MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Rudolph Norris walked out of Morgantown
federal prison two weeks ago carrying a duffel bag like no other. First, he had
spent six months hand-stitching it himself from dozens of mottled leather
scraps, symbolizing the shards of his life he longed to piece back together.
Then he unzipped it and pulled out his invitation to try.
“Dear Rudolph,” the letter began, “I wanted to personally
inform you that I have granted your application for commutation.”
It was signed “Barack Obama.”
Mr. Norris’s 22 years behind bars over with the stroke of
the president’s pen, he showed off the letter to his receiving crowd of
siblings, in-laws and, mostly, his all-grown-up daughter, Rajean, who had
wondered if she would ever again see her father out of an orange jumpsuit.
(“That’s my daddy!” she said as he came into view, sounding like the 8-year-old
she had been back when he was sentenced.) Mr. Norris hugged and cried and
fist-bumped.
Then the former inmate, a newly minted symbol of second
chances, rode the family’s rental van from West Virginia back to Maryland.
Mr. Norris, 58, was one of 22 federal prisoners released on
July 28 through a continuing bipartisan push to shorten the sentences of
nonviolent drug offenders who, during the war-on-drugs fervor of decades ago,
received punishments far lengthier than they would have drawn today. The mass
incarceration of those days crowded prisons at great expense, and was found to
have disproportionately penalized minority crack-cocaine offenders like Mr.
Norris, who was convicted of possessing and selling the substance in 1992 and
sentenced to 30 years in prison. The commutations, announced on March 31,
preserve the conviction but end the sentence.
One commutation went to a 65-year-old Kentucky man who had
drawn a life sentence for running a massive marijuana farm; six others were
freed from life sentences for cocaine-related offenses. President Obama
announced another round of 46 commutations on July 13 — prisoners must wait
three months for their actual release — and is considering more.
Mr. Norris’s winding, six-prison path to freedom followed
early resentment over his long sentence, fatalistic acclimation to a middle age
lived behind bars, and then 10 years in which he spent dozens of hours a week
in prison libraries learning federal drug law and pursuing legal avenues to
release.
His efforts foundered before Mr. Obama’s clemency initiative
saw his case routed to a George Washington University Law School clinic and a
student who received it as a class assignment. Their serendipitous work
together, culminating in Mr. Norris’s release, led prisoners and wardens alike
to call him the Miracle of Morgantown.
During his first days of freedom, Mr. Norris delighted in
slurping his first chocolate shake and fixing his granddaughter’s Barbie
playhouse. He goggled at technology he had never used, from the Internet to
hands-free bathroom sinks.
But he also recognized the challenges that so many recently
released prisoners face: finding work despite his criminal record; getting his
own home rather than crashing in his brother’s basement indefinitely; and
generally convincing a skeptical society that he is a changed man.
Not everyone will fly the yellow happy-face balloons that
greeted him at his big sister’s welcome-home party the afternoon he arrived.
“He’s going to be fighting for his life,” said Courtney
Stewart, the founder of the Reentry Network for Returning Citizens, a volunteer
organization based in Washington that helps recently released prisoners pursue
employment, housing and mental health services. “It’s going to be hard as hell,
but he has to be willing to do whatever it takes. It’s not going to be up to
him what that is. He won’t decide how long he’s going to have to do it. He’ll
have to have some faith.”
Mr. Norris immediately called his parole officer to learn
his responsibilities and pledge to follow them. (His clemency does not vacate
the eight years of probation to which he was originally sentenced.) He applied
for food stamps and, because all he had was his Morgantown inmate card, pursued
a more marketable driver’s license.
His commitment to playing by the rules was so strong that he
avoided a day-labor landscaping opportunity because it paid in cash, and he
wanted to pay taxes like everyone else.
“As I navigate my way back to society and begin a productive
life,” he wrote to Mr. Obama in April, “one of the first and foremost thoughts
on my mind will be my solemn commitment to prove to you that your faith in me
was not at all misplaced.”
Getting Out
Mr. Norris fit the requirements of the Obama
administration’s clemency program almost perfectly: He had demonstrated model
behavior while serving at least 10 years for a relatively low-level, nonviolent
drug crime. The court’s 1993 presentencing report stated flatly, “There was no
victim in this offense.” Still, sentencing standards of the time called for 30
years in prison.
Not that Mr. Norris’s record had been exemplary before that.
A lifelong resident of hardscrabble northern Washington, D.C., he had been
convicted of seven crimes since he was a teenager, from possession of marijuana
to check forgery to robbery; none involved violence or a weapon. He was in and
out of prison until the mid-1980s, when he held legitimate jobs — painting and
rustproofing cars, delivering water bed mattresses — but also made $7,000 a
month dealing crack cocaine, a drug so pervasive that even Washington’s mayor,
Marion S. Barry Jr., was caught smoking it.
In 1992, police officers targeting Mr. Norris found 291
small bags of crack totaling 29 grams in his Chrysler LeBaron convertible.
“I wasn’t addicted to the drugs,” Mr. Norris said during his
van ride back to Maryland, adding that he has not used any illegal substance or
alcohol since 1983. “I was addicted to the lifestyle.”
Having had discipline issues during several earlier
incarcerations — including a fight in which he stabbed an inmate with half a
pair of scissors — Mr. Norris, now in his mid-30s, committed himself to clean
time and the development of work skills. He took a 4,000-hour course as an
electronics inspector, worked jobs like making furniture and packaging
recyclables, and had only three minor disciplinary violations in 22 years,
according to prison records. His behavior earned him a 2012 transfer to the minimum-security
prison in Morgantown.
Ribbed by younger inmates there as “Old Gangsta,” Mr. Norris
spent several hours a day in the law library, poring over the Federal Rules of
Criminal Procedure and case law that might suggest some way to shorten his sentence.
(He said he received tutoring from a fellow inmate, Matthew Kluger, a corporate
lawyer serving 12 years for insider trading.)
In April 2014, when the Obama administration announced its
clemency initiative, he sensed an opportunity.
But federal public defenders were not allowed to handle
clemency applications, so the lawyers who had represented Mr. Norris forwarded
his case to George Washington University Law School’s Neighborhood Law and
Policy Clinic, which allows 10 students per semester to assist inmates for
class credit. A third-year student, Courtney Francik, got the assignment last
fall.
Ms. Francik, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate from the
Baltimore suburb of Cockeysville, had heard from friends who had gone to law
school that their most valuable experience came from handling real cases in a
clinic, she said in a recent telephone interview. She signed up and soon found
herself engrossed, taking the unusual step of staying on for the spring
semester as well.
“I almost moved into the clinic building for Mr. Norris’s
case,” Ms. Francik said. “I couldn’t wait to get to the clinic building in the
morning and start working.”
Working closely with two lawyers at the clinic, Ms. Francik
prepared 182 pages of legal and personal material to support Mr. Norris’s
clemency application. Her enthusiasm and confidence during their one
face-to-face meeting at Morgantown, in November, along with phone calls and
numerous letters, so encouraged Mr. Norris that he began sewing the leather bag
he hoped to carry out of prison.
His application was submitted in mid-February, joining
thousands of others from inmates nationwide. They were evaluated by Department
of Justice attorneys, who then recommended top candidates for White House
officials to cull. Mr. Obama reviewed information on each finalist, a White
House spokesman said, before using his constitutional authority to commute
their sentences.
In the early afternoon of March 31, a White House lawyer
called the clinic to say that Mr. Norris had become one of 22 people who would
be getting letters of congratulations from Mr. Obama. Ms. Francik received a
text and bolted from her class — Professional Responsibility — to join the
phone call alerting Mr. Norris, who naturally was in Morgantown’s law library.
He burst into tears.
“I’m not going to die in prison,” he recalled saying as he
cried once more. “I’m on my way home.”
Mr. Norris spent the three-month wait for his release making
sure he did nothing to jeopardize his good fortune. (Although most inmates were
happy for him, a few resented his special treatment and tried to provoke
altercations, he said.) On the morning he left for good, he told a crowd of
hundreds of inmates seeing him off: “I’m not better than you. I just had to
grow up.”
Getting Started
Walking toward his family in the parking lot, Mr. Norris
wore heavy gray sweatpants and heavier gray whiskers, some pounds having
migrated from his barrel chest to his belly, but still with the muscular
shoulders of his distant youth. (His brother-in-law remarked, “Man, he looks
good.”) Mr. Norris’s younger son, Raymond, who could not travel to the reunion
from New Mexico, received Mr. Norris’s first phone call and a promise: “It’ll
be my last game of basketball — I’m going to show you what Daddy’s got left and
then retire.”
The five-hour ride home, during which he took 34 calls on
six different family cellphones, included crucial stops for a Wendy’s chocolate
Frosty and some outlet-mall sneakers. Having never used a cellphone, he
officially entered the 21st century when spotty reception on Interstate 68
caused him to plead, “Can you hear me now?”
Family members fought over who would buy him a wallet, a
watch and a jersey of his beloved Washington Redskins.
“Don’t buy anything for me — wait till I work, I’ll buy it
for myself,” Mr. Norris pleaded. “I don’t want to be no burden. I been y’all’s
burden for 25 years.”
At the welcome-back barbecue among two dozen family members
in his older sister’s backyard, Mr. Norris destroyed a crate of hard-shelled
crabs brought just for him. He met his daughter’s three children, including
2-year-old Zuri, whom he hoisted on his shoulder and told: “Can I have some
sugar? I’ve been waiting to see you. This is all your family. It’s my family,
too.”
Mr. Norris’s younger brother, Bruce, brought him back to his
house in Upper Marlboro, Md., where a new, full-size mattress and several sets
of clothes awaited in the made-up basement room he will use until he gets on
his feet. The next morning, he showed that his playful side had survived
prison; he phoned Bruce and said frantically, “I messed up the alarm and the
police have me in cuffs outside the house!” only to bellow in laughter
afterward.
Mr. Norris then met his probation officer to learn the terms
of his supervised release: He may not leave the District of Columbia, Maryland
or Virginia for 60 days, must check in with her regularly, and is subject to
drug testing. A violation could bring its own punishment, which could include
jail, but would not affect his commutation.
A growing number of state and federal officials from both
parties are supporting measures to decrease the prison population by lightening
punishments for some drug-related offenders, who according to federal data make
up roughly half of the 1.5 million federal and state prisoners. The Fair
Sentencing Act of 2010 eliminated the five-year minimum sentence for first-time
possession of crack, and decreased higher mandatory punishments for dealing
crack with a prior criminal record.
The day after visiting the probation office, Mr. Norris met
with a social services agent who briefed him on more than a dozen state
assistance programs, including ones that offer free interview clothes and
health exams at the Wellmobile, a clinic on wheels that drives around Maryland.
Applying for food stamps meant his first attempt at a technology forbidden in
prison: the Internet. “I feel like a 5-year-old trying to learn this stuff,” he
said, poking hesitantly at a keyboard.
As for the critical job hunt, the social services
representative told Mr. Norris that he has more skills than many people in his
position. Besides his experience painting cars and delivering packages, she
said, his electronics-inspection classes and exemplary work record in prison
would encourage potential employers willing to look past his incarceration.
The question is how many of those there will be. Mr.
Stewart, of the association that assists former prisoners, said that initial
job searches typically last between nine months and two years and tend to lead
to work that is custodial, or related to the restaurant or lodging industries.
One of Mr. Norris’s brothers-in-law is a shuttle-bus driver for a local hotel
and will try to get him a job there, while another is looking into some
gardening work.
“I’ll take the lowest honest job out there — I just want to
get started,” Mr. Norris said. “Society doesn’t owe me anything. I owe society
for dealing drugs.”
Getting On
A few nights after his release, Mr. Norris phoned the person
he credits most for his coming home: Ms. Francik, the law student with whom he
had not spoken since she delivered the news of his clemency three months ago.
She graduated in May and just started work as a public defender in Shelby
County, Tenn.
“Miss Courtney, y’all kept telling me I was a primary person
the clemency was about,” Mr. Norris told her. “I kept hearing how confident
y’all were. That’s what made me make it. Y’all were the vessels to get me
home.”
“It was an honor, Mr. Norris — it really was,” she replied.
“I believe in you.”
“I’m trying to get gainfully employed in a hurry,” he said,
“so I can be able to provide and get my own place. I have the freedom to do
what I want to do as long as I do it right.”
The two spoke for an hour. As the conversation wound down,
Ms. Francik told him, “I’m going to be back in a few weeks and the whole clinic
team wants to take you out to dinner. Wherever you want.”
“I’ll be dressed, pressed and at my best,” he said.
Then he paused for drama, as if his story lacked any.
“But one thing,” he said.
“What?”
“I’ll have a job by then,” he vowed. “And I’m paying for
you.”
