The Lives They Lived...2015 The New York Times

[bigvalboy]

Worth a brief moment of our time....A powerful read

 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/16/magazine/the-lives-they-lived.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/magazine&action=click&contentCollection=magazine&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

 

The Lives

They Lived

 

2015

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year. For readers’ tributes to loved ones who died this year, see The Lives They Loved.

 

So many stories....this one hit home

 

 

1. 
   
   
   • • Glenn Ford
       B. 1949
       All Alone
       Nearly three decades in solitary for a crime he did not commit.
       

http://i1.nyt.com/images/2015/12/27/magazine/27TLTL-ss-slide-1ZR3/27TLTL-ss-slide-1ZR3-jumbo.jpg

[*]‘‘It separates you from everything and everybody,’’ Glenn Ford said about his 29 years on death row. ‘‘Can you imagine going 20-some years without no human contact?’’ Perhaps it is impossible to truly imagine years, let alone decades, on death row, particularly for someone like Ford, who was incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. In 1984, he was convicted of killing Isadore Rozeman, a jeweler in Shreveport, La., for whom Ford had done yard work. The court appointed two lawyers with no criminal-law experience to defend him, and despite scant evidence, an all-white jury took less than three hours to find him guilty.

 

From then on, Ford lived in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, in a concrete cell the size of a bathroom. Three hours a week, he was allowed outside to exercise, but even there he was alone and in a cage offering less freedom than a dog run. For his last seven years in prison, Ford refused to even go outside. He called the exercise pen ‘‘ridiculous.’’ Being in a solitary cage outdoors was more like a taunt than a respite.

 

In other parts of the prison, inmates could touch visitors; they could hold hands and even embrace. But nearly all death-row visits are ‘‘no contact,’’ in which there is a plexiglass partition between the inmate and his visitor. Angola allowed Ford up to four contact visits a year with his family and friends, but even then the visits offered only a facsimile of intimacy: They were conducted under the watch of a prison guard. Ford decided not to see his family while he was on death row. He didn’t explain why, but perhaps, like being in a cage outside, such meager contact with family would only remind him of all he was missing.

 

Paradoxically, solitary meant never having privacy. Ford was alone in his cell, but he was never in control of when he was looked at or by whom. There were open bars on the cell doors, the lights never went completely dark and guards walked the tier to do prisoner checks. Cameras were present, letters were opened, phone calls were monitored and recorded. Every day had this steady hum of low-grade humiliation.

 

Ford was constantly cold in the winter months, and in the summer his cell was brutally hot. His health deteriorated. He had an untreated tendon injury in his knee, a severe stomach illness and a misdiagnosed gallbladder infection that resulted in emergency surgery. He lost most of his teeth. In 2011, a blood test indicated that Ford could have cancer, but he said he was repeatedly denied access to an oncologist. The underlying message was clear: On death row, the body wasn’t entitled to be well. It just needed to be maintained until execution.

 

What’s most difficult to imagine are the long days that made up the months and years. For Glenn Ford, that total was 10,680 days. There were few institutional gestures toward education or rehabilitation on death row. Some inmates developed compulsive habits, like counting the 358 rivets on the cell doors over and over. Ford’s salvation was that he loved making drawings and became very good at it. But Angola banned art supplies from death row for years at a time. Ford also filled his days by reading books, listening to music and writing letters. In the hour a day he was allowed outside his cell, he would talk to the other men on his tier and sometimes play chess through the bars. Occasionally, the sameness of the days would be broken by the execution of one of the men. Ford described low points in which he would withdraw into himself for months at a time, not writing or talking. He didn’t explain more, but you can imagine a retreat into a kind of psychological hibernation. Yet somehow, he would recover himself. He always believed that he would be freed, and perhaps that goal gave him the particular combination of focus and distraction he needed to endure.

 

Last year, the district attorney’s office announced that it had new evidence that Ford was ‘‘neither present at nor a participant in’’ the crime for which he was convicted. Ford was released with nothing but an apology from the warden and a debit card with a balance of $20.24. Riding in a car leaving the prison, his lawyers stopped to get him a meal. But Ford just sat in the car and didn’t move. He was at a loss because he hadn’t opened or closed a door in three decades. ‘‘One night you are sleeping on death row, and the next morning you are in the free world,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s how overwhelmed I still am.’’

 

Forty days after Ford was freed, he found out he had terminal lung cancer. Jumping from the slow years he had served to the quick months he had left to live, he went from one radically distorted relationship with time to another.

 

The state found a way to refuse compensation for his wrongful incarceration. He was free, but destitute and dying. He lived in a facility run by the charity Resurrection After Exoneration, where his needs were covered by donations and volunteers.

 

In March, A.M. Stroud, the lead prosecutor in Ford’s case, wrote a passionate apology in The Shreveport Times, admitting that the trial wasn’t fair and that evidence was withheld from the defense. Stroud berated his past self for being more concerned with winning than with discovering the truth. A month later, ‘‘Nightline’’ arranged for Ford and Stroud to meet so Stroud could apologize in person. In the television footage, Stroud walks into Ford’s room and stands as he speaks to him; he practically glows with the relief of his contrition. ‘‘I wasn’t a very good person at all,’’ Stroud says. ‘‘So I apologize for that.’’ Ford is a frail, tiny figure in a sweater seated in the corner of the frame. He barely looks up as Stroud finishes, and then Ford responds, his words labored and breathy and slow. ‘‘It happened, it happened,’’ he said. ‘‘And I’m sorry I can’t forgive you. I really am.’’

[+ quoththeraven]

BVB - Thank you for sharing that. I remember seeing Stroud's apology through links on Twitter.

 

This seems like an appropriate place to put the following, which I ran across on Twitter when it was first published. I was thinking of starting a thread for it, but it would be a mighty depressing thread.

 

Criminal Law 2.0 - Everything that's wrong with the criminal justice sytem that you were afraid to ask about, written by federal appellate judge Alex Kozinski.

 

For a simpler version, the Washington Post ran it unexpurgated (except for footnotes and some case citiations) as follows:

 

Introduction (12 reasons to worry about our criminal justice system)

Wrongful convictions and excessively long sentences

The jury system and ways to improve it

Prosecutorial misconduct

What judges can do

Four final ideas

I've been unable to find a couple of posts, so you're better off reading Criminal Law 2.0 and skipping or ignoring the footnotes. It's not difficult reading; it's just scary. But it's important stuff, especially if you ever serve on a jury in a criminal trial.

 

Happy New Year!

[+ purplekow]

Read most of the stories. The author's made each life described illuminate dark corners of my own life.