Issue 3, September 2007

I am seventy years old, and have been in the Maryland prison system for some 40 years now. I've also had 14 parole hearings, yet no one seems to know what to do with my case.

Yes, I've been in prison long before many readers were even born. And during these decades I've seen many things, things readers would not even believe were possible in these days and times. I'm spurred to write with all due respect to the Honorable Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Gale Rasin, who spoke the truth in making a brave decision to set Walter Lomax free after many decades in prison. Judge Rasin's words — "That was then and this is now" — are echoing in my mind. Judge Rasin evoked another world and another era of thinking.

So why is it that Judge Rasin and I seem to be able to go back in time and see the wrongs and injustice in the penal system from prior decades, injustice which needs to be addressed and is really long overdue for relief! My reason for saying this is that when I came to prison in the 1960s, I received a life sentence. Yet today when I read or watch TV, there is somebody receiving a life sentence with an amount of it suspended. This sort of sentence did not exist back then!Why can't this suspended sentence be given now to the many old lifers who are still here in the infirmary, unable to do anything for or take care of themselves. Who is accountable for this oversight — this inability to do anything for old lifers even as the new young punks get suspended terms because the "Old Turks" already in the system are holding all the bed space!

If the General Assembly can graciously go all the way back to slavery and "express profound regret for the role that Maryland played in instituting and maintaining slavery and for the discrimination that was slavery's legacy," apologizing for the wrongs and injustices which existed from Maryland's period of legal slavery, until the end of the era of segregation, then why can't the Governor also go back and grant clemency or some kind of home-monitored release for the few of us old lifers who are still alive now and would love to live the short remainder of our lives as normal citizens? After all, "That was then and this is now."

Because when some of us older lifers came to prison back then, we were all sent to the Maryland State Penitentiary, where we were given four digit prison numbers. Now these youngsters are getting six digit prison numbers in the half million mark, and somewhere and somehow along the way I believe the politicians and powers that be have long forgotten about us older men who got our sentences in that era of time with that way of thinking, what Judge Rasin referred to as "That was then and this is now." We have been forgotten and lost within the cracks of the injustice and judiciary system of today.

Yes, we are just like the needle in the haystack — invisible to the eyes. But we are speaking out now so that our words can be heard from within this penal gulag where many old lifers have already died, while yet a few of us still exist to ponder our plight.

And we are pleading now, with the hopes that someone will show a little understanding — realizing that there was no "plea bargain" for a suspended portion of a life sentence back in the day.

We have been incarcerated for many decades, and we have already lost the opportunity to see, hug, or say "I love you" to many of our family members and friends who have already passed on, even as we have done our best and given our all to change, having spent decades without even getting an infraction.

All we are asking is an opportunity to be allowed to die in peace and with dignity as free men, or is it that we have been incarcerated for so long now that the outside world is deaf to our pleas and forgotten that we still exist?