Recipient of commutation of sentence
Dear Warden:
Please find enclosed a certified copy of the warrant by which President Barack Obama has commuted the prison sentence of William Edward Ennis, Reg. No. 62601–080. Please deliver the enclosed warrant to the inmate and ensure he has completed the enclosed receipt acknowledging that he has received the warrant. The receipt should be returned to this office via email to [email protected]. Thank you for your assistance.
Sincerely,
Robert A. Zauzmer
Acting Pardon Attorney
* * *
—
Donna had never wanted to be an attorney. She wanted to be a literature professor. She wanted to teach Moby-Dick. Law school was more her mom’s idea.
She was in her office when she got the voicemail from Billy. He was weeping. She called him back right away but couldn’t reach him. She checked her email and found the list of new commutations there, and she scrolled up and down to make sure what she was seeing was really there.
• William Ennis—El Paso, Tex.
Commutation Grant: Prison sentence commuted to expire on December 1, 2016.
She forwarded the news to everyone in the office, to everyone in the district, to everyone she knew. She couldn’t sit still. She kept trying to reach Billy. For a couple of hours, she tried to work, then drove home. She wanted her husband to take her out to dinner. She couldn’t sit still. She wondered if Obama knew how commutations affected people. She wondered why he had done it. He would get no political capital for a thing like this. She wondered if anybody in the press would say it was the right thing to do. What an odd, quaint thing to have in America, she thought, the idea that politicians could step outside of the system and say, “Enough is enough.” All of these ideas were racing through her mind, and her husband wasn’t home yet to take her to dinner, so she was going to just pour herself a drink to calm herself down, but instead she got the idea to open her laptop. She drafted the email, slept on it, edited it the next morning. She wanted to get it just right.
She wondered if anybody ever bothered to thank the president. When a person in a position of power does a powerful thing, the focus tends to be on the thing, not the person who did it.
From: Donna Coltharp
Submitted: 8/4/2016 12:14 PM EDT
Address: San Antonio, Texas
Dear Mr. President,
Yesterday, you announced the commutation of the three-life sentences one of my first clients as a federal public defender is serving. His name is William (Billy) Ennis. No one I have ever represented is more deserving of a second chance. In fact, for this reason, I referred Billy’s case to a commutation lawyer a year before our national commutation projects began.
Billy grew up with parents who trafficked in drugs at the border. At one point, when he was a child, he was actually kidnapped by people who were seeking to collect drug debts from his parents. For awhile, as a child, Billy lived under a bridge. It was not surprising that, as a young adult, he picked up two drug convictions—one relatively minor. Then, he went straight. Quit using drugs. He had a son. But, he got pulled back into his parents’ dealings and performed a role in a drug transaction. And, the drug laws put him away for three lifetimes. His son, whom he had custody of, was just a baby.
I lost Billy’s direct appeal. But, I have remained in touch with him for the past 14 years. We talk at least once a month. So much has changed. His son now plays high school football in El Paso! His mother passed away a few years after he was sentenced. Billy has participated in every prison program available to him and has the respect of prison staff and inmates alike.
Billy deserved a second chance. But not many people would have given it to him. I am profoundly grateful that you have the courage to look at people whom society has decided are not worth looking at and see an opportunity for redemption rather than just a criminal. Yesterday, the day I heard about Billy’s commutation, is the single best day I’ve had as a criminal defense attorney. I’ve seen clients walk free because of my representation (not many!), but I have never seen a client handed the gift of grace that you gave Billy.
Billy called me in tears yesterday. I may never hear from him again, but I will never forget him or that call. Please keep him in your prayers as he tries to find a way forward to a better life.
* * *
—
Billy has never met Donna in person. Today she’s in El Paso for some kind of meeting, and that’s why he’s finally getting to meet her. He imagines her with dark hair, probably about fifty. He knows he’s put on weight, and he wishes he still had hair. In a few minutes he’ll be ready to head out, but first you can look around if you want.
As you can see, the house needs work. When Billy first walked in a few months ago, the cobwebs were like The Addams Family. He’s tackling the plumbing and the electric first. It’s weird being forty-seven and coming back to the house you grew up in. Billy lived here until he was thirteen, back before everything went haywire. His grandmother owned it. When she died, she left the house to Billy, even though he was serving two life sentences. Not three, as Donna says in her letter to Obama. When it comes to multiple life sentences, it’s easy to lose track.
Over the years, while the house sat vacant, people came through and trashed the place. But that’s okay. As you can see, they left the family photos. Here’s one from a vacation at Knott’s Berry Farm in about 1980. Billy is maybe ten here. He and Chester and a cousin, Billy’s mom and dad, all dressed like cowboys at one of those booths where you get to wear historic costumes. That’s Billy’s dad with the sheriff badge. Everyone in this picture besides Billy is either dead or in prison.
He’s glad he has a house to live in. He’s been able to see his son, William, a few times. William is tall and super involved in church and school, so he’s busy. He got Billy a dog. They named him Zeus.
Billy’s job is in roofing. Metal roofs. He appreciates the guy giving him a chance. After just months on the job, he’s already been promoted to supervisor. He sometimes feels like Rip Van Winkle. Everyone now is so obsessed with their phones. When he left for prison fifteen years ago, it was still the flip phone. Billy does not yet quite understand texting. He recently went to his first Starbucks. Also, he recently got a girlfriend. They met in the supermarket.
“Don’t I know you?” she said.
“My name is Billy,” he said.
“Ennis!” she said.
They recognized each other from seventh grade, before everything happened.
Dear Donna:
Thank you for taking the time to write to me last August. I read your message personally, and it meant a lot to hear your perspective on Billy’s case. People who have made mistakes deserve opportunities to earn second chances, and stories like his underscore why we need to make our criminal justice system fairer and more effective, particularly when it comes to nonviolent drug offenses.
I firmly believe that exercising my power as President to commute the sentences of deserving men and women is an important step toward restoring the fundamental ideals of justice and fairness. Still, there is more work to do, and your experience speaks to the responsibility we have to make sure people who learn from their mistakes are able to continue to be a part of our American family.
Again, thank you for your inspiring message. I am tremendously grateful for your years of service as a public defender, and your message will stay with me.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama
* * *
—
When Billy gets to the office in El Paso, Donna is eating birthday cake. It’s awkward. They can hardly make eye contact. She offers him cake. She says there’s quesadillas in the back. She finds that she really wants to feed him.
“How is your son?” she asks.
“How is
your son?” he asks.
They exchange updates and soon begin showing pictures.
“He looks just like you!”
“I got fat.”
“You look fantastic.”
He tells her about getting promoted to supervisor on the job; $17.50 an hour is pretty good for El Paso. She tells him she got promoted to supervisor, too, to deputy federal public defender. “It’s weird. But I guess it’s worth it—”
“Definitely.”
“Right.”
“Anyway—”
It’s hard to find words sometimes.
“I want you to know I appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” he says finally.
“You kept me optimistic,” she says, and she opens her arms.
“I’m sorry,” he says about crying, and she holds him.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
It turns into more of a laugh-cry for both of them.
“It’s hard to believe life can be so good sometimes,” she says.
CHAPTER 16
Election Day
On Election Day, Hillary Clinton had an 85 percent chance of becoming the next president of the United States, according to The Upshot in The New York Times. “Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L. kicker misses a 37-yard field goal,” the Times reported. Over at FiveThirtyEight, she had a 71 percent chance of winning, and she was predicted to take 302 electoral votes.
Yena and others on the OPC staff were headed over to Lacey’s apartment, where they would watch the election results together. There would be champagne. It would be a celebration, albeit a bittersweet one. The last full day of the Obama administration, January 19, 2017, would be the last day for this OPC staff. They could apply for positions under the new administration, but there were no guarantees of anything; this team was breaking up, and everyone knew it.
Much of the focus over the past month had been on preparing transition materials. Fiona remembered 2009 all too well; the Bush OPC staff had left the Obama team virtually nothing in the way of guidance. No procedure manuals, no letter templates, no software, no hardware, no computer, no telephones…no paper. Mike Kelleher had had to start from scratch to create the foundation for what would turn into this OPC empire, and Fiona was determined to hand it to the new folks intact—with detailed manuals. She had instructed her staff to document everything: Break down every beat of every process, sorting, sampling (in pencil), dispositions, Red Dots, policy letters, casework referrals, inmate mail, kid mail, condolence letters, emerging issues meetings, the conditional language tech team, algorithms. If they prepared the materials properly, it would be plug and play for the new administration. She organized the materials into binders, and when the transition team came in, as they were scheduled to do sometime soon after the election, she would hand the material over to them and let them know she was available for questions, for training sessions, anything at all.
Fiona wasn’t going to Lacey’s party. She wanted to watch the results in the quiet of her home with her husband. The next morning was going to be nuts, she warned me. She had readied the staff: Nobody should even bother going to the hard-mail room. She would need everyone, all the interns, all the volunteers, all hands on deck in the email room. Major national events, like State of the Union addresses, always generated massive amounts of email, and this one—the first woman ever to be elected president, the first black president handing the reins over to the first woman president—was sure to blow the circuits.
* * *
—
Cody Keenan was watching the election results at his apartment with his wife and his friends Ben Rhodes and Dan Pfeiffer. His phone rang at about 2:30 A.M.
It was Obama. “You know we’re going to need to rewrite this statement for tomorrow,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” Cody said, and he turned off the TV.
He scrapped the remarks he had begun drafting for Obama to deliver in the Rose Garden on the day after the election congratulating Hillary Clinton for her historic win.
Donald Trump had won the presidency, and Cody wondered what in the world Obama should now say to America from the Rose Garden.
At six in the morning, Cody sent Obama his revisions.
“A little too dark,” Obama told him.
“Yeah, I know,” Cody said.
* * *
—
It was raining on the morning after the election, and I arrived at the White House gates early. No one at the main OPC office on the fourth floor of the EEOB was in yet except for Fiona, who was shuffling through papers as I sat on the other side of her desk.
“Well,” she said, looking up. Her face held the vague puffiness of a morning after little sleep.
“Well,” she started again, bouncing a stack of pages up and down and into order. She was having trouble making eye contact. The sky outside her window was a flat steel gray. I could hear the distant whirr of a printer revving up. There was a wet umbrella at my feet.
“Well, your hair looks great,” she said.
I told her, no, her hair did.
“Oh, it’s just—” She shook her head to make a swish. We discussed my bangs.
Hair talk is a refuge.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally, dropping back in her chair. “It’s just that you’re the first person I’ve talked to.”
“Same,” I said.
We muttered awkwardly about greeting the security guys out at the gate, and did that count? No, yeah, no.
I suppose a lot of people will always remember where they were when the sun came up. The first person you talked to. What you said. The implications, one by one, hitting you. Wait, what? This wasn’t supposed to happen. How strange it was to feel that reality had gotten ahead of you and now you had to race to catch up. If you even wanted to catch up. The lethargy of not wanting to join the new reality would increasingly feel like a flu spreading.
The email room was in another building, in the satellite office over on Jackson Place, and soon Fiona and I would head over and join the staff and the voices from all the people all over America who had awakened that morning to the results and had the thought: Today I need to write to President Obama.
From: Sam K-G
Submitted: 11/9/2016 8:20 AM EST
Address: Granville, Ohio
Message:
Dear Mr. President,
I’m not really the “writing a letter to the president” type. It seems like more of an idealistic gesture than anything else. But this morning, I am frightened for the future of our country. As, I am sure, are you. As any reasonable person would be. What I ask is this: Please please do whatever you can to curtail Trump. Anything you can do to mitigate this catastrophe that is underway.
I’m sorry your presidency has to end like this.
Sam
P.S. To the volunteer reading this: must be a crazy day in there. Keep up the good work
Fiona finally broke down in tears that morning in her office. It was only a matter of time, and now she was getting it over with. “I’m sorry,” she said, her head hanging. She talked about her husband, Chris. They were newly married. She reminded me that Chris had worked at OPC and that was where they met; they had trained together, eight hours a day reading hard mail together. An experience like that bonds you, she said.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
So many people throughout my time at OPC talked about the bond. It reminded me of the way soldiers talk, or coal miners: groups of people on the front line of something most people never witness. The mailroom. Who would think something like that would happen in a mailroom?
“You ready to head over?” Fiona said, and we both grabbed our umbrellas and our coats.
I saw Kolbie on the way out; she was leaning against a wall with another staffer who see
med to be consoling her. She was looking down at her shoes, biting the nail on her thumb.
* * *
—
Jackson Place is the street across from the White House that forms the western border of Lafayette Square. It’s lined with cherry trees and stately brick townhouses that were built in the nineteenth century. They were the homes of diplomats and dignitaries, including Henry Reed Rathbone, the military officer who was sitting in the President’s Box at Ford’s Theatre next to Abraham Lincoln when Lincoln was assassinated; Rathbone never recovered from the trauma—he went mad and lived out his days in an insane asylum. President Theodore Roosevelt and his family also lived in one of the townhouses on Jackson Place while the White House underwent renovations in 1902. The federal government acquired the properties in the 1950s with the idea of tearing them down and putting up a federal office building. In 1962, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy intervened, said, don’t destroy those beautiful old buildings, and the project was canceled. Now the townhouses hold an array of federal offices that feel homey and interesting and full of intrigue.
The email room was on the third floor of 726 Jackson Place; it was a wide open space that could have once been a formal parlor. The ceilings were high, and the windows were encased in ornate moldings, and there were deep window seats. Otherwise it was cubicle after cubicle after cubicle with computer monitors flickering and maybe fifty people jammed in; at either end of the room, the staffers in charge had their computers propped up on boxes so they could stand while they worked.
One of the staffers in charge I’ll call John, even though that’s not his real name. The weird thing that happened the morning after the election was some people in OPC started to ask me not to use their real names. That had not once happened before. It was as if everyone had been under the protective shield of Fiona, of Shailagh, of Obama; it was as if OPC was a collective, and what was good for one was good for all.
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