become over the past 17 years in prison and the people I have met here.
At Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in the Catskill Mountains in New York, I’m incarcerated with men who have earned college degrees while incarcerated and who fill their days with volunteer work. Despite bettering our lives — or aging out of criminal behavior — we have no opportunity to demonstrate our rehabilitation outside of parole hearings that may come decades in the future.
Lawmakers across the country have proposed so-called Second Look laws. The First Step Act, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018, gave federal judges the discretion to reduce the sentences of people convicted of federal crimes when there’s compelling evidence to do so.
In New York, State Senator Julia Salazar has introduced legislation that could help reset past policies that contributed to ballooning populations in state prisons. The state’s Second Look legislation would allow judges to weigh factors like victim impact statements, age, whether the prisoners were penalized for bringing their cases to trial (instead of accepting a plea bargain) and participation in rehabilitation programming when considering sentence reductions.
The bill is receiving plenty of support, including from people who will make decisions about the fates of prisoners, like the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, Rowan Wilson. While running for re-election last year, Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said, “Ultimately, there may be individuals who are incarcerated on sentences that no longer meet today’s sensibility of justice.”
After I was arrested in 2007, I waited on Rikers Island for four years before my case went to trial. I soon learned that the threat of violence, not necessarily violence itself, garnered respect. I found ways to make money to pay for my expenses like phone calls and legal fees by smuggling contraband such as tobacco. It must seem as if I was a menace. Maybe I was. But I know I’m no longer the person who languished on Rikers.
When my case finally went to trial, it took just six days. I was struck by the prosecutor’s assertion, during his closing argument, that drug dealers are often both victims and perpetrators of violence. At sentencing, that same prosecutor argued I had no redeemable qualities. The judge said I had committed my entire life to crime.
It seemed as though it wasn’t just my freedom on the table. They also judged my humanity and foreclosed anything I would ever become. I was sentenced to the maximum: 50 years to life.
Days later, a correction officer at Rikers stirred me awake at dawn. It was time to go upstate, to prison. Even though I had carried a scalpel for the past four years to protect myself from other prisoners, that morning I was conflicted. I didn’t want to be who the system thought I was. As I watched the sun rise, I prayed. Before I stepped out of my jail cell for the last time, I flushed the scalpel down the toilet.
At my new prison, I landed a job in the law library, where a fellow prisoner named Darnell Epps taught me the law. He also provided me with a model to follow in prison. Mr. Epps was enrolled in the Cornell College program, exercised religiously and volunteered speaking to kids in the Scared Straight program. He was serving 17 years to life for murder. In time I adopted his routine: powerlifting meets, college classes and volunteer work.
Since Mr. Epps’s release in 2017, he has graduated from Yale Law School and founded his own tech company. I know I can contribute to society as he has. One of my college professors, Jamin Sewell, who teaches law and policy at St. Thomas Aquinas College, wants me to go to law school. But none of that will matter until I appear before a parole board in 2053, when I’m 67 years old. Shouldn’t it matter sooner?
I wonder why the prosecutor suggested my case was a common story, given that my sentence is so much longer than the average punishment. According to the Department of Justice, the median time spent in prison for murder is 17.5 years. I wound up with a trial penalty, meaning I got punished not just for the crime, but for asserting my right to trial, receiving consecutive sentences.
Judges are not wrong for giving out the maximum sentence. I’d say the shock of my sentence was what I needed at the time. It created a seismic shift in my thinking and behavior.
But it’s wrong to think that the Second Look Act would give prisoners “extra credit” for good behavior, as New York State Senator Anthony Palumbo said. Given all the factors that would be reviewed by a judge, it’s unlikely those with bad disciplinary records in prison would be given serious consideration. Rather, the law would serve as a test of redemption for the more than 6,000 people who would otherwise never get any credit for their rehabilitation.
When we have no chances of ever getting out, we start to believe we have nothing to lose. Having the opportunity of a second chance would make people less likely to commit violence inside.
In May, at a college graduation event held at Sullivan, the commissioner of New York State’s Department of Corrections, Daniel Martuscello III, told the audience, “I have full confidence that the individuals in this community will not be judged based on their past, but rather on their present selves and the remarkable individuals they are evolving into right in front of us.”
Life expectancy studies of New York prisoners suggest that I will be dead at 57 years old, long before I face the parole board. Research on correction officers shows they often struggle with their physical and mental health. Our well-being is intertwined. Hopelessness and despair are contagious and toxic — yet another reason the Second Look Act deserves serious consideration.
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