To Obama

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  I thought, finally, about Patty Ries, a woman in Dallas, Texas, whom I’d recently gotten to know. She wrote in 2016 because she wanted Obama to see one of her own family heirlooms, a letter her father had once written to President Roosevelt, in 1943.

  I have meant to write to you for some time. Now I am concerned whether this letter will reach you before you leave office….I am deeply concerned about Donald Trump running for President. I sincerely hope that he doesn’t win. I fear that our country will go back in time if this comes to pass….My father was born in Germany and came to the United States when he was eighteen. My father desperately wanted to become a United States citizen so that he could join the US army and fight against the Germans during WWII….He was sworn in as a US citizen at two in the morning by a Justice of the Peace after this letter was received in Washington. If Donald Trump was the President, my father probably would not have been allowed in the United States let alone been sworn in as a US citizen….When the war ended he did find his mother who had been a prisoner at the concentration camp Theresienstadt. She too was able to come to the United States after the war and lived almost fifty years in the US before her death at age 99! Unfortunately I did not get to meet my grandfather. He was killed in Auschwitz concentration camp.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON

  January 13, 2017

  Ms. Patty Ries

  Dallas, Texas

  Dear Patty:

  Your letter reached my desk, and I wanted to thank you for sharing your family’s story with me. I was deeply moved by it and by the letter your father wrote to President Roosevelt—what a powerful piece of history.

  It’s clear you come from a long line of people committed to building a more inclusive, more just future, and your pride in that legacy came through in every word. I hear your concerns about our country’s politics. I know it may sometimes seem as if the loudest and angriest among us drive our national conversation, but I firmly believe that the most thoughtful and compassionate voices will ultimately win out and shape the stronger America we all deserve. Hearing from folks like you only reaffirms my optimism for our country’s future.

  Again, thank you for writing to me, and for your father’s dedication to our country. It’s been a tremendous privilege to serve as your President these past eight years, and your words—as well as your father’s and grandfather’s—will stay with me.

  All the best,

  Barack Obama

  * * *

  —

  I remembered how proud Patty was of that letter from the president, like Bob Melton, like so many of the others. She put it in a brown frame and hung it over her computer, prime real estate, a new family heirloom to add to a collection that dated back to her grandfather’s imprisonment and murder in Auschwitz.

  I suppose Kolbie was the one who actually wrote that letter to Patty, and the letters to Shane Darby, Bob Melton, and Donna Coltharp, and so many of the other typewritten responses I had read. I didn’t ask Kolbie about any of those letters specifically. This was inching way too deep into Santa Claus territory. I remember Yena telling me that one of the reasons she and other people in OPC didn’t like talking about their work to outsiders was because they felt a responsibility to preserve the illusion. Like the magician’s pledge—thou shalt not reveal the tricks of the trade. Your silence was your gift.

  “Every day I just can’t believe that (a) I’m here,” Kolbie told me that afternoon, “and (b) that the president cares so much about these letters.”

  It was impossible not to root for Kolbie. The more time I spent with her, the more I thought there was probably nobody I’d rather see be in charge of the magic than a woman with a tender heart whose still-burgeoning belief in a hero had not been tainted.

  I asked Kolbie what she needed to do to finish the letter to the woman in Tulsa who wrote about the shooting, and she went back to her computer, scrolled up, then down.

  “Okay, so what I’ve done here is break down the sections of his thoughts,” she said, tapping the screen. “See? It’s ‘I’m mad, too.’ And ‘My administration can’t intervene in individual cases.’ And ‘But this is what we are doing.’ And ‘No one should have to fear being profiled.’ And then he ends with ‘This is what you need to do.’

  “Basically, POTUS has given me topic sentences, and I’m filling in the blanks,” she said with a shrug. “I’m an English major. It’s what we do.”

  The final version, including all the annotations, would go to Fiona, who would inspect and edit it, then forward it to the interns who manned the printer. Fiona would inspect the printed version, the margins, the consistency of the ink—no random dots or splotches—before finally sending it back to Obama for his signature. Then the letter would be out the door, destined for a mailbox in Tulsa and, likely, a frame on a wall.

  “If my job didn’t exist, so many people would have unanswered letters; you know what I mean?” Kolbie said. “They wouldn’t know that the president cares. They wouldn’t know that their voice does matter. They just wouldn’t know.”

  I asked her if she’d ever had a chance to talk to Obama about what it was like to channel his voice.

  “I’ve never met him, no,” she said. “I mean, he hand signs these letters, and he knows that they don’t just come out of nowhere, so he knows my job exists.”

  But that was as close as he was to knowing her. She told me that would soon change, however. Every White House staffer was due to get a departure photo taken with the president during his final months in office, and Kolbie’s appointed time was just a few weeks away.

  “I’m trying to mentally prepare,” she said. “It’s bigger than anything that’s ever happened to me. Sometimes I spaz out in front of people, so I’m trying to prepare.

  “I’m going to shake his hand. I’m going to make sure he knows who I am. I’m going to say, ‘My name is Kolbie, and I’m your voice.’ ”

  CHAPTER 15

  Donna Coltharp and Billy Ennis,

  August 4, 2016

  EL PASO, TEXAS

  Billy was fifteen the first time he got kidnapped. It was a Saturday morning, back in the 1980s, in Anthony, New Mexico, just north of El Paso, Texas, where the family moved after they got rich. Billy was asleep in his room. He was a skinny kid who loved motocross and who lived by the rules his parents taught him: If you’re hit, hit back harder, and don’t go bothering your parents about it. Take care of your own problems.

  So this one morning the doorbell rings, and Billy answers it, and the guy asks for Billy’s dad. “He’s not home,” Billy says, and the guy leaves only to return an hour later with more guys who grab Billy by the hair, drag him across the yard, and stuff him in the trunk of a car. Next thing Billy knows he’s handcuffed to a bed frame in a house somewhere in Mexico, and everybody’s calling him Chester.

  “My name is Billy,” Billy says.

  Chester was his brother, a few years older.

  They got the wrong kid. Ransom-wise, a firstborn was worth more. Billy learned a lot just listening. This situation clearly had something to do with his dad’s booming drug business, the extent of which Billy was only beginning to grasp. It had always been more of a vague thing. A lot of garbage bags moving into and out of his parents’ bedroom, put it that way. After three days with the kidnappers and no ransom coming, Billy escaped in the middle of the night—he tricked the guy with the key to the handcuffs—and ran for his life through the desert. With the help of the Mexican police (who knew Billy’s dad), he was deposited at the border, and his dad picked him up.

  A few weeks later, Billy got kidnapped again, only this time they took both him and Chester. They came in the middle of the night, and they shot up the house, and they bashed his mom’s head in with the butt of a machine gun because she wouldn’t stop screaming. They again stuffed Billy into the trunk of a car, which was mu
ch more crowded with Chester jammed in there too. Again the kidnappers drove to Mexico. This time they hog-tied Billy and put him facedown on a couch. The guy who had been in charge of the handcuff key beat Billy repeatedly saying he shouldn’t have tricked him like that. “You would have done it too,” Billy told him. “I wasn’t doing anything a normal person wouldn’t do.” They were so much meaner this time. They threatened to kill Billy’s mom, and they beat him and Chester. The rescue, days later, by the Mexican police (who knew Billy’s dad), came after a shoot-out.

  Nothing was the same after that. Billy was so angry he got kidnapped twice and so was Chester. They wanted retribution. They got guns. They believed they knew who was behind the kidnappings, and they said they were going to go get him. Their dad pleaded with them not to do this. Their mom said, “Well, I’m not letting you kids go alone,” so she got her .44 and got in the car with them, and so then their dad got in too—the four of them, off to go get even.

  It did not go well. The guy they were after was not home, and so Billy and his parents and Chester took the wife, a maid, and two kids hostage. They took them to a hotel room. “I was an asshole,” Billy would later remark, looking back on how he treated them. He did buy them food, though, and toothbrushes. It was a fiasco. Everybody was terrified. In the end, Billy’s family locked the hostages in a U-Haul and turned themselves in. His dad worked the deal. Everybody was part of the drug trade. Everybody. Nobody pressed charges. Everyone walked away.

  * * *

  —

  “I found out later it wasn’t a normal childhood,” Billy was telling Donna Coltharp in 2002. He was now thirty-three.

  It was the first time Donna had ever talked to her client. Billy was calling from the Florence Federal Correctional Institute, a medium-security prison in Colorado; she was a newly appointed federal public defender in the Western District of Texas, and she had been assigned his appeal.

  “Nice to meet you,” she had said after he introduced himself. “How was your morning?”

  Billy told her that his dad was his cellmate, and that his dad snored, so they were moving him.

  Donna asked Billy how he ended up in prison with his dad, and Billy was trying to summarize. He explained about the kidnappings, and he told her that by the time he turned sixteen, he was homeless. His dad had been busted—“with ten tons of marijuana,” as Billy recalled it—and went to prison. Chester also went to prison, but it was for gang stuff he got involved in. Billy’s mom couldn’t afford the house, so she took off. She did not take Billy with her. “I was an asshole,” Billy said, defending his mom. Billy found a spot under a bridge to live in. The school told him he couldn’t come back because he no longer had an address in the district. (He did not tell them about the bridge.) He broke into a vacant trailer and lived there for a while. He stole groceries for food. He met a guy who said there was a better way. It took Billy just a few hours to sell a kilo of coke. He made twelve thousand dollars that first day. From then on it was party central.

  Billy put his story on fast-forward and told Donna about the two convictions that had led up to his current situation. He said his teenage cocaine business was wildly successful. When he got busted, in his early twenties, he was full of fury, until he figured out it was the best thing that could have happened to him. In prison he learned about normal childhoods. He got clean. Drug dealing, he discovered, led to one of two possible outcomes: prison or death. He tested the theory when he got out; it took him another round of prison for the point to stick. It was after finishing his second prison sentence that he got it together. He got a job. He had a son.

  Billy wouldn’t snitch on anybody; that could be part of why the cops got so mad when they came and raided his house in 2002. They didn’t find any drugs. They found diapers and baby toys, and Billy told them to take their hands off his son.

  Billy’s father was the one they wanted. He’d been free for a few years and had opened a print shop with Billy’s mom. Billy suspected his dad was up to no good, but he wouldn’t give any information to the cops. When the cops finally busted his dad and a neighbor as part of an organized crime investigation called Operation Power Play, they wrapped Billy into the arrest.

  “I had nothing to do with it,” Billy said. He confessed to having dealt weed—his occasional freelance work when he needed to make rent. That much he did do. He told them, you can have me for that, but not for this.

  They tried three of them at once: Billy, his dad, and the neighbor. The jury came back with a guilty verdict for all but Billy. On his case, they reached an impasse. The judge instructed the jury to continue deliberating. In the end, the jury found Billy guilty, and because of his priors and the “three strikes” law imposing mandatory prison time for repeat offenders, the judge handed him two concurrent life sentences.

  “For a drug conviction,” Donna said that day on the phone. Two life sentences for a drug conviction was the kind of thing that drove Donna crazy. She was the type of person who thought a lot about mercy and the power of imagination. Warehousing nonviolent offenders was doing nothing to help society.

  “Well, let’s get to work,” Donna said.

  Over the years, Donna and Billy grew close, even though they never met in person. Everything they did was by phone. That’s pretty typical when you are talking federal appeals court. They chatted about their sons; they both had toddlers. When Donna’s son started preschool, so did Billy’s. Both boys learned how to tie their shoes and started sports. Donna and Billy would compare notes, as parents do. They became the kind of friends that parents become, sharing transitions. Donna knew that for Billy the transitions were theoretical. She could feel the passage of time in a way Billy could not, and the disparity would eat at her.

  Billy’s appeal came down to a black-and-white box. At trial, police had testified that they had aerial surveillance of Billy carrying a box into his dad’s house. Thirty kilograms of cocaine had been found in a box. Specifically, a Gateway computer box. Gateway was an iconic brand in those days. Its mascot was a Holstein cow, and all its boxes had large black cow splotches on them. Did the guy in the helicopter see the splotches? He should have been able to, the defense said. Could he have instead seen any number of other boxes Billy may have taken over to his dad’s? In deliberations at the first trial, the jury was hung up on the question of the box. No fingerprints or other physical evidence had connected Billy to it, just the aerial surveillance. The jury asked to see the box. “Sorry,” they were told. The box had been inadvertently destroyed by courthouse cleaning personnel.

  Donna thought the missing evidence should have cleared Billy then and that it should clear Billy on appeal.

  It didn’t.

  It was 2005. She called Billy with the news. The denied appeal was three years in the making.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Billy said he wanted to keep fighting. There had to be something they could do.

  Donna was out of ideas. She told him, well, we can always appeal to the president of the United States to grant clemency—that’s how out of ideas she was.

  * * *

  —

  Unlike presidents before him, Obama had not made use of his pardon power. People said he had pardoned more turkeys than people. In fact, he wouldn’t commute a single sentence until 2011, and even then it was just one.

  A pardon is forgiveness of a crime, wiping out the conviction entirely, while a commutation leaves the conviction intact but wipes out the punishment.

  The idea of the president commuting Billy’s sentence was, Donna knew, a fantasy. It was like hoping for the tooth fairy to be real. But it was all that was left. So she prepared the plea, told Billy’s story, and contacted a commutation attorney to file it.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t until late into his second term that the dam burst open for Obama on the issue of commutations. On July 14, 201
5, he gave his first major criminal justice speech at the NAACP convention in Philadelphia. “Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it,” he said. “I’m going to shine a spotlight on this issue, because while the people in our prisons have made some mistakes—and sometimes big mistakes—they are also Americans, and we have to make sure that as they do their time and pay back their debt to society that we are increasing the possibility that they can turn their lives around.”

  Obama followed the speech with a visit to the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma two days later. “When they describe their youth, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different from the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” he said there. “The difference is that they did not have the kind of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”

  He was the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. His presidency was coming to an end, and he had certain things he wanted to accomplish; he would use his power of commutation as a form of criminal-justice reform.

  Obama granted 46 commutations in the summer of 2015, another 78 in December 2016, and then hundreds more, including 330 on January 19, 2017, his last full day in office. In total, he would grant executive clemency to 1,927 people convicted of federal crimes, more than the past thirteen presidents combined.

  U.S. Department of Justice

  Office of the Pardon Attorney

  Washington, D.C. 20530

  August 3, 2016

  FLORENCE

  Warden

  Florence FCI

  5880 State Highway 67

  Florence, CO 8122609791

  Re: William Edward Ennis

  Reg. No. 62601–080