How Long Will I Cry?

by Miles Harvey

  And there are certain decisions that have to be made by your client. Whether they want to plead guilty or not guilty, whether they want to be tried in front of a judge or a jury, whether or not they would like to testify on their own behalf, whether they would like to be considered to be found guilty on lesser charges, or if they want to go for all or nothing. Those are their decisions. So, many times I’ve advised people to plead guilty to a reduced charge or to a lesser sentence. You know, you have a young man who’s 15, 18, 19 years old, and you would think this is the guy you can sell something like 25 years to, because they’re gonna get out when they’re 40-something, and they’ll still have a life. And they say, “Fuck it. That’s like the rest of my life. I’ll roll with it; let’s go to trial.”

  I suppose there is a level of attention that they get by going to trial. There is this whole idea of: “Are these people actually going to come in and say this shit about me? Let’s see what my brother really does. Let’s see if he really comes in and testifies against me.” Or: “Let’s see if my fellow gang member will actually come in and testify against me.” Or: “Let’s see if these witnesses actually come in here and stare at me and say I did that.” And it usually happens. And the poor guy winds up getting 75 years after turning down something like 20. But at that point it doesn’t make any difference to them.

  The kids that I grew up with—we didn’t want to fight each other. We wanted to play baseball, and we wanted to play Frisbee football, and we wanted to ride our bikes. So it just wasn’t normal for us to always be engaged in some kind of fight. But it almost seems like that is the norm on conflict resolution now. There’s almost an expectation now that fighting is the way you deal with conflict.

  I think the violence comes from a lack of social skills, it comes from the inability to deal with conflict, and it comes from learned behavior. Unless you’ve got people who are providing some sort of structure for children, some sort of model on how to deal with conflict, they’re going to learn the wrong way to deal with it. I think that happens a lot. It is very intergenerational—learning the wrong ways to deal with conflicts.

  I had a case a few years ago, from the West Side. One of the guys got his teeth knocked out—he got beat up, jumped by these guys, got his teeth knocked out. So four months later, his buddies see the guy who they think was responsible. So they chase him down, stop him, broad daylight, summer afternoon—4 o’clock in the afternoon. They beat him with tire irons and a baseball bat, until he’s just lying there like mush. Six guys on one guy. You know, that kind of brutality, it’s just…there’s just too much rage.

  And obviously there are a lot more guns out there. I mean, they’re usually coming from other states and straw purchasers.33 My clients don’t tell me how they got their guns. I’ve got cases now where people were using AK-47s—allegedly. In the old days, I don’t remember any cases with machine guns. My perception is that there are more guns now than there used to be. There are a lot of gang guns, secreted in various areas, and everybody has access to them. I would say 20 to 30 percent of the firearms that show up in my cases have the serial numbers etched off of them. You know, there are a lot of states in this country where you can buy a lot of guns whenever you feel like it and those get into the supply stream and they wind up in the wrong places.

  I recently started working with some schoolchildren with the Constitutional Rights Foundation and the Lawyers in the Classroom Project. We did this exercise called “Martians from Space,” or something like that. The scenario is that these Martians come in from space and basically tell you that you can only keep 5 of your 10 constitutional guarantees within the Bill of Rights. So which ones are you willing to give up? Of course, I explain what the rights are and try to make them relevant to the kids, and then the kids talked about which five constitutional rights they’d want to keep. They all kind of caucus with each other, and I was stunned to find out that they thought that the most important right was the Second Amendment: the right to bear arms. I couldn’t believe it. I was speechless. I really was. The Second Amendment? I think it’s because they don’t feel safe.

  A few years ago, I represented a young man who was charged with two homicides. One was the involuntary manslaughter of his brother—they were playing Russian roulette and the gun jammed, so he struck it down onto the table to unjam it and it fired and went through his brother’s torso and severed a major artery. They lugged the kid in a car to the hospital and told the police that he’d been shot by rival gang members. Eventually the police investigated it and noticed the trail of blood coming from the house. They spoke to some of the other participants, who not only said that it was an accident but also implicated him in a shooting that had occurred five months before, of a rival gang member whom he had shot to avenge the death of one of his friends. So this poor kid, who was under 18 and basically raising himself on the streets and getting affirmation and reassurance and a sense of being from these gang members, gets charged with first-degree murder and also gets charged with involuntary manslaughter of his brother. At the sentencing hearing, the father of the victim—who had given a victim-impact statement aloud in court—shook my hand with this look of reassurance, like, “I’m not holding against you what you do for a living. I appreciate what you do for a living.” There really wasn’t a whole lot to say to him, you know? I said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” As a parent myself, it doesn’t matter if your son is a gang member who gets killed by another gang member. It’s still the death of your loved one, and it’s still a loss no matter how you look at it.

  Being a parent gives me a lot more perspective on my clients. I’ve represented parents as well as children who were charged with crimes, and that shows you the full cycle of things and how people get to be where they are. Why did this person turn out to be this person who goes around strangling and murdering women? You know? What happened in his life to make him this way? Well, maybe it was because his mother was a prostitute and would put him in the hallway when he was 3 ½ years old while she turned tricks, and maybe it’s because women never really paid attention to him and always neglected him, and maybe he’s angry because he never had a mother.

  There are a lot of aspects to how I do my parenting that have evolved after seeing what other kids have gone through. When I think about my own children, I think about some of the children that I’ve encountered during my years as a public defender and how they got to be my clients and what it was that was lacking in the parents who were supposed to be taking care to train, protect and discipline them.

  My clients—as they get older, especially if they’ve had a checkered past—they’ve had their mother come to court for them so many times, it gets to be to the point where the mom just can’t do it anymore. Or it becomes shameful—here is a grown man for whom a mother may have gone to juvenile court over and over, perhaps even sharing her frustration with the juvenile judge, saying: “I can’t control him.” A lot of parents will fess up to that: “I can’t control him; he’s supposed to be in bed at 11 o’clock, but at 2 o’clock in the morning, he’s running the streets with his buddies, hiding guns under the bed, bringing drugs into the house.” So parents get burned out, and a lot of parents stop coming to court. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times it’s almost like, friends of the bride, friends of the groom. On one side of the courtroom you’ll have all the cops, and the victims’ family, and the victim witness coordinator, holding the hands of the victim’s loved ones. But oftentimes, the defense side of the courtroom is empty, except for maybe a couple of people.

  The victims usually have a few more resources. If you’re unfortunate enough to have a loved one who was murdered, the prosecutor’s office has somebody who will inform you about the next court date. If you come to court, they will sit next to you in court and explain to you what’s going on, provide you with a lunch, perhaps even provide you with transportation expenses, give you reassuring hugs and things like that. I don’t really have anybody in my office that does that for the def
endant’s families. My office doesn’t have any social workers that will sit with my clients’ families and hold their hand.

  Losing a loved one is very difficult. It’s very easy to focus that anger on the person that’s been charged. It’s really difficult to try and overcome that—and I’ve seen it over and over again, where I’ve walked into the courtroom for trial and the friends of the victim—you’re getting the dagger eyes from them because they’re still not over it.

  The most fulfilling aspect of what I do is hearing the words “not guilty” from a jury. Somehow, it’s addictive, you know? Just hearing those words is intoxicating. I mean, that’s what makes me keep doing this. Even though I know I’ll hear “guilty” far more often. We’re just fierce competitors. It sounds kind of cruel for me to say this: Everybody thinks the law is a search for the truth, but that’s not what the law is. At some point, I don’t really care what happened. It’s about strategy, it’s about tactics, and it’s about skill and advocacy. Maybe the truth gets lost. I don’t know. But it’s not a search for the truth. As far as lawyers are concerned, it’s about whether the prosecution can meet its burden of proof. That’s what it’s about.

  There have been times when I wasn’t feeling very good about being a lawyer, and it took me a long time to have some kind of faith in the system again—that there is some redemption out there. Maybe there is a way to right wrongs. But if I had stopped being a lawyer after nine or ten years I would have never found that out.

  There have been a lot of people that have come in and out of my life. Right after my juvenile court years, I would sometimes walk into a grocery store and get: “Hey, you represented me,” or something like that. Some of my clients I really, really like, and it’s like: “Oh my God, how did we wind up here?” But others are just set in their ways, and they’re just not going to change. They’re just damaged. What I’ve realized—what I’ve come to learn—is that once someone is about 16 or 17 years old, it becomes really difficult to rehabilitate them. You really have to get them at a young age—to try and disabuse them from acting out. Because, after a certain age, they are basically goners.

  —Interviewed by Emily Ce Anderson

  Endnotes

  32 See Kevin Davis, Defending the Damned: Inside a Dark Corner of the Criminal Justice System (New York: Atria Books, 2007), 34. This book offers a compelling and insightful look into the Cook County Public Defender’s Office.

  33 According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a straw purchaser is an individual who buys guns for people who are legally prohibited from possessing a firearm or for individuals who do not want their name linked to the gun. Straw purchasing is an illegal firearm purchase and is a federal crime that can result in a felony conviction. People can serve up to 10 years in jail and incur fines of up to $250,000. For more information on Illinois gun laws, or gun laws in other states, see: http://smartgunlaws.org

  The Whole World Stopped

  AUDREY WRIGHT

  Audrey Wright is an unlikely—if forceful—advocate for violent ex-offenders. In 1998, she lost her 24-year-old son, Gordie, in a drive-by shooting. But instead of wallowing in hatred for young people who turn to violence, she decided to help them find better futures.

  The result is Gordie’s Foundation, a vocational-training program for ex-cons located in West Englewood, a South Side neighborhood where the rate of youth homicide is nearly five times higher than it is citywide.

  As this interview begins, Wright indicates that she is not feeling well and almost canceled our meeting. She seems impatient to get through the conversation, and keeps her coat and hat on as she recounts the traumatic story of her son’s death and the way she chose to deal with that loss.

  You just don’t give up on communities. You don’t just give up on young kids. You know? I don’t know what kind of heart people have when their kids get killed and they just go home and sit down. They don’t do nothing. They got to get up and say, “Let’s fight. Let’s stop some of this.”

  I have a 12,000-square-foot building that I train people in. I have about nine things in my building that I teach. I have carpentry, with weatherization. I have janitorial. I have the barber school. I have industrial sewing. I have embroidery and screen-printing, so ex-felons can get a job or open their own business. I have a city inspector, who teaches heating for me on Saturdays. Did you know that a heating and air guy that’s been taught by a city inspector can go out and start his own business in his own neighborhood? You see what I’m saying? He don’t have to worry about looking for work at McDonald’s and whether he got a record.

  Those are things that I do to help the community. We have a counselor. We can recommend some place to go if you are homeless. I have a young lady that always tries to put aside 13 beds for me. These are things that are important to people on the street.

  It was 1998 when my son got killed. When he walked out the door that night, he said, “Mama, I’m going to get me some cigarettes.” And I begged him, “Please don’t walk around that corner. You know how these people be.”

  He went out of my house at 15 minutes to 12. At 12:01, my son was shot. At 12:49, my son was dead. It was like the whole world stopped. And you know what he said to me before he walked out the door? He said, “Mama, you got to turn me loose because if God get ready for me, there ain’t nothing you can do.”

  I remember that, just like he said it yesterday: “If God get ready for me, nothing nobody can do. It’s my time to go.” And that’s what keeping me going. God was ready for him. And he had to go; I couldn’t stop it.

  No mother wants to lose a son by a stray bullet, by any kind of bullet. Twenty-four years old—your life is just beginning. That was the hardest thing for me to accept—his life was gone at 24. But when you sit back to look at it, he lived a life that a lot of young men didn’t live. We went to Denver, Colorado, and he did a movie with John Ritter.34 He did commercials with Gus, what’s his name, little white boy, Gus, what is his name? Anyway, he did commercials with him. He did commercials for macaroni and cheese. He was in a movie with Cicely Tyson.35 He did a lot of things in his life that a lot of children didn’t get a chance to do. And I said to myself, God blessed him. God blessed him to do some of the things an average black kid couldn’t do.

  It is just so sad to lose a child. You look to your son or your daughter to bury you, not for you to bury your child. When you bury your child, a part of your whole life is gone. You cry; you’re gonna cry. It’s not going to ever go away. So you have to wipe the tears and keep going to accomplish something. That’s the way I think.

  The day my son got killed, two mothers lost, not one. I lost and the boy that killed my son, his mother lost. Okay? I don’t have no hate in my heart. I just wanted that person that killed my son to be taken off the street and punished because he didn’t need to be on the street where he would kill somebody else’s child. Now my husband feels differently than I do, okay? But I’m my own person and I have to account to God.

  That’s why I put the school here in Englewood after he got killed. I decided to help stop some of the violence, to give young men, ex-felons, ex-drug addicts and handicapped people a trade. Take the guns out of their hands and put a trade into their hands.

  I reach out to help regardless of what kind of crime you did. I have a young man who was in the penitentiary for 25 years. And he’s working on a newspaper. I put my head out on the block for him. You know why? Because he was sincere.

  The person that called me said, “Miss Wright, do you recommend him?”

  I said, “Yes, I do recommend him. If he don’t do what you say, give me a call.” He’s been there over two years now. Those are things that I’m proud of because I’ve helped somebody. They can come to me and ask for help. I’m their mother, I’m their father, their brother and their sister because I leave my door open for them to come in.

  Everyone asks me, aren’t you afraid to be around all them killers and rapists? No. They human just like I am. They did something wr
ong, okay? They realized they done wrong. They ready to change. How come I can’t give them the chance to change? We have to give another human being a chance to change. And if you don’t give them a chance to change, they back out there killing again.

  And I got backup behind me. It’s like a safe haven here. I’ve never been broken into. I’ve never had big problems. They know not to come down here and mess it up. Now who put it out there I don’t know and don’t care, but I appreciate that because they say that Miss Audrey is the only thing we got to help us. Some of those same guys, I can call them up right now, and they come to the rescue. You know why? Because I changed their life.

  A lot of these young men, they keep me on my knees, praying all the time. Right now, when they come through my building, they say, “Miss Wright, I might not live to 25.” That’s sad. We as parents, we don’t fight hard enough to keep our children here. Do you think if you had a son he would come and tell you that the gangs want him? Let me say this. Open up your eyes and listen to what I’m saying. Open up your ears. The gangbangers on the street tell a boy, “You gonna do what we say or we’re gonna do something to you and your whole family.” That young man be scared that something gonna happen to him and his whole family. It has happened. We’re losing our babies now. The gangs don’t care who they kill. They shooting up in the house, shooting up in the yard, shooting everywhere, they don’t care.

  I’ve seen so much, where they got empty houses behind the buildings. Tricks go down there, and the summertime I used to sit in my lot and I’d call the police because the little kids coming though there, walking through the alley going to school. They seeing this, they’ve been exposed to these things when they 5 and 6 and 7 years old. Then the gangs drive by, boom, boom, boom. This is what needs to be stopped. And we got to come together. If you got a strong group, you can stop them. If we start weaving ourselves together like a basket, you can’t get through it. You can stop them. You can stop them. We can help our own communities.