As I mentioned, at the original trial Gladys Johnson, the other Gerald’s mom, testified that she saw Ken Floyd and Gerald Rice, who was known as Junior in the neighborhood, passing back and forth between them a Coca-Cola bottle filled with liquid. She testified that the bottle Gerald hurled through her sister’s kitchen window was unlit. (The police found no accelerant on his clothes.) Gladys also said that when she ran out of the house, Gerald Rice and Ken Floyd ran right past her. She knew both boys from the neighborhood, especially because they would frequently come by to play basketball in the alley with her son. (She told me that Floyd and his friends wouldn’t let Gerald Rice play, so he would watch from the sidelines.) It was a bench trial, and the judge acquitted Ken Floyd because, he said, Gladys hadn’t identified him at the scene as she had Gerald Rice, and only identified him later in a lineup. Gerald had told the police that he wasn’t with Ken Floyd, that he was asleep when around four in the morning a friend knocked loudly on his door to alert him to the fire. He said that he and his friend stood in the alley and watched the house burn.
At Gerald’s sentencing, the judge, Richard Neville, seemed discomforted by the facts. It was clear to Judge Neville that Gerald had been lured to assist others, that he wasn’t acting out of his own volition, that he clearly had developmental issues that made him highly susceptible to others’ influence. But because of mandatory sentences set by the state legislature, Judge Neville had no choice in deciding Gerald’s fate. In an extraordinary admission, Judge Neville suggested that Gerald wasn’t fully at fault. It was clear, he said, “that Ken Floyd was the instigator of this occurrence.” He rued the fact that he didn’t feel he had the evidence to convict Floyd. He then went on to apologize to Gerald: “I think it is outrageous that I cannot take that into consideration in determining what an appropriate sentence is for Mr. Rice…Were I able to, I would not sentence Mr. Rice to mandatory life for these charges. I would find another sentence which I think would be more appropriate…I think the legislature has overstepped its bounds and indicated an inappropriate sentence must be given to Mr. Rice and has stripped judges of the ability to consider each defendant individually which was the keystone of our constitution to begin with…It is with total reluctance that I enter the sentence and it is only because I believe I have no authority to do anything else that I enter this sentence.” Judge Neville, with great reluctance, sentenced Gerald Rice at the age of sixteen to natural life in prison.
In 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court in Miller v. Alabama ruled that mandatory natural life sentences for juveniles was unconstitutional, and as a result most of the two thousand inmates around the country who were sentenced to natural life as children were given a new hearing, a chance at resentencing. The ruling came nearly thirty years after Gerald Rice was originally sentenced. The prosecution put on only two witnesses before turning it over to Gerald’s lawyers, who pointed out that since 2001, Gerald hadn’t received a single ticket for even a small violation while in prison—and that whatever gang affiliation he might have had was long in the past. The former director of the Illinois Department of Corrections testified to Gerald’s remarkable record, recalling an incident in which a ladle, a potential weapon, went missing, and Gerald helped the guards find it. He also mentioned that since 1994 Gerald had had 1,101 visits, mostly from his mother, his grandmother, and his sister. “This doesn’t happen often with someone who has a life sentence,” the former director testified.
Even Judge Neville, the judge in the original trial, weighed in, with a letter to the court. He wrote: “I continue to be troubled by the sentence I was required to impose. When I sentenced Mr. Rice, I never had the opportunity to consider mitigating information regarding Mr. Rice in order to reach an appropriate sentence. I would have wanted to consider his cognitive capacity, his age, the circumstances of his upbringing and family life, his educational and criminal history, the source and strength of support for him in his family and community, and his lesser role in the crime. In that regard, I recall that, based on the evidence I heard at the trial in this matter, I felt that Mr. Rice was being used by the other individuals who perpetrated the crime…I do not believe that Mr. Rice deserved the sentence he was given.”
Gladys sat in a middle row, leaning into her younger sister, Faye, the two at times holding hands. Gladys can be forceful and direct, and sometimes I imagine that because she says what’s on her mind and because she often looks fatigued, people underestimate her. She had considered testifying but chose not to once she learned that the assistant state’s attorney might introduce photos of her sister, nephews, and nieces after the fire. She knew she’d fall apart. Instead she submitted a short written statement, which was read into the record:
Through the years, my mental and physical states have changed both due to age and periods of stress. Shortly after the incident, I took custody of my sister’s remaining children and raised them as my own. Not long after this incident, my mother’s health began to fail and she passed away. Through the years, I’ve grown to the point where I believe that individuals deserve a second chance. Heddie’s surviving children have grown to have their own families and have been able to surpass the grief and place forgiveness in their hearts. For whatever it may mean, I have continued my life and accept whatever sentence the judge may place on Gerald. Sincerely, Gladys Johnson
The statement, not surprisingly, was ambiguous. While she testified in his original trial that he’d been partly responsible, she now says he both deserves a second chance and that he had nothing to do with igniting the fire. Gladys’s memory of the fire and the subsequent trial has shattered and rearranged itself numerous times. Trauma does that. It toys with you. That’s the case for Gladys. And if you listen to her stories closely, it’s not that she’s seeing something completely apart from what she saw before, but rather it feels like with time that moment three decades ago comes into clearer focus. “It was just like yesterday,” she told me. “It just is so vivid in my mind.” At the original trial she testified that she saw Gerald Rice throw an unlit firebomb through the kitchen window. Years later she told Gerald’s lawyers, “I will go to my grave believing Gerald is innocent.” She claims the transcript from the trial isn’t accurate—which is unlikely. And then she told me that she saw Ken Floyd and two others, close friends of his from the neighborhood, throw Molotov cocktails into her sister’s home, and that when they all ran past her toward the alley, Gerald followed them. She assumed he’d been on the side of the house she couldn’t see. She’s described this to me multiple times. Here’s the bottom line: Gladys believes that Gerald, if he had a role in the firebombing, was there only at the instigation of others, that he was bullied into it. Here’s where she never wavered: Gerald Rice should be freed.
The judge, after hearing all the testimony, resentenced Gerald so that he would get out in a month. The judge stated, “It’s pretty clear for a variety of reasons that Mr. Rice didn’t intend for this to happen. Ken Floyd did…It is clear from my review of the record…Ken Floyd was the moving force in this.” Gerald’s grandmother, Mary, walked a few rows back and hugged Gladys, told her they’d all get together, both filled with relief. Gladys looked as happy as I’d ever seen her. Gerald, still shackled, shuffled out of the courtroom accompanied by two sheriff deputies, looking bemused, uncertain as to what had just transpired.
* * *
—
Gerald Rice had told one of his lawyers that all he wanted when he got out was pepperoni pizza. It is a chilly day in February, the thermometer hovering around freezing, and we talk and pace in the waiting room at the Stateville Correctional Center. Gerald’s brother, Taiwan, who repairs security alarms and runs a small real-estate brokerage firm, tells me he’d gone online to read accounts of men getting out of prison so he would know what to expect. One former inmate, he says, didn’t feel free until he went to the beach where he used to go as a child. Another talked about his need for privacy. “If Gerald wants to close his door
, that’s fine,” he explains.
Gerald’s family is incredibly close-knit. Warm. Welcoming. Each with wide, open smiles. Gerald’s sister, Velinda, remembered that as a kid Gerald loved shoes and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, so she got him a pair of white sneakers and three Reese’s. The family explains that they visited him so often in part because he can’t read, and so sending letters was a useless exercise. His grandmother and mother recall the time right after the fire when they were called down to the police station. They weren’t allowed to see Gerald, but they caught a glimpse of him through a window, and he pounded his chest, suggesting he’d been hit while in custody. Gerald, a minor, had been questioned by the police without his mother or a lawyer present.
After two hours of waiting, shortly after noon, a guard announces Gerald’s being released, and everyone races outside. Across the parking lot, we spot Gerald lugging a cardboard box with his belongings, following another released inmate to the bus stop. One of his lawyers laughs and yells to Gerald, “You don’t need to take the bus.” Gerald’s in a blue skullcap, white T-shirt, and black pants, not dressed for the weather. His brother pulls out a new winter coat he purchased for the occasion, and Gerald wiggles into it, complaining that it’s too small, too tight. Taiwan tells him, “That’s the style. It looks good.” One of the lawyers asks Gerald how he feels. “Nervous,” he replies.
At the Golden Corral, a buffet-style restaurant, Gerald eats pepperoni pizza and roasted chicken. He seems lost amid the celebration. Over a dozen family and friends and his lawyers hover around him, hugging him, patting him on the back, urging him to pose for photos. At one point Gerald walks to his grandmother, who’s in a wheelchair and who has been quietly sitting at the head of the table. “You awright?” he asks. “I’m all right seeing you,” she says, and takes his hand in hers.
* * *
—
I sit with Gladys Johnson on her second-floor back porch, late afternoon, both of us sipping water. We watch as disheveled-looking young men and women enter and exit through a rear door of an apartment building across the alley. “A drug den,” she explains. Gladys knows this because she’s seen her son, Gerald, enter there. Gerald got out of prison a few months ago, and by her count has been in and out of four rehab centers in that time. He’s back using. She knows this because he spends hours in the bathroom and has blood in his stools; heroin use can block one’s bowels. He’s also lost color and has fallen asleep beneath the kitchen table. He’s tried to hock a pair of her shoes. She has understandably run out of patience with her son, and tires of hearing him talk about the fire and how it’s consumed him. “I just think it’s an excuse,” she tells me. “He’s using it as a crutch. It could’ve played a part then [when he was young], but come on now, you’re forty-five years old.” Nonetheless, she lets him stay at her apartment. He’s her son, after all. She loves him. She had told Gerald I was coming by, but, not surprisingly, he didn’t show.
It’s hard not to recognize the irony. Her Gerald is a prisoner of his drug habit, and the other Gerald, Gerald Rice, is free. Don’t get her wrong, she’s glad Gerald Rice is out of prison. “Everybody misinterpreted my story,” she insists, explaining that she saw only Ken and his two friends throw lit bottles into her sister’s home. When the three of them ran from the burning house toward the alley, she says, Gerald was running with them, pulling up the rear. “Thirty-some years. That wasn’t fair at all,” she says of his time in prison. She wanted to meet Gerald, to talk to him, to tell him everything’s okay, but she never heard from him or his family. She’s upset by that. “I would’ve liked to get together. I just want him to know that I don’t have any animosity in my heart toward him. I know he got bullied.” The thing is, Gerald still contends that he had nothing to do with the fire, that he was at home asleep when the house across the alley was torched. His lawyers are pursuing a case to clear his name.
Over a quarter of a century ago. A dispute between teenage boys. A fistfight. A baseball bat. Then a firebombing. Four family members burned to death. Of one of the survivors, one of her nieces, Gladys says, “She’s lost in her sorrows.” It’s hard not to think that for Gladys, too, that morning is still very much present. Every year she writes the birthdays of her sister and her sister’s children in her calendar. Every July 24, the anniversary of the fire, she hosts a barbecue which the survivors of the fire, her nieces and nephews, attend. She often can’t sleep at night because when she closes her eyes, she can see everything like it’s right in front of her: her eleven-year-old nephew Dante on the porch roof, panicked, hollering through the window for his mom, Gladys’s sister. Momma, where you at? Momma, where you at? Gladys yelling at Homer, who’s also on the porch roof, Get Dante! Get Dante! Dante disappearing, crawling back through the window to find his mom. Then, later, a heavyset white police officer, a woman, taking Gladys in her arms. Come here, it’s going to be okay, she tells Gladys, who nestles her head in the roundness of the officer’s shoulder. Gladys just wants to know what’s taking so long to get everyone out. She thinks they’re still alive. She can still feel the warm, comforting embrace of the police officer, the softness of the officer’s shoulder, a place where in that moment, for just that moment, she feels reassured; it’s a feeling she wants again. The visions are too real, too vivid, so much so that she can’t keep her eyes closed at night. And so she can’t sleep, sometimes for two or three days at a time. Her psychiatrist has prescribed trazodone for the insomnia, and Gladys, who’s sixty-two, now goes to the gym three times a week, mostly water aerobics, to burn off the anxiety. “Sometimes,” she tells me, “I think I’m going to my grave with this on my mind and in my heart.”
Chapter 13
The Tightrope, part three
AUGUST 15…AUGUST 16…AUGUST 17…
In line to enter the city’s neoclassically designed criminal courthouse, the same place where Gerald Rice was resentenced, men and women—mostly men—fidget and keep their heads down or look off into the distance. They avoid eye contact. They’re preoccupied, subdued, on edge. Many look as if they want to disappear. In front of me is a young Hispanic man, a tattoo on his shaved head which reads Renegade Killer. On his neck he has etched Thug Life. The man behind me mutters, “I wonder what kind of case he’s fighting?” Many of the men wear shorts and T-shirts, a statement of defiance. Whatever status you hold on the streets is stripped from you here. Whatever your history, it’s erased. Whatever your aspirations, no one cares. They say it’s a place where justice is served. But justice too often feels arbitrary. Like a game of craps. You enter this building, and whatever control you had in your day-to-day existence is lost. The judges, the prosecutors, the deputy sheriffs, the public defenders, are intently focused not necessarily on you but on getting through the day without too much going wrong.
I came here today to meet Marcelo. Bob Dwyer, his public defender, has done two stints in this building, with an interruption of working for an insurance company, and is one of the most respected attorneys in the Cook County public defender’s office. Despite his laconic manner, he can be a fierce advocate, and he seems determined to ensure that Marcelo, who along with his friends robbed three people of their cell phones, doesn’t get a felony on his record. Marcelo’s case has become a priority for his office, partly because of the Mercy connection (there’s a kind of Catholic mafia in the city) and partly because Marcelo’s case felt as if it represented something more: a way to push back on the inflexibility and unnecessary harshness in applying justice. Dwyer wanted the prosecution to reduce Marcelo’s charge to a misdemeanor—or, better yet, get his case sent to juvenile court, anything to keep him from getting a felony on his record. In a nation that likes to see itself as forgiving, we are mulishly unforgiving of those who have committed a felony, which could be anything from selling drugs to street robberies to murder. A felony marks one for life. In some states you lose your right to vote. For certain felonies you can’t receive federal loans for college and
are barred from federally funded housing. You can’t legally buy a firearm. In many states you can’t get a license to become a realtor or stockbroker or nurse or teacher. You can’t work in child care. Potential employers can lawfully refuse employment if you have a felony on your record. It’s permanent. No one was arguing that Marcelo shouldn’t receive consequences for his robbery spree, but those around him asked, Should this singular moment constrict the rest of his life?
This is the second of sixteen court appearances Marcelo will make over the next two years. The first judge is replaced after becoming ill. An effort to transfer the case to juvenile court—Marcelo turned seventeen just five days before committing the crime—proves unsuccessful. Arguments over whether to reduce the offense to a misdemeanor charge are stymied by dogged prosecutors. For the next two years Marcelo will be on house arrest, an electronic bracelet cinched around his ankle, his movements restricted and tracked by the sheriff’s office. He’s allowed to go to school and to a job, when he has one, but he can’t visit his family on weekends. He can’t go to the store or out for dinner. He can’t take a walk. He can’t leave his third-floor suite at Mercy. He can’t play basketball in the gym or lift weights or eat lunch or dinner in the cafeteria.
On this day in court, Marcelo is dressed in a black shirt and black tie. His gray dress slacks, which are too long, gather in a pile of cloth on his shimmering black shoes, the ones he purchased for his junior prom. He’s also slipped on a pair of hip-looking rectangular reading glasses. “It makes me look like a good person,” he tells me before confiding, “I feel really funny in them.” He’s a creature of habit (he claims the same shower stall every day at Mercy), and so we sit in the back row of hard-backed wood benches, me on one side, Claire Conway, a program manager at Mercy, on the other. “I feel like we sat here last time,” he says. “We should sit here again.” His right leg pumping, he’s biting his fingernails. There’s so much movement, it’s almost like he’s exercising in place. Bob walks by, stops, places a hand on Marcelo’s shoulder, and asks, “Are you okay?”
An American Summer Page 20
