Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption

by Hopwood, Shon

  I kept walking toward them, which is all I could do. Getting seriously messed up this late, this close to getting out, would be justice in a way. That thought helped me smile as I got closer. And yes, I had just taken on a new black client in clear defiance of the warning not to.

  I was within a couple of feet of them when they stepped completely off the sidewalk to let me pass. I should have kept going, but I was perplexed. As I stopped, I saw a shadow. Someone had been walking behind me. It was Big Meeks. He had cut over from the clinic to the weights to work out, but he had seen me and thought he might be of some assistance. He knew the issue.

  “You dogs good?” he said to them. They nodded, looking up at him. “That’s good. Shon here is my law man, you know. You all understand that, don’t you?” They nodded. The Nation of Islam guy turned and started walking away. That was that.

  The Kaos thing was still hanging over me, but I could handle one thing hanging. I minimized the risk from Kaos by just staying far away from him.

  My release to a halfway house was set for October 2, 2008, still a little over a year away. I was in the home stretch. I was focusing on completing my college courses so I could get a degree as soon as possible after my release. My job search would depend on it.

  Annie and I continued to correspond. Some days she could not wait for me to come home, and others, well, she seemed to be wising up. She told me how two guys, both of whom she had dated, had proposed to her and she was debating what to do. My suggestion was that she dump both of them, even though she hadn’t really asked for my opinion. She started visiting again, but when we were holding hands I could feel the uncertainty. She was the center of my future life—that much I knew. I resolved to be patient and easygoing, whatever she needed.

  Dad’s cancer had returned. He came to visit the week after his prognosis. I could tell that this go-round with the disease was scaring him. When I asked what the doctors had said, he changed the subject. But I pressed him to promise to still be home when I got there, and he promised.

  My brother Brett was well on his way to a successful life. He was getting married that summer to his longtime girlfriend, Katie. They already had one son, Nathaniel, and they were expecting another. I wished I could be at the wedding to share in my family’s joy.

  On an August evening when Dad and Mom had just returned from the cancer center in Omaha, I called home. Mom was crying. Dad took the phone, but then he broke down, too.

  “The doctor said there is nothing more they can do for me, Son.”

  “What … there’s nothing they can do?”

  Dad and I had discussed at length that the day might come when he would need to be selfish—because he deserved the right to stop his treatment, to go out his own way. When we had talked about it, I never thought things would reach a point where he would really do it. But four years of chemo, radiation, and stem cell transplants had taken a toll as great as the cancer.

  “What are the doctors saying?”

  But Dad couldn’t answer. He passed the phone back to Mom, who told me that the cancer had advanced into his liver and other organs. They would do a radiation treatment to reduce the discomfort and pain, but there were no more solutions.

  “The doctor said it’s inevitable,” Mom said. “I just will thank the Lord for every day I still have with him.”

  I’m sure they were holding hands.

  Against the doctor’s orders, Dad decided he needed to come see me one more time. Bringing him to Pekin would be challenging. He needed an IV drip with large doses of pain medication and replacement fluids in his arm almost all the time. And the expense of the trip seemed impossible; the medical bills had depleted the family savings. But word had spread in David City and in Shelby, the nearby town where Mom and Dad had started out. To their complete surprise, envelopes started arriving in the mail with best wishes and checks in small amounts to help with the trip.

  You just can’t say enough about the people of David City and towns like that. They knew Dad was an honorable guy, and that was enough. He had a right to see his son one more time.

  My mom and my sisters, Kristin and Samantha, rolled Dad into the visiting room in a wheelchair with an IV suspended above it. The bones in his face were sharp under his leathery, yellowed skin. Even the whites of his eyes were yellow; his liver was failing. I was not prepared for how he looked, and I almost broke down when I saw him. “How are you doing, Son?” he said. I hugged him and kissed his cheek. We sat at a table and he wanted to know all about my latest legal efforts and my progress toward a degree. He told me he was proud of what I had become, and proud that I was helping people. That, he said, is what life is all about. He said he was sorry that he would not be around to help me when I was released, but that others would help if I came back home.

  We played cards—a few games of Spades like when I was a kid. Dad nodded off a little. My sisters and I would talk, and the game would restart when he woke up. There were long silences. He told me that he wanted me to take his place when my sister Kristin was married, to walk her down the aisle for him. In saying that, he had accepted me back into the family, showing me he trusted me with its responsibilities.

  When Mom and the girls were in the back of the visiting room buying food at the vending machines, Dad leaned toward me and said, “I want to see you in heaven.”

  I told him I would see him there, but he shouldn’t look for me too soon. I told him I wanted to have a new life with Annie, and I thanked him for being a good father to me.

  “I’m sorry for everything,” I said. “I wish I could go back and change things.”

  Dad smiled. “Don’t we all, Shon … some of it. Not all of it.”

  I promised to spend some years back home in Nebraska once I was released. I told him I would be there to take care of our family and to give Mom the love of a son that had been denied her for a decade. I said I hoped I might be able to go to law school when I was released, but, after that, I would come home to the family.

  The trip had already worn him down, so I took Mom’s cue and pushed him toward the door. His tired eyes were moist, as were mine. I gave him a hug and kiss and told him that I loved him. His frail arms wrapped around me and he did not want to let go, nor did I. The finality of everything was unbearable.

  Mom rolled him out. He glanced back and waved his wrist. I had caused him a lot of grief, but he loved me deeply.

  I walked back into the unit with red eyes and tears collecting on my khaki shirt. I didn’t care who saw them or if they thought I was soft. I didn’t care about much that day.

  Two months later my new counselor—Terri had been reassigned to another cellblock—came up to my cell. “Hopwood, Hopwood, are you awake? … Shon, are you awake?”

  I already knew what it was. Dad passed on Sunday, October 14, 2007. Six hundred people attended the funeral. My best friend, Tom, read a short eulogy, stopping briefly in the middle to collect himself before finishing the words I had sent from prison.

  All day I could hear Dad’s voice. I remembered the time we were out at the farm and he was riding the quarter horse chasing cattle around, with his arm in a sling. He had broken it, I don’t remember how. When we were finished sorting cattle, he said, “Not bad for a one-armed fat man.” It was a play on the John Wayne line from True Grit, one of his favorites.

  Shon,

  Just know that I am carrying you in my heart, saying lots of prayers for you and your family, and I promise to be here for you and help you in any way that I can, both now and in the future. Although you haven’t asked this of me, I have grieved hard this week, both because of my own sadness and for you. I sobbed so hard and felt such sadness as I also grieved the loss of the hopes and dreams of experiences you were counting on having with your dad after your release. I know that sadness myself as I, too, had to deal with the overwhelming shock of my mom being yanked from my life and the shattering of all the dreams of experiences we would have together throughout my life. I guess it wasn’t meant to be
that way for you and me. It is strangely ironic that five years ago, you were there for me when I lost my mom and now I am here for you as you have lost your dad. We are very blessed to have each other, indeed.

  I love you, Shon. And your family loves you. We are all praying for you and looking forward to next October.

  Peace and Love my dear friend, Annie

  She was at Pekin the next week—a beautiful angel to support me in my grief. After the visit I knew I wanted to marry her. I would have married her right then if I could have.

  Horn arrived in 2008. He was about twenty-five and tattooed from head to toe, with big bulky shoulders, Mad Max energy for mayhem, and a total dedication to white supremacy. He had transferred from a high-security federal pen and considered himself the leader of white supremacists everywhere. I was now in my early thirties and he was like a little kid to me. He sat at the tables where the Aryan Brotherhood, the Skinheads, the Dirty White Boys, and a few Hells Angels and other bikers congregated. He was stirring up so much racial trouble that the staff started leaning on him to cool down. They threatened to send him back to a maximum-security prison. Over dinner after that threat he tried to force all the white guys at his table to back him up. He told them that the guards couldn’t send them all away if they stuck together. They balked at the idea and tried to calm him down. He picked up his food tray.

  “I’m not sitting with you rats.”

  He scanned the room. He looked over at our table, the Nebraska and Iowa guys. We were known for something different, mostly for keeping ourselves out of the limelight. Maybe we looked easy to a newcomer. He came over and sat down.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. If we accepted him at our table, we would have trouble with black gangs and everyone else within a few weeks. Most of us had worked hard to keep good relations.

  “What do you mean, what am I doing here? I’m eating my dinner.”

  “Not here,” Bobbie said without looking at him.

  “You’re saying I can’t sit here?”

  “You make too much trouble, man. You can’t sit here,” I said. Horn was stupefied.

  “Let’s go outside with this,” he said.

  He trailed Bobbie out. I hung back behind them both.

  “So you two are saying a peckerwood can’t sit at your table?”

  “Peckerwood” is a term white guys use to describe other white supremacist gang members. I don’t know where it originated.

  “No, we’re saying you can’t sit at our table,” Bobbie said. “You bring too much heat.”

  “So let me get this right.” Horn inched toward us with his hands in his pockets. “You saying I positively can’t sit there?”

  The last thing I wanted to do was start a fight with this moron in the middle of the compound. I wasn’t scared of him or the knife he was pretending to have in his pocket; I was scared that Bobbie and I could lose good time. We were short timers now.

  “That’s exactly what we’re saying,” Bobbie said. “If you try it you know what will happen.”

  “I don’t fight. I use them things,” Horn said, motioning an arm as if he already had his blade in hand. “We’ll see what your homeboy Toro says.”

  Toro was a fellow Nebraskan, tough, intelligent. I often worked out with him and another Nebraska boy named Jimmy.

  Horn thought Toro was tight with him because they sometimes talked on the yard.

  “You can talk to him now,” I said.

  Toro and Jimmy happened to be nearby. They could tell what was happening, based on the positioning and body language.

  “What’s happening, fellas?” Toro said to Bobbie and me.

  “You better tell your boys to back off before I cut one of them,” Horn said.

  Toro looked over at us and laughed.

  “And why would you do something so stupid?” he said.

  Horn laid out the problem. But Toro told him he should respect the traditions, that he should not sit somewhere if he wasn’t invited. What went unsaid was that if Horn started something it would be all four of us beating him. That was the end of it.

  Two months later Bobbie and I were walking through the yard when Horn came running past, chased by two white guys. One tackled him. They took turns stomping him with their boots until enough guards arrived to stop them.

  I asked Bobbie if he thought we had ever been that stupid, back when we were starting our sentences.

  “We were stupid,” he said, “but not that stupid.”

  Davey was my last celly. He was about seven years older than I was but decades younger in some ways. It felt like having a teenager in the cell. I don’t have the expertise to diagnose things like obsessive-compulsive disorder, multiple personality disorder, or schizophrenia, but to my layman’s eyes Davey showed symptoms of all of them.

  He would watch TV programs like 24 or Prison Break and be so wound up in them that he was sure they were real and he was a part of them.

  “Shon, did you see the way Jack Bauer took those guys out?”

  I was in bed and ignoring him.

  “Did you see it?”

  “Davey, I’m writing a letter.”

  He would then launch into a word-for-word recitation of the entire episode.

  He was short, slender, and gullible to the point that guys would set up elaborate jokes to mess with him, like telling him a systemwide prison escape was being planned.

  When these hoaxes came along, I tried not to discourage him all the way, because he needed hopeful things to think about at night in order to fall asleep. Otherwise he would often become lost in the horror of what had happened during his one-day crime spree. If he couldn’t sleep, sometimes I couldn’t sleep, because he would be twitching around and half talking and moaning.

  Davey had robbed a bank. He was in love with a girl who left him because he never had any money, and there was some other guy who did. So Davey, then twenty-two, figured he needed some big cash so he could win her back. He took a single-shot 12-gauge shotgun into an Illinois bank—he had never fired a gun in his life. He wore a ski mask and camouflage Army pants with the big pockets full of shotgun shells.

  The vault was closed, so he took a customer as hostage and went back to the vault area with the manager and demanded he open the thing. I expect everybody in the bank could tell that he wasn’t quite right. The guy he was holding was a nice guy, a father of two who had brought his blind mother to the bank to make a deposit. When the vault door swung open it bumped Davey’s elbow and the gun fired, sending the good man’s brains all over the place and all over Davey. He surrendered shortly thereafter, crying.

  In his cell, trying to sleep, he was often wiping himself because he still felt blood and goo all over him.

  He was going to be in prison for most of his life. Deep inside he knew it was justice; he felt awful about the man and his family. Just the same, he missed freedom and would have done anything to be out and leave the horror of his old life behind. He was a miserable kid; though he wasn’t really a kid: he just seemed that way.

  After listening to the adventures of the latest television thriller, I went back to writing Annie.

  Dearest Annie,

  It’s after midnight and the unit is quiet. It’s best at this time. No screaming, no arguing, no rapping to music videos, and no dumb legal questions. Just me, my radio, my pen, and notebook. Not perfect but close. If only I could smuggle and then snuggle you in here for a night.

  Love, Shon

  I looked over at Davey sleeping. If he had had a better lawyer, I expect he would be in some kind of high-security mental facility. Many prisoners suffer from severe mental illness and receive no treatment. The best they can hope for is friendship.

  The new year was still fresh when some Hispanic guys tried to kill each other on the yard, triggering a four-day lockdown. In a world of attention-craving narcissists, lockdowns bordered on cruel and unusual punishment. For me, however, these occasions had become reading and writing retreats. I wrote Annie, read bi
ographies and novels, finished briefs, wrote short stories, even opened Mom’s books. Lockdowns were a respite from the multitude of legal questions from guys who regularly mixed up words like “retroactive” and “radioactive.”

  I saw that there would be one more legal storm coming before I left, and retroactive was, in fact, the word.

  For years the federal government had made a distinction between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. A person could receive a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence for possessing over 50 grams of the former, but it took possessing over 500 grams of the latter for someone to receive the same ten-year sentence. Obviously, more African-Americans were dealing affordable crack than expensive powder, and due to these policies, black men were locked up for disproportionately longer terms than whites.

  The U.S. Sentencing Commission had rethought that policy and changed the punishment levels. I prepared detailed, one-size-fits-all motions that could be plugged into brief after brief. When the time came and the Commission finally did, in fact, make the change, I would be ready. I researched a way to argue for larger sentence reductions than even the new regulations might provide, and those arguments worked, even though the Supreme Court would reject them some three years later. I filed briefs in courts all over the country leading to decades’ worth of new lives. It was my going away present for everybody. The Wagner brothers—my typist and his brother—could go home three years early.

  Bobbie packed up and cleaned out his locker. There’s usually sort of a potlatch when a guy leaves: he’ll distribute this and that, a few cans of pop or Vienna sausages, some books and magazines, cheese crackers that might be a year or two out of date, some shampoos and shaving cream, and other items of junk that just accumulate. Some things have probably been passing from locker to locker since the joint opened.