Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  12 OCTOBER 2007

  Dear District Attorney Leone:

  I’m writing to implore you to personally intervene in the case of Damion Smith, now scheduled to be tried in Cambridge District Court on October 24th. I am writing as the father of Damion’s girlfriend, and the grandfather of his son, born in early August. Obviously I have an interest in Damion’s remaining out of jail, for my daughter’s sake, her baby’s, and Damion’s as well. I also think I can offer some perspective on this young man and his situation.

  Damion has won me over during the past year or so. No doubt you can imagine my initial skepticism, indeed my resistance. I did not know Damion when my daughter, a junior in the Boston College nursing program, announced that she was pregnant. Perhaps understandably, I was extremely wary of him. Since then, however, I have had occasion to spend time with him on nearly a daily basis, and I see him as a young man who drifted off course and suffered near disastrous consequences. As you are doubtless aware, Damion has served time in federal prison for an offense that occurred during the same very short time period as that for which he is now charged.

  During that short time period, Damion was trying to make enough money to return to school. He was studying business and wanted to obtain his contractor’s license. He had completed one year of a two year community college program, but he ran out of money, and like a lot of young men succumbed to the allure of some quick cash.

  Since his release, Damion has been trying to make things somehow come out right. I am impressed with his sensitivity, his thoughtfulness, his warmth and sense of humor. He is a doting father and a committed, deeply loving partner to my daughter. He has become a member of our family, and I am willing to help him in any way I can.

  Like many other young men I encounter (my son is twenty-three, and I teach at Emerson College,) Damion sometimes seems a little lost in dealing with the complex realities of today’s world and fitting into it, and he needs mentoring, coaching, and advice. I am convinced that he sees a different path opening up for him now, and although he knows that it will not be easy (already he has encountered the trouble finding work that a CORI check, not to mention an open case, almost ensures,) he is committed to never repeating his past mistakes. More than that, he has embraced fatherhood with real joy and a genuine commitment to be an active, loving father to his infant son. He walks the floors with him at night, he feeds him from a bottle so my daughter can study, he reads to him, sings to him, changes his diapers, soothes him. It is a joy for me, as a grandfather, to see. He has taken the initiative to become a member of the Carpenter’s Union Apprenticeship Program, and he is actively visiting work sites, speaking with shop stewards and supervisors, looking for his opportunity.

  Damion is a young man who exercised decidedly bad judgment, paid the consequences, and has grown up a great deal since the offense for which he is now charged. That offense took place before his incarceration in the Federal system. Upon his release, those charges, which had been nol prossed, were reinstated. I do not know why, but I suspect that the purpose was to ensure public safety since, after all, the charges included gun possession. However, this young man, who has made his time in prison into exactly what we all hope for, and has demonstrated his willingness, his eagerness, to transform himself, is no threat to public safety.

  Please allow me to put my remarks here in a broader context. I have been a victim advocate for more than a decade now, since the publication of my first book led to the arrest of a serial child molester. I have been and continue to be outspoken about violence against women and children and the brutalizing effects of the socialization of boys. Until recently I served on the steering committee of the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence, and I am a member of the Men’s Initiative for Jane Doe. I have been nominated for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center’s Champion of Change award. I have keynoted Attorney Generals’ conferences in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I mention these things so you will understand that I take issues of crime and safety extremely seriously.

  That said, I cannot see how anyone is served by incarcerating this young man for something he did nearly three years ago, in what was truly a former life. There are no victims, yet, in this case; no one is crying out for redress. This is an old offense that harmed no one. I cannot see how taking a newborn’s father from him will further anything resembling justice, and I expect that, in addition to creating victims where there are none, it would make of this young man of renewed promise an utterly discouraged person. He has been doing everything he possibly can to demonstrate that he is no longer the young man who exercised such poor judgment two and a half years ago. Please, I am begging you, do not allow this young person’s efforts to be for nothing; please do not allow him to be thrown away.

  One year from now the Commonwealth could be home to a new household of productive taxpaying parents, headed by a union carpenter and a registered nurse. Or the Commonwealth could break up a young family, separate a parent and child, and incur the considerable expense of incarcerating a young man who, under some financial duress, made a wrong turn nearly three years ago.

  You will receive letters from other members of my family as well. We are asking that mandatory minimum sentences not be sought in Damion’s case. I can assure that you would never regret such an action. Damion has been in complete compliance with supervision after his time in prison (I have spoken to his Federal Probation Officer who thinks highly of him) and we are asking that the Commonwealth be satisfied to place him under stringent supervision for a length of time that would allow him to demonstrate that he is a contributing, law-abiding citizen.

  Should you have any wish to talk further about this matter, please don’t hesitate to call me.

  Richard Hoffman

  The guards are pouring toward me, taking their car keys from their pockets, calling out to one another, looking tired and glad their shift is over, just like workers leaving an auto plant or a steel mill. I am reflecting, with growing anxiety, on what, driving here, I have been coming to understand as the part I played in the way events unfolded. The story I have been telling myself, of the magnanimous and wronged Samaritan, has begun to unravel.

  A guard knocks on my window, startling me. I fumble a moment, panicky, put my key back in the ignition, and turn the car on to lower the window. He points across my windshield, “Just a reminder. Your inspection expires this month.”

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” I’m trying to decide if he’s being friendly or officious. Then he smiles. “Mine ran out last month. I weren’t paying attention and got a ticket. Okay. Take care!”

  “You, too. Thanks.”

  Not too long after I sent that letter, Damion and Veronica began fighting. At first we thought it was just the pressure of living with us in the crowded house we were all finding stressful. Kathi and I both tried to assure them we understood, having lived with Kathi’s parents for a year. But there were other things going on, just as there were when we lived with Kathi’s parents. One fight had to do with the image of a naked woman Veronica glimpsed on Damion’s cell phone. She found it insulting; he felt he had a right to it. I thought about all I would risk as a boy for another glimpse of the goddess of the triangular pillow. What seems clear to me was that Damion was feeling trapped by the routine, caged by the tight space, awkwardly trying to live in someone else’s household, and chafing at his lack of access to other friends. For a young man, probably even more so for one who has been to prison, being incarcerated with loved ones is still being incarcerated. And, of course, hanging over him always was the prospect of returning to prison. How could he afford to give Veronica his heart under such circumstances? And how could she fully give hers? They both loved their infant son; no protecting oneself from the pain of that attachment.

  Damion started going out evenings, coming home late. One night in early December, Damion came down the stairs and put on his coat. Before I could greet him he turned and went out. Veronica followed close behind. “Daddy, t
alk to him. He listens to you!” I put on my coat, caught up with him at the end of the block. It was the coldest night so far that winter. “You want company?” I asked him. I don’t know what I would have said next if he’d said no. He shrugged. “Yeah. Sure.” We walked. I didn’t ask where we were going; we just walked the avenue. I tried to convey that I understood, although I didn’t, only thought I did. I talked to him about postpartum, about how hard it can be for a woman in the weeks and months after giving birth. Besides being a mother, Veronica was working part time and going to school full time. It put a lot of responsibility on Damion. I said we understood this and that we admired him for it. I said I understood what it’s like to be a new father living in a household in which you have no standing, where nothing is yours, and you have no say in even simple daily decisions. I promised him things would get better. I hugged him. “Don’t walk away from this,” I said. “You can make this work. Don’t walk away.”

  “I have to think.”

  “Well, I’m going back. I’m freezing my ass off out here. You coming?”

  “I have to think. You go ahead.”

  He came back hours later, in the dead of night; he was there to take over his shift with the baby in the morning when Veronica left for school.

  By Christmas he was no longer living with us. The official story was that he and Veronica were trying to sort things out while Damion lived with his aunt. In fact, it seems now that he had a number of places he could sleep, none of them alone. He continued to work out child-care arrangements with Veronica so she could study.

  One night Damion came to the house to bring back baby D and Veronica saw a young woman sitting in the passenger seat of his car, playing with the baby, tickling him. She roared down the stairs and let him feel the fullness of her rage at his betrayal. “He’s my son! He is not for you to show off to your girlfriends! He’s my son! He’s not a puppy!” The baby was wailing. Kathi, Robert, and I were all there in the small front hallway. Veronica continued to rage at him.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Damion kept saying. “Veronica, you’ve got this all wrong.” But it didn’t matter to her who the woman in the car was; she knew, and it twisted her guts to know, that there were other women. She took the baby upstairs, soothing him.

  Damion looked around at us, his expression saying, “See? How can I reason with her when she’s like this?” He sighed and shook his head. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my cousin.”

  When no one spoke, he left.

  All through this time, we continued our efforts to convince the DA to drop the old charges, or at least make a deal that did not include returning to prison. I spoke to our state representative, and I wrote to the governor with whom I had recently shared the dais at a White Ribbon Day event opposing domestic violence. A friend who knew the DA personally agreed to pay him a visit and talk with him about the case.

  The weeks and months passed and nothing seemed to be working. I decided to write an op-ed. I had been published in the opinion pages of the Boston Globe twice before, and I was serving on the board of a nonprofit with one of its former editors, so I felt I might have some access. It all seemed to me to be about access. Because Damion was politically inconsequential, he was disposable, like hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class people, especially young black men.

  Rereading the piece I sent to the paper, I see that it was more than an appeal; I was attempting to shame the DA into changing his mind. I didn’t allow myself to see this at the time. I was convinced I had the moral high ground and that the tone of the piece was right.

  I wrote that a grave injustice was about to be done in the name of justice, that an old and victimless crime was about to claim its first victim, a six-month-old baby boy who would be separated from his father. “He is, after all, a black boy. Maybe he needs to get used to it, prison, as a feature of his life. Statistics suggest this is so. But neither he nor his father are statistics, they are the latest victims of institutionalized racism. If this trial occurs, this costly and senseless prosecution, then our judicial bureaucracy is even more out of control than anyone thought.”

  Instead, and wisely, the Globe gave the story to one of its columnists, Adrian Walker, who met with Damion and me. I’d shown Damion the piece I wrote. He didn’t like it, didn’t like seeing himself as a victim.

  Another friend of mine put me in touch with the best defense attorney in Massachusetts, who agreed, as a favor to our mutual friend, to work for half his usual retainer. Even this reduced fee was a hardship for us, and Kathi was angry that she was not consulted. Things felt to me that they were moving and moving fast, and the fact that I did not slow them down long enough to confer with her was a mistake, not only because that was our agreement about spending any large sums of money, but because something had begun to creep back into my behavior that I should have seen and understood. It is true that I wanted Veronica and Damion to have a decent chance to make a family, but it was also true that I was getting caught up in the battle, sending e-mails, making phone calls, meeting with the defense attorney, talking to anyone who might have any leverage. I had decided it was a matter of principle: Damion would have all the advocacy a middle-class, well-connected white kid would have. But it was also, although I mostly hid this from myself, my exercising whatever social and political muscles I had built up by virtue of crossing the class line, of “moving up.” It was my need to prove I was just as good as them. As I said, other things had kicked in, including the old male mythology about battling injustice on behalf of the underdog.

  Walker’s column ran the following Tuesday. It was strong but more politic than mine. A couple of days later, the district attorney responded with a letter to the editorial page. He took issue with the way Walker had framed the case and restated the charges in such a way that they suggested Damion was incorrigible.

  District attorneys never, ever write letters to newspapers. They prefer to do their arguing in court, not in the media. I thought this was evidence of progress. It meant we were getting to him. I failed to see, even then, that I had changed the game from a considered appeal to his sense of fair play to a public assault on his integrity. I was too full of myself, wedded to the myth, to understand that by hiring the DA’s arch nemesis, bringing pressure to bear from the statehouse, the governor’s office, and the media (I had spoken to reporters at three TV stations, as well), I had not only changed the tone, I had challenged him, I had called him out. I believed I had outgrown this kind of aggressive taunting, and that I had only the welfare of my family at heart. Who could blame me? I was the good guy.

  I was the fool. I was so certain I was right that, whether or not I was right, I was wrong. I had been giving myself a free pass, a vacation from self-examination, beginning even before I hired the defense attorney without consulting Kathi. When Veronica and Damion and D were living together in their own house, a family, without the threat of incarceration or, worse, the separation of a prison sentence, everyone would agree it had all been worth it. People might even remark how I had risen to the occasion, found, gathered, and deployed resources like a field general, and won one for the little guy. I would demur: “What else could I do?” As I said, a fool. I want to insist that I was a well-intentioned fool, but what other kind is there? An ill-intentioned fool is no fool at all but a villain.

  Soon after that, the defense attorney informed me that the trial had been moved forward to May. He insisted that he hadn’t done this so that I would have more time to agitate on Damion’s behalf. He repeated this twice on the phone, and I took it as a wink and a nudge. The crusade continued.

  Then one night, at the kitchen table, the baby asleep upstairs, Veronica told us something she had withheld from us for months, that Damion kept a handgun in the glove box of his car. She’d kept this information from us probably because the potential cascade from this revelation could destroy what was left of her dream of making a family. Love blinds us to good sense, but that night she was angry enough not to care
.

  “So he’s driving around with the baby in the car seat and a loaded gun in the glove box? That’s outrageous!” Kathi said. She was the one who, later, came up with the sensible and respectful idea that Damion could visit D here, or we would bring D to his mother’s house, but under no circumstances could he be allowed to take the child anywhere on his own.

  The next evening Damion came by to pick up D. As I heard his key in the front door, Veronica shouted down the stairs, “Don’t you let him in here! Tell him to go away! I don’t want him here!” She’d been upstairs crying, Kathi comforting her.

  As the door opened, I blocked his entry. He looked up, surprised. “What’s up?”

  “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Yeah. I know.” He held up his cell phone. “She’s mad. I just come by to get D.”

  Robert had turned off the TV and taken up a position behind me with his arms crossed.

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said.

  “I don’t understand. What’s going on here?”

  “What’s going on is you driving around with my grandson in the back of your car and a gun in the front, that’s what’s going on. And that is not happening again, ever.”

  Veronica and Kathi came halfway down and sat on the stairs, Veronica nursing the baby. Damion could see all of us now, aligned against him. He raised his hands in front of him, palms out, fingers spread, as if to say, “Whoa. Hold on a minute.” I would rather not have seen the look in his tearing eyes then, and I hope to never have to see it again. “Can we talk about this? Sit down and talk about it?”

  “No. There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Go,” I said. “You’re no longer welcome here.”

  That afternoon I had e-mailed the defense attorney and told him we would no longer pay for him to represent Damion. I had written that I no longer believed that he had been truthful with us, and that I believed he had lied to us about a number of things, including having a gun in our house. I told him about the gun in the glove box.