In 1997, Ezell Gilbert was sentenced to more than 24 years in federal prison in a crack cocaine case. Because of mandatory sentencing (treating crack 100 times as severely as powder), he was put in a cage for a quarter century, and even the judge said this was too harsh.
At sentencing, Gilbert noticed an error that increased his sentence by about *10 years* based on a misclassification of a prior conviction. In 1999, without a lawyer, he filed a petition complaining about the mistake. The Clinton DOJ opposed him, and a court ruled against him.
Ten years later, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in another person’s case, confirming that Gilbert had been correct about the error in his case. A public defender helped him file a new petition for immediate release from prison back to his family. He had served his time.
The federal judge sided with Obama/Holder, and Ezell Gilbert remained in a cage even though everyone agreed he was now in prison illegally. He had the audacity to hope that courts would follow the law.
A federal appeals court disagreed with Obama/Holder, and in June 2010, three judges set Gilbert free after more than 14 years in prison.
The judges rejected the DOJ’s argument as a departure from fairness and common sense. They said that it could not be the law in the U.S. that a person had to serve a prison sentence that everyone admitted was illegal. Ezell Gilbert went home and stayed out of trouble.
Here’s where it gets interesting. There are many people like Gilbert in federal prison whose sentences are illegal. Did you know that? Instead of rushing to ensure that thousands of people illegally separated from their families were set free, DOJ decided to fight and appeal.
The Obama/Holder DOJ argued: If prisoners were allowed to file more petitions, the “floodgates” would open and many others — mostly poor — would have to be released. They asked a larger group of judges to reverse Gilbert’s victory.
In 2011, a larger group of judges, led by a Republican majority, agreed with Obama/Holder that the “finality” of sentences was too important to allow prisoners to be released on a second rather than first petition, even if the prisoner was correct all along.
Ezell Gilbert was rearrested and sent back to prison to serve out his illegal sentence in a cage. Here's a link to one of the most shameful court opinions I've ever encountered, and one of Barack Obama and Eric Holder's most enduring victories: https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/200912513op2.pdf
An 87-year-old Republican judge wrote a dissent. Having served in WWII, he called the explicit decision to illegally keep a human being in jail “shocking.” He wrote that a “judicial system that values finality over justice is morally bankrupt.”
Addressing Obama/Holder argument directly, he said: “[T]here are many others in Gilbert’s position — sitting in prison serving sentences that were illegally imposed. We used to call such systems ‘gulags.’ Now, apparently, we call them the United States.”
Major media ignored Ezell Gilbert’s case at the time. Eric Holder did something similar in an even more egregious effort to preserve illegal sentences in the cases of Cornelius and Jarreous Blewitt, which consigned tens of thousands more people to federal cages illegally.
In 2013, two years after sending him back to a cage, Obama granted Gilbert clemency, and the media praised Obama for his leniency. Tens of thousands of other human being remained in prison illegally. You’ve never heard their names.
These legal precedents, and the unaccountable formations of lawyers, judges, politicians and bureaucrats who make them possible, are essential to the authoritarian project. They normalize the unjustified deprivation of liberty.
Once this normalization of the senseless deprivation of a single person's liberty is allowed to sprout, it is almost impossible to contain. This is the enduring import of the civil rights work that we do, and why telling these stories matters to the hope of a better world.
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