When I visited her, she would hug me so tightly I could barely breathe. After a little while, she would ask me, “Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?” If I said yes, she’d let me be; if I said no, she would assault me again. I said no a lot because it made me happy to be wrapped in her formidable arms. She never tired of pulling me to her.
“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,” she told me all the time.
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One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities. By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military.
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“It’s been a very strange day, Bryan, really strange. Most people who feel fine don’t get to think all day about this being their last day alive with certainty that they will be killed. It’s different than being in Vietnam … much stranger.”
He nodded at all the officers who were milling about nervously. “It’s been strange for them, too.
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“All day long people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ When I woke up this morning, they kept coming to me, ‘Can we get you some breakfast?’ At midday they came to me, ‘Can we get you some lunch?’ All day long, ‘What can we do to help you?’ This evening, ‘What do you want for your meal, how can we help you?’ ‘Do you need stamps for your letters?’ ‘Do you want water?’ ‘Do you want coffee?’ ‘Can we get you the phone?’ ‘How can we help you?’ ”
Herbert sighed and looked away.
“It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.” He looked at me, and his face twisted in confusion.
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Most of the juvenile lifer cases we handled involved clients who shared Evan’s confusion about their adolescent behavior. Many had matured into adults who were much more thoughtful and reflective; they were now capable of making responsible and appropriate decisions. Almost all of the cases involved condemned people marked by the tragic irony that they were now nothing like the confused children who had committed a violent crime; they had all changed in some significant way.
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In preparing litigation on behalf of the children we were representing, it was clear that these shocking and senseless crimes couldn’t be evaluated honestly without understanding the lives these children had been forced to endure.
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The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving.
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Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice.
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