On Friday, NPR’s Julieta Martinelli published a moving report on the plight of Matthew Charles, a man whose sentence President Trump should commute.
Charles was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison in 1996 after being convicted of drug dealing with aggravated circumstances. But after sentencing reforms introduced by President Obama, Charles was released in 2016, having served 21 years.
Unfortunately Charles is now heading back to federal prison. Not because he has committed another crime, but because the legal bureaucracy has decided he was wrongly released under Obama’s reforms.
There is a great moral injustice underway here.
Charles, now in his 50s, is a reformed man who found God in prison and has sought to better his life in freedom.
“When he walked out of prison two years ago,” Martinelli notes, “he had nothing. Even his photo albums were seized by law enforcement when he was arrested in 1995. In his file, there are countless requests made with the court asking for the photos to be returned — he never inquires about his money or vehicles. Eventually, the government writes him a letter saying they lost the photos. But, over the past two years, Charles built a new life — he bought clothing, furniture, a cellphone, a car. He rented a room in East Nashville. There are frames with new pictures and smiling faces on the nightstand next to his bed.”
Charles’ experiences of a prison bureaucracy so incompetent it seems malicious in design will be familiar to many families of those incarcerated. But the operative point here is that Charles has served a very significant sentence for a comparatively minor crime. And be under no illusions, while most federal prisons are better than most state prisons, they are profoundly unpleasant places. They are places of gangs, violence and despair.
Of course, they are also necessary places where many of those who have broken society’s contract deserve to be sent.
Yet the Matthew Charles of 2018 is not the Matthew Charles of 1996 nor even of 2016. And today, Matthew Charles deserves the chance to continue doing what he has been doing since his 2016 release. Namely, serving his community as a good citizen who renders physical proof of the moral cause of redemption.
But unless President Trump now acts, Charles will spend the next ten years in prison.
Fortunately, President Trump can still make things right. His senior advisor Jared Kushner is leading efforts to get Federal sentencing reforms through Congress, and Trump himself recently lauded America as “a nation that believes in the power of redemption.”
Trump can render meaning to those words by commuting Charles’ sentence and seeing this redeemed man freed to the new life he can build.
