PREVIOUSLY: At the DC jail, some inmates was sayin’ how they got arrested. One dude say, “Man, why you sit back so quiet?” I say, “I’m just waitin’ to get extradited to another state.” Right there they know I’m a standup guy. I wasn’t no Kool-Aid (friendly) kind of person. Friendly is not good, cause you don’t know who’s who. Remember, I’m not in on a charge you can go in on and then walk out. My charge bein’ investigated. At night I could hear conversations about all the crime they committed: robbery, car thief, murder, drug dealing. And they would yell out they flap hole what they gonna do when they get out. I just play it by eyes and ears—hearin’ and seein’. A few old cats I knew look at me as an idol—they watch the news, so they knew I wasn’t in there for jaywalkin’, but for drug trafficking, conspiracy, and all that. The authorities put informers in jail to find out what’s goin’ on. One guy told his cellmate he killed his girlfriend and also said he took the body out in the woods. Then the cellie went to court and testified what the guy said about how he did it. So the cellie got out and the other guy got convicted.
I’m sittin’ in the cell wonderin what’s gonna happen when I go back to court. How much time I was gonna get. And, like I said before, whether I was gonna see the street again.
Just doin’ a lotta thinking for real y’know? A couple weeks later, me and myco-defenders went back to court. That day we really didn’t know what was gonna happen. I called it “Let’s Make a Deal Day,” ’cause that was one thing I did know was gonna happen.
They say “If you wanna take a deal today we can offer you ten years. We’ll put a cap on the case and close it up and it’ll never be opened again.”
My lawyer tell me, “Y’aint gotta take it if you don’t want to. We probably get a better deal if we don’t take this first deal.”
Each of my codees had different lawyers and no one that I know of took a deal that day. Nobody wanna take nothin’.
On the side, me and my lawyer sit in the courtroom and talk. I asked him, “What would be the decision if you was wearin’ the shoes I’m wearin’ on myfeet?”
He said, “I can’t really tell you. If I had your shoes on my feet, I wouldn’t want anyone to tell me what I should do. Let me look into the case, maybe I might can beat it, get it dismissed.”
But most of the times when the FBI involved, they got some solid concrete against you.
I said, “Man I’m gonna tell you the truth, I’m a user not a seller.” He knew I was a seller, but I’m tellin’ him I’m mainly a user.
He say, “Maybe I can get you into a program.”
I say, “Yeah?”
He say, “Yeah, maybe I can get you a program while you’re incarcerated. You go into a program for six or nine months—and if you clean without getting in no trouble—you get 18 months credit for that time.
“But I tell you this here,” I say to him. “This not the first time they caught me up, as you can see in my record.”
He say, “Give me a little time to look it over.”
I say, “I’m gonna put my trust in you.”
He say, “If I can get the judge to agree with me to put you in a program would you go along with that?”
I told him, “I’d take it if my codees were ok with it. I wouldn’t let them down in any way.”
(to be continued)
My book, Still Standing: How an Ex-Con Found Salvation in the Floodwaters of Katrina, is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle form.
