Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption

by Hopwood, Shon

  Ford came up to me in the kitchen about a week after the game. His big mitt landed on my shoulder and he said he was sorry about that. How was my back? My back would, in fact, never be quite the same, but I told him it was not a big deal. He said that was good, because he might need my help in the law library with something. I said I’d be happy to help him. That much was true. I had started to enjoy the challenge of helping guys figure out how to research their cases. I even fantasized that maybe, when I got out, if I ever did, I could work in a library somewhere or even become a paralegal in some clinic that would be desperate enough not to check my past. It could happen.

  “I want to talk to my lawyer,” Ford said when he came into the library a few days later. I was way back in the stacks, but I recognized his voice. I enjoyed his company, and having a few black friends made me feel more normal, like the times back in the Navy and in the happy days of bank jobs. It also set me apart as someone a little different in prison, and I think I wanted that. It was sometimes risky to walk that line, but that was where I always liked to walk.

  He would be about the last guy I helped before a bolt of lightning came down from the Supreme Court and caused nearly everyone in Pekin to almost wet their pants with excitement.

  The bank of phones was at one end of the dayroom. You could hang out on the balcony rail next to them and overhear entertaining conversations if you were that bored, which was a given.

  “No, baby, that’s not what … You know I … No, baby, I’m just … You know I got to …” and on and on in long blues ballads. Most calls were made in the evening after chow. “She don’t mean nothing, baby. I don’t know why she come to visit; you know I love you best, baby.”

  The charges for the calls came off your account. The cost was three dollars for a 15-minute call. Somewhere, someone is becoming rich off the families of prisoners.

  For me it was worth the ten hours of work it took to hear fifteen minutes from home. Those voices were a reminder that there was a life outside the walls. I would have called every night if I had the money.

  The law library in Pekin was a sleepy place. A few regulars would amble in, check out one book each, and hand me their ID. I would make a note on the book register. When they came back, I reversed the process and shelved the book. There was an abundance of time to read between tasks.

  Although the U.S. Supreme Court hands down decisions that affect large numbers of people, rarely does the Court issue a ruling that brings about a systemwide change in the criminal justice system. But that happened on June 26, 2000. In a case argued by Solicitor General Seth Waxman, the Court issued a decision declaring that the famous Miranda warnings are part of our constitutional heritage. Somewhat unnoticed was the other case announced that day, the decision that would more immediately rock the prison world: Apprendi v. New Jersey.

  Ryan and I conducted some preliminary research and requested that the library staff make extra copies of the case for prisoners to check out. Ryan and a black jailhouse lawyer named Stix held an impromptu meeting of the other dozen or so jailhouse lawyers. We huddled with yellow legal pads and pens at a wooden table for a briefing. Ryan took the lead.

  “You know how guys take a plea deal to a lesser crime, thinking they will avoid doing time for the worse crime, only to see the judge sentence them to the bigger crime’s penalty anyway?” he said.

  Yeah, we all knew that one. It had arguably happened to me.

  “Or when a guy is convicted of distributing fifty grams of cocaine, but then the judge sentences him based on five pounds?” I said.

  That was a common occurrence in the federal system.

  “Well, they can’t do that no more,” Ryan said. “So we’re going to see everybody and his uncle coming in here trying to figure out if they can get their sentences reduced. It’s going to be a freakin’ zoo.”

  The decision indeed filled the law libraries of America’s prisons with interested customers; we went from serving a small handful of men each day to serving forty or fifty. Guys were asking questions and almost fighting over the same few books and printouts of the decision. To accommodate the rush, we started opening on Sundays.

  In Apprendi the Supreme Court ruled that judges were wrong to add harsher sentences based on facts not proven to a jury or confessed in court. In plea deals, prosecutors had been charging a person with lesser crimes to speed things along, but then after the conviction they were asking judges to sentence the person based on the suspected but unproven additional crimes—just as if that person had been convicted of the greater crime instead of taking the plea deal. Sometimes the facts of additional crimes were clear, but oftentimes they were hazy and based on the hearsay of drug addicts trying to obtain sentence reductions by implicating others.

  To put it in a different context, imagine being convicted at trial of possessing one kilo of cocaine, only to have a judge, rather than the jury, find afterward that while you were dealing drugs you shot and killed someone. Then the judge sentences you to life for the murder. With such practices in place, juries were reduced to little more than gatekeepers, and sentences had but a slight correlation to the convictions. The Supreme Court said that kind of sleight-of-hand maneuver was now unacceptable, as should have been obvious.

  The same reasoning also applied to plea deals. In my situation, bank robbery is a separate charge from armed bank robbery. My plea deal listed the crime as unarmed bank robbery. The judge, however, knowing I possessed a gun during the robberies, sentenced me for armed bank robbery anyway. Naturally, I believed the Apprendi decision applied to my situation.

  I’m sure some would see this as a technicality, but the prosecution had not charged me with armed robbery, so I should have been sentenced based on the crime they had charged me with and what I had pled guilty to. It was that simple. At least, that was my analysis of how Apprendi applied to me. Not pursuing it would be like not taking a tax deduction to which you were technically entitled.

  I began to research cases in piles of dusty books. Could I knock a couple of years off my sentence? I had no idea, but like the Tim Robbins character in The Shawshank Redemption, I suddenly felt like I was digging a tunnel to freedom. My tunnel ran paragraph by paragraph through the law library. The more I dug, the more I believed a sentence reduction was almost certain.

  I soaked up everything I could find about the history of our right to a jury trial and our rights more generally. The First Amendment acknowledges our natural right to free speech, to a free press, and to free religious practice. It is therefore considered the flagship American right. But the right to a jury trial is not far behind. It is the only right established both in the body of the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights.

  In addition to the right to a jury trial, I studied the body of law known as habeas corpus, which is incorporated into our Constitution from an old English right, and is essentially the right to be heard by a court if you believe you are being held in violation of the law. Habeas corpus is a Latin phrase meaning “you have the body.” Translated further: the prison warden has a real person in custody who must now be brought before a judge who will rule if there is legal justification for continued imprisonment.

  Habeas law is widely regarded as impossibly difficult and has defeated many attorneys and countless jailhouse lawyers. But I was making sense of it. I was never one for Dungeons & Dragons, but I think it must be like habeas law: complex and full of trapdoors and instant death if you make a wrong turn.

  In any case, I had nothing to lose and freedom to gain.

  We had no computers in the law library, no access to the legal databases like Westlaw or LexisNexis that everybody in the free world was using. So I had to go from book to book, tracing cases back and forth, taking volumes of notes. A computer search would have given me a list of pertinent cases, but without that I had to read everything. That is harder by far, but you end up learning a lot more. I was forced to remember cases because making copies of everything was too expensive. Keeping cases in your h
ead is good, too, because cases are like puzzle pieces floating around in your mind, and sometimes, in moments of creativity, they fall into place and form a picture. If they were words on a screen that you could pull up anytime you wished, that phenomenon wouldn’t happen as easily.

  Every guy in Pekin thought he had a case for resentencing, and the issue kept getting bigger; there were rumblings that the entire Federal Sentencing Guidelines were called into question by the Apprendi decision. The library remained hectic for several months. Similar claims for resentencing were constantly arising so, like a coach running plays from a well-worn playbook, I was churning out similar drafts for several people at a time. I had devised my own legal research methods and was becoming expert at finding relevant case law and seeing arguments where other people, including the inmates’ real lawyers, sometimes hadn’t. What had started as a solo mission to help myself had now brought me, really for the first time in my life, into a situation where I was helping others and enjoying it.

  The Apprendi decision was a morale booster for everyone, as if we were all planning a big prison break.

  The more advice I gave in the prison library, the more guys throughout Pekin became aware that I could help them. Vic, a Chicago Italian, was the best of the prison gourmet chefs. He used his food to obtain what he wanted. He wanted legal work from me.

  “Shon, good friend, how are you doing with my case? Listen, do you like a marinara better, or maybe an alfredo for your linguini with roasted peppers?” He came bearing a wooden spoon in his hand to make the food seem imminent—something to stir around in the air when he spoke, as Italian cooks like to do.

  He answered for me.

  “Maybe the alfredo. The alfredo with nice peppers.” Then he left. I hadn’t responded at all, but when he was gone I moved his file up to the top. Such is life.

  Some of the motions were gaining traction, but my own was dead. The judge who sentenced me said that since my case had been long settled and closed, the Apprendi decision did not apply, and even if it did apply to my case, it didn’t apply to the sentencing guidelines. I was devastated. No matter how much I wanted to stop myself, I had already started some preliminary calculations of a possible sentence reduction. Thoughts of Christmas with my family in a couple of years, of eating steak again and smelling fresh Nebraska air, seemed realistic. The judge’s denial meant I still had to serve eight more years—an eternity.

  The judge, by the way, was partially right. Apprendi did not apply to my case because it had long been final. But he was wrong about the application of Apprendi to the guidelines, as the Supreme Court held a few years later.

  The resentencing process was working best for guys who still had some kind of appeal in the works. I tried to forget my own disappointment by burying myself in the cases of people who had a higher probability of success.

  I started guarding my private time in my cell, sending away visitors so I could work on cases. It made me unpopular. Some thought I was becoming unfriendly because I didn’t want to discuss the latest prison gossip anymore.

  My new cellmate, Robby, was a few years older than I was by birth and fifteen years older by appearance. He had been ravaged by intravenous meth use. His teeth looked like he gargled espresso for mouthwash, and his hair was patchy—what remained of it hung in long strands. Although he had started his sentence with a few tattoos, he was soon sleeved out—meaning you couldn’t fit one more tattoo on his arms.

  But Robby was the classic case of why you shouldn’t judge a crook by his cover. For the five years we were cellies, he was my loyal friend and bouncer, keeping visitors away when I was deep in legal books or writing briefs.

  “Hey, look, ol’ Shon there is pretty busy,” he would say. “Maybe we should let him have some quiet.” He said that maybe a few thousand times, giving me his jack-o’-lantern smile after each visitor was dispatched. I would look up from my books to see it. It was, all things considered, a great smile.

  I needed peace because, in addition to working on the appeals, I was enrolled in correspondence courses at Illinois Central College and Ohio University, and legal courses at Kaplan. I realized that if I wanted a career as a paralegal, a college degree was a necessity. For the first time in my life I applied myself academically. It turns out that school is not so difficult if you actually read the textbooks, but who knew?

  It’s not easy to take courses from prison. Even when I did it through correspondence, professors simply couldn’t comprehend the logistics—some seemed to assume I had a large research library at my disposal. And the prison staff members are not exactly helpful. Fortunately for me, a lady at the education department, Angie, volunteered to proctor my exams. Without her it simply would not have worked.

  My parents were pleased that I was taking college courses and that I was excited about something, anything. It was a time of change for them, too, as their nest was slowly emptying.

  Something happened to my brother Brook in those years. He was on track to finish his undergraduate degree when he started behaving very oddly. First, he started isolating himself even from his best friend and girlfriend, and then he accused them of sleeping together and plotting against him. A few weeks later he had a nervous breakdown. The doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, and he was institutionalized in a state facility for a time.

  It wasn’t an easy time for Brett either. He finished his high school education and was a free man again, but it’s difficult to break into any decent field without a college education and with a rough juvenile past. So he moved around from telemarketer to telemarketer. He was good enough at selling things that he never stayed unemployed, but he longed for something better.

  Mom was earning promotions at work, and she began spending more time with the boss’s daughter, Ann Marie, who was now out of college and setting up a human nutrition product line for her father. She was also helping produce KV’s big catalog.

  In one of our weekly phone conversations, Mom told me that I should try to find a nice girl like Ann Marie someday. Sure thing, I said. Sometimes I let Mom be in her dreamworld. But it was encouraging that she thought wonderful things were still possible for me.

  My work with the law provided a mental escape. But escape always comes with a price. I needed to remain grounded in who I was and where I was, because if you become disconnected from that, if you are off in a cloud somewhere thinking you are a young lawyer or a college student, and that the prison life is some inconvenience that doesn’t really define who and where you are, you will become sloppy. You will let your guard down. You will forget the rules. And you will get hurt. Your friends will drift away, and they won’t be there when you need them.

  Fortunately, Robby and Bobbie kept bringing me back to who I was and where I was and who my friends were. Those two were as different as could be, but they were together in their enthusiastic friendship for me. You can’t imagine how much that counts in such a place.

  “Tell the truth, did you piss your pants during the first robbery?” Robby asked.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Well, you may not have soaked your britches, but I bet you wet ’em just a bit,” Robby said.

  Bobbie thought that was funny.

  “Seriously, tell us how you managed to pull off the first job,” Robby said.

  “We just went in and took the money.”

  “Really!” he said. He was sitting on the top bunk, his legs swinging. “I guess I was thinking it was a bit more complicated than that. Now I’m wondering why more people don’t do it. I’m going to write my mother and tell her how she can get a little extra money every week. Just go in and take the money. I guess most people think you need a gun and a plan and a getaway car and all that.”

  “You really want the story?”

  “Just tell us,” Bobbie said, trying to gangster the conversation. “What kind of gun, at least?”

  “Rifle on the first one. A nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson on the others.”

  “Nice.
Black?”

  “Of course.”

  “You really can’t go wrong with black,” Robby said. “Was it just you? How much did you get?”

  So I described that first day when Tom and I went driving north to find a likely bank to rob. They inhaled every detail.

  After Tom and I preselected the bank in Petersburg, we found an abandoned farm just outside town where we could stash a stolen car taken from another town. That car would be used only to drive the couple of miles to the bank and back to the abandoned farm, where we would stash a big grain truck. The truck would be borrowed from Tom’s father’s farm, which was not far away. The grain truck would be our second getaway vehicle, one that the police would never suspect. That would get us back to Tom’s dad’s farm, where our own car would be stashed for use when everything had cooled off. That was the plan. If it didn’t end with us shot up and making our getaway, or if the abandoned farm didn’t become some Butch and Sundance last scene, we would be okay.

  We drove around until we knew just how we would do it. We even picked up some brochures from Wayne State so that if we were pulled over we could say we were just out looking for a college to attend.

  After we scoped all that out, we went home to David City for a few weeks. Our next move was for Tom to go back alone. He walked into the bank and asked about opening an account and storing some insurance policies in a safety-deposit box. They showed him the vault. On the way home he pulled over and drew a rough sketch of the bank. We let time pass so they would forget about him.

  As the planned robbery date approached, both of us were wondering if we would really go through with it. Sometimes we had doubts and sometimes we were sure we would do it. Our minds, our realities, were on two tracks, and it wasn’t clear which track would win out.