Redeeming Justice

by Jarrett Adams

  It takes a little time, but I get placed working in the kitchen as a waiter, an ironically fancy title meaning that I stand behind a counter and put milk cartons and juice boxes onto trays. I must be good at this because whoever’s in charge promotes me to food server. Three or four times a week, I sling lumpy hash, runny eggs, and unidentifiable globs of gruel onto plates. On mornings when I work breakfast, I get up at five. I don’t mind. Having a work pass gets me out of my cell. I soon move even further up the food chain. One day the guy running the kitchen tells me I’m being wasted as a server. He promotes me to chef. I think about how I used to help my grandmother cook our meals in the Big House. I’m back in another Big House, the one where you walk in and don’t leave for twenty-eight years. I would die of shame if my grandmother ever saw me inside these walls.

  * * *

  —

  Stay safe and stay sane.

  My mantra. My life’s goal.

  I work as a cook four times a week and alternate my rec time playing basketball with the younger guys, most with gang tattoos on their necks and faces, and playing chess with the older guys, most with long beards. I like that look, and because the razors the guards give us couldn’t cut paper, I decide to grow a beard of my own. My aunties continue sending letters and copies of Bible verses. One of them buys me a subscription to the Chicago Sun-Times, my hometown paper. Each issue arrives a day late, but I don’t care. I devour the paper, front to back, linger over the sports, following the Cubs, Bears, and Bulls, the only way I can tell when the seasons change. And I write my mother often. I don’t call. I can’t.

  The prison rotates cellmates. One day, the scowling, tatted-up hulk packs up his stuff and leaves. I sleep alone in the cell for one night, and the following morning my new cellmate painfully lumbers in. He’s tall, thick-bodied, and older, at least sixty, a white guy with thinning gray hair and a flabby paunch. He arrives with a companion, a portable oxygen tank. He breathes hard and coughs often. We nod to each other. We don’t speak. People call him Pops. Because my previous cellmate left, I’m entitled to the bottom bunk. But I look at Pops, his oxygen tank with its tubes, oxygen mask, and accompanying tray filled with medications, and I don’t see how he could make it up to the top bunk.

  “I got the top,” I say.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  Those five words constitute our entire verbal communication for the first two weeks.

  Partly, we don’t speak because we rarely see each other. I get up before five for my job in the kitchen. Pops runs the law library. While I’m celled up in the afternoons, he’s out. On the yard, during rec time, while I’m playing basketball, Pops, if he’s there, sits by himself and reads. At night, we both read on our bunks, or if I’m not reading, I listen on my headphones to the only radio station on my radio that plays rap. I love everything by 2Pac, especially his album Me Against the World. I identify with 2Pac—young, Black, disposable, and sent to prison on a rape allegation. Songs like “Me Against the World” and “Dear Mama” rip me up. He could have written them about me. After lights out, I see 2Pac’s lyrics before my eyes and I memorize every line. Then I try, desperately, to will myself to sleep. But between my anxiety and anger at being in here and Pops’s violent snoring, I seldom manage more than three hours of sleep and never in a row.

  * * *

  —

  One night, around ten, I sit up on my bunk, lost in a book. Suddenly the outside door buzzes. A cell door clanks open. Loud voices fill the hall. Footsteps thump toward us. I jump down and find Pops, reading on his bunk.

  “What’s going on? You got a visitor?”

  “No. They’re doing a cell search. Looking for weapons.”

  I panic.

  “They must’ve heard something,” he says.

  I have a weapon. Pops knows it. He’s seen it. I’ve stuffed two locks into a sock, a common weapon in here. I’ve never used it. I pray I never will. If the guards find my weapon, we will both go into the hole.

  I reach up to my bunk, shove my hand under my pillow, and grab the sock.

  “Give it here,” Pops says.

  “What?”

  “Give it to me.”

  I hesitate.

  “Come on.”

  I hand it to him just as two guards appear outside our cell door.

  Pops starts coughing, a sudden roaring death rattle of hacking. He makes his face flush red.

  A guard unlocks our cell door, flings it open with a clang.

  “What—what’s going on?” Pops says between coughs. “I was just getting ready to take my medication.”

  “We’ll make this quick,” the guard says.

  “You’re searching our cell? Are you serious? Why are you doing that? You know we don’t have anything in here. I’m an old man and he’s a kid.”

  The guards ignore him. They start rooting through our stuff, our sheets, our books, everything. Pops revs up his coughing, holds on to the cell bars for effect.

  “At least can I get some water?” He hacks up some fake phlegm. “I’m dying.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” a guard says, looking disgusted. “Go.”

  Pops clutches his oxygen tank, steers it out of our cell, and heads down the hall toward the nurse’s station. I realize then that he has hidden my weapon on the food tray he’s taken with him, stashed it among a balled-up paper bag and his medications. A moment later, I see him standing hunched over the nurse’s station, sipping water from a plastic cup.

  “Spread your arms,” a guard says to me.

  I do. He pats me down.

  “Do you speak?” the other guard says.

  I shrug.

  “He’s clean,” the first guard says. “Let’s move on.”

  “You know what’ll happen if you get caught with a weapon?” the second guard says up in my face.

  I shrug.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  * * *

  —

  August. Dog days. The heat stifles me. Pops, a large man, a sick man, suffers in the heat. He breathes abnormally. He pants. At night, his coughing jags increase.

  One day, while I’m playing hoop, the siren sounds, bleating a staccato, head-banging alarm. An order screams through the loudspeaker. Everyone, go back to your cell. Nobody hesitates. We go. The older guys scatter, abandoning their chessboards, leaving kings and castles in mid-battle. I return to my cell, find Pops hyperventilating in the brutal heat. He presses a plastic Hannibal Lecter mask over his face, sucking down oxygen.

  “Suffocating in here,” I say, splashing water from our sink on my face, under my arms. I start to climb up to my bunk. I look at Pops, in obvious discomfort, his chest heaving, and I say to myself, “Breathe, Pops, breathe.”

  We go on lockdown. Rumors fly. We hear that a guy slipped in a puddle of blood, running to his cell. We hear somebody got shanked up on the yard, took a knife between the ribs. We hear a rival gang selected a hit man to settle a score. Then we hear the truth. Some treacherous dude doing life, who was mopping the floor, got into a beef with a tier runner, a guy who passes out phones when you get a call. The dude with the mop went crazy on the tier runner, used the mop like a baseball bat, bludgeoned the tier runner, beating him over and over, knocking out his eye.

  The lockdown stays in place for three straight days, all of us going stir-crazy in the heat. The prison rocks with complaints, shouts, cups banging on bars. Then, gradually, a day at a time, guards let out those of us with jobs. One night, I hear that I have a phone call, and a tier runner passes me the phone through our trap in the bottom of the door. I answer the phone, hear my aunties’ voices patched together.

  They ask first about my health. I mumble something vague, then ask about my mother.

  “Why don’t you call her and ask her yourself?”

  “I know. I should. I will. I—”

&nbs
p; I stop.

  “What?”

  “It’s hard. I’m so ashamed. I feel like I hurt her so much.”

  “She’s strong,” Honey says.

  We both know that’s not true.

  “She just wants to know you’re all right,” Sugar says.

  Honey changes the subject. “What’s going on with your case?”

  “I’m waiting on appeal,” I say, and then I go into the best description of the case that I can, which sounds flimsy because I really don’t know much myself. As I speak, the frustration starts to grip me, and I blurt, “I got railroaded, you know that. I’m innocent. I would never…rape…anyone. Ever. That didn’t happen. If I had a lawyer like Rovaughn has, maybe things would be different. But this is so hard. Because it’s wrong.”

  I take a breath, then speak in a near whisper, my voice barely eking out. “I’ve been inside close to a year. I shouldn’t be in here at all.”

  “You can’t lose faith,” Honey says. “You have to keep praying.”

  “Read those scriptures I send you,” Sugar says. “They’ll help.”

  “I will. And thank you again for sending me the paper. That helps, too.”

  “We love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I say, and, trembling, I hang up.

  I turn toward the bunk and catch Pops looking at me. The nights have cooled, and his breathing has become more regular. I turn away. I climb up to my bunk and stare at the ceiling. I don’t feel like reading or listening to rap. I just want to sleep. No—I want more than that. I want to disappear.

  “You asleep?”

  Pops. Speaking to me. For the first time since he saved me during the cell search.

  “Nah. I’m awake.”

  “Come down off that bunk for a second.”

  I lean on my elbow, sit up, and then hop down. Pops moves to the far side of his bunk and pats the mattress next to him.

  “Sit down.”

  I do.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation you had with your family, and I have to tell you I’m confused.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m confused because I hear you on the phone talking about your innocence. Everybody in here says they’re innocent. But you plead your innocence. You shout it. You demand it.”

  He pauses.

  “I believe you,” he says.

  I stare at the floor.

  “You have a good family. They check on you. They send you mail. The paper. They care about you. You can tell.”

  I swallow.

  “And yet,” Pops says.

  He stops. I peek over at him, wanting him to keep going.

  “I see you out there playing basketball, playing chess, lifting weights. You act like you’re at some kind of camp. You don’t act innocent, like you want to do something about it. You act like you gave up. People who are innocent, they don’t wave a white flag. They don’t give up. They keep fighting. Especially if they have a case.”

  “I got a lawyer doing my appeal,” I say.

  “You had a lawyer who did your trial, didn’t you?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Let me see your stuff.”

  At first, I’m not sure what he means.

  “Your file,” he says. “Let me look at your paperwork. Let me see what’s going on in your case.”

  “Okay,” I say. I get my file and hand it to him. Pops takes it, turns the file over, and then squints at me.

  “This is untouched. You never opened it. You never looked at it.”

  I sniff. “Nah. I haven’t.”

  “Why not? I know you can read. You read all the time.”

  “Why do I need to read that for? It’s useless. I sat in that courtroom while they railroaded me. I don’t need to relive that.”

  “Let me read it,” Pops says quietly. “Maybe I can see something in there that might help you. Would that be okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That would be okay.” Then I swallow again and say, “Thank you.”

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, they lift the lockdown for the entire prison population. I go to my job working in the kitchen, come back, and find Pops sitting on his bunk, reading my file. I’m surprised to see him. He normally spends all day in the law library, returning to the cell late. Sometimes he doesn’t get back to our cell until everyone else has been locked away for the night.

  “Why you here?” I say. “What happened? You get fired or something?”

  He knows I’m messing with him and allows himself a brief smile.

  “Sit down, Jarrett,” he says.

  I sit next to him on his bunk. “Listen,” he says. “I’m going to be in here for the rest of my life for something I did. But you—”

  He slaps my file, startling me.

  “You’re in here for some racist crap. Period. No evidence at all. Guy out there, playing basketball with you, is serving ten years for murder. You pulled twenty-eight for this?”

  He slaps my folder again. I wince.

  “You are not taking this seriously. You have a case. Listen to me—”

  He pauses. He speaks so quietly I can barely hear him. A whisper. Hitting me harder than a scream.

  “Listen to me, son. Those guys out there. You don’t talk like them. You’re not like them. They’re lifers. They’re comfortable here. Their life is coming in, getting out, and coming back in. You keep staying out there with them it’s only a matter of time before you’re walking around with a teardrop tattoo under your eye and another tattoo crawling up your neck. You’re going to either end up like them, or you won’t make it in here.

  “Here,” Pops says. “Take this.”

  He hands me a pen insert and a notepad.

  “There are so many inconsistencies and holes and lies in your case. You need to start researching it yourself because nobody can tell your story the way you can. That’s what a case is. A story.”

  I’ve never heard that before. It seems real. It seems right.

  “Write this down,” he says. “I want you to go to the law library and look up a Supreme Court case, Strickland v. Washington. You got that? Write it down.”

  I scribble the name of the case on the notepad.

  “What is that case about?”

  “Ineffectiveness. Your lawyer failed to do his job. It’s ineffectiveness alone for him to make the decision to proceed to trial without giving you the option of joining in on the double-jeopardy motion.”

  He flips through my paperwork, stops at a page, waves his hand over a list of names.

  “See this?”

  I peer over his shoulder.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the witness list. Your lawyer didn’t call any witnesses. Why didn’t he call any witnesses?”

  I can only shrug.

  Pops jabs his finger at a name on the list. “Who’s this?”

  “Shawn Demain,” I say. “We hung around with him in his room. When the guys went upstairs, I stayed back with him and played video games. We all hung around with him later, too, you know, after—”

  “You hung around with him afterward?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The accuser, too? The girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  His eyes widen in shock. “Your lawyer needed to call him as a witness. He could establish that you had a friendly encounter with your accuser after the alleged fact, that you didn’t flee, none of that. This whole case has the prosecution painting you guys as these big Black boogeymen.”

  I say nothing.

  “Your lawyer botched this case,” Pops says.

  He hands me back my file.

  “Strickland v. Washington. Look up that case.”

  * * *

  —<
br />
  I fill out a pass for the law library the next day, but prison protocol keeps me from getting permission until two days after that. That day, I enter the library and find a small room, its four walls filled floor to ceiling with shelves bulging under law books. Fortunately, Pops keeps everything organized and alphabetized. I find Strickland v. Washington and settle in to read the case. I read it once, then read it again to make sure I’ve comprehended the basics; then I say aloud, “This is my case.”

  According to the Sixth Amendment, everyone who goes to trial is entitled to be represented by a competent lawyer. The Strickland case, heard before the Supreme Court in 1984, established a two-part test that defined ineffective counsel. It applies when counsel’s representation falls below an objective standard of competence or when counsel’s inadequate performance would have objectively resulted in a different outcome. In the Strickland case, David Washington’s lawyer failed to defend him properly. Specifically, he refused to call any witnesses.

  I close the law book, return it to its proper place, and practically sprint back to my cell. I find Pops reading on his bunk, cuddled up with his oxygen tank.

  “You hit it on the head,” I say. “Strickland v. Washington is about a lawyer’s failure to represent his client effectively. But I have a couple of questions. First of all, this is my case, right?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Yes. It is. I think so.”

  “I think you’re so excited you need to go back, read it again, break it down, take some notes, make sure. You’ll need another pass for the law library.”

  “What do you think I should do after I read it over?”

  “Write a letter to the attorney. Not yours. Not the lawyer off the court panel. He’s useless. He’ll drag that appeal out forever.”

  “Boyle,” I say. “Rovaughn’s attorney.”

  “Yes, him. Tell him what he missed. Tell him about the witness.”

  “I’m going to do that,” I say. “I’m going to get on this.”