In my life thus far, I have been fortunate not to have been subjected to any direct form of injustice. In my life I have seen enough injustice to leave a bitter taste in my mouth. It would seem that we as a species have found it easier to select the path of injustice over one of truth, compassion, and justice. So much for that, those concepts are unfortunately idealized but life always gives opportunity for redemption. Sometimes the little we can do as individuals counts for something so great that for that one brief moment we can move mountains.
I work at the DC Public Defender Service and by nature I am witness to injustice after injustice. However recently I have experienced an injustice so cruel and uncaring that it blew me out of the water. My story begins with a man. He is 61 years old and has served 33 years of a life sentence in Maryland. His crimes are unpleasant as you can imagine, but they serve no purpose to this story. Besides his Maryland crimes, this man also stood trial in Washington, DC and was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years for that crime. His DC sentence was set to run consecutive to his Maryland case. Now 33 years later my client is faced with a greater problem than prison. He is dying. Slowly. With each breath he takes through his ventilator he drowns a little more in his own fluids.
My client has been sick now since August. For longer than that he has been alone. The little family he had stopped caring for him a long ago. He does not even have someone that can act on his behalf in a power-of-attorney capacity. In August his medical issues became so severe that he was removed from the prison he was in and placed in constant care at a regional hospital. A photo of him above his bed tells the tale: in August he had a round face, bushy beard, and a smile. The man in front of me is gaunt and grey. The bones on his sunken face highlight his pain-filled eyes. He spends his day sitting in a cot, unable to speak due to the trach tube in his throat and he is too weak to even write. The only noises in his room are the machine's mechanical symphony pushing moist air into his frail chest. Two Maryland Department of Corrections officers sit outside his room armed with guns. He is not allowed a television because he is still “incarcerated”. He is not even allowed to take off his plastic zip-tie handcuffs that loosely encompass his boney wrists.
The State of Maryland no longer wants this man. He is costing them far too much. In a desperate plea, officials contacted DC Superior Court in an effort to get him paroled to his DC sentence due to his existing detainer. Maryland officials figured it would work just fine to dump him in the Bureau of Prisons; probably at FMC Springfield out in Missouri. When my office got notification from DC Superior Court about this case, we immediately sprung into action. Why not work to get the US Attorney and DC Superior Court to agree to lift the detainer on this man? With only a few months to live, why not let him die with a little bit of dignity in some community hospital rather than in a prison?
The injustice here is a combination of things. On one hand, we have laws that clearly spell out a sentence, a term for which this man must be held by the state as punishment. On the other hand, he has become a pawn in a game of finances. The prisons have an obligation to care for those under their supervision. In this case it is the bare minimum. In this man's suffering he has only seen indifference. The basics of human compassion are absent and in their stead is a void. Our office does not have to assist this man. He will probably be dead by the time you read this and before much of the legal leg work can get started. Even under those auspices, we still will work on this case because we owe nothing more to this man than responding to the call of moral obligation. I am working on this case of injustice because I believe that in the waning days of this man's life, he deserves to be human. No one deserves to die a criminal, that is such a harsh stigma. This man is no exception but sadly there is no clear provision to assist this man outside of fighting to free him from his detainer. And if that is the righteous fight then that fight is well worth effort. For this man and for the one that comes after him.
No comments:
Post a Comment