When inmates at San Quentin State Prison began submitting applications for commutations last year, Shadeed Wallace-Stepter was skeptical.
He didn’t think a commutation was attainable; it would be like winning the lottery.
“When you think of commutations, you think of pardons, death row, a last-minute call from the governor,” Wallace-Stepter said. “In the 17, 18 years I’d been in prison, I’d never heard of anyone getting a commutation.”
“When you think of commutations, you think of pardons, death row, a last-minute call from the governor,” Wallace-Stepter said. “In the 17, 18 years I’d been in prison, I’d never heard of anyone getting a commutation.”
“When you think of commutations, you think of pardons, death row, a last-minute call from the governor,” Wallace-Stepter said. “In the 17, 18 years I’d been in prison, I’d never heard of anyone getting a commutation.”
Although Gov. Jerry Brown has reduced punishments for 283 people during his last eight years in office — more than any other governor in California history — the majority of his commutations have come recently, with more than 200 in November and December. Before that, California governors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis and Pete Wilson commuted 14 sentences combined.
Because of the seemingly long odds against receiving a commutation, which would reduce the length of his sentence, Wallace-Stepter — convicted for shooting someone during a robbery at age 16 — originally put all of his energy into filing a habeas corpus claim, which allows inmates to challenge their imprisonment on the basis of factors like inadequate representation or prosecutorial misconduct.
But at the urging of staff from Re:Store Justice, an Oakland nonprofit, Wallace-Stepter, 36, sat down in March to answer the five questions on a commutation application. Five months later, he got a call from the governor’s office. His sentence was being commuted. His 19th year in prison would be his last.
In the year since it was founded, Re:Store Justice has helped Wallace-Stepter and more than 10 other men serving life sentences at San Quentin gain their freedom after spending decades in prison. The organization works with currently and formerly incarcerated people, victims of violent crimes and legislators to reform the criminal justice system.
A lot of this kind of work typically focuses on nonviolent offenses, like drug crimes, which is why Re:Store Justice decided to direct its efforts toward violent crimes.
“There’s not enough action in this space, and if we’re going to address mass incarceration, we need to address what we call violent and serious crimes,” said Kate Chatfield, the organization’s policy director.
Re:Store Justice teamed up with state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, to draft SB1437, the bill that overturned California’s felony murder rule. Before the bill passed, defendants could be found guilty of murder if they participated in a crime that killed a person, even if they didn’t do the killing. Beginning in January, people convicted under the old law can petition for resentencing.
Part of Chatfield’s mission is to go into every state prison to train inmates on how the law has changed and how to file a petition.
Wallace-Stepter now lives at the organization’s headquarters in Oakland, which doubles as a re-entry house for those recently released from prison. His housemate, Earlonne Woods, had his sentence commuted Nov. 21 and came home nine days later, after serving 21 years for attempted robbery with a firearm, his third strike.
“A lot of people want to know how you get back into the flow of society,” Woods said. “You dream about it every day in prison, so when you step back out, it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m back.’”
On his commutation application, Woods found one question more difficult than the others.
“When they ask you why do you deserve (a commutation), of course you say, ‘Well, I’ve served a lot of time.’ But you can’t say it like that,” Woods said. “We feel we don’t deserve anything, but we would love it.”
In 2017, Woods launched Ear Hustle, a podcast that tells the stories of inmates at San Quentin. Woods said he’ll continue working on the show as a producer, but not before taking a vacation to relish his new freedom.
Re:Store Justice’s other efforts include helping inmates produce videos about their experiences in prison as a way to foster accountability and rehabilitation. Wallace-Stepter and others work as writers, editors, videographers, cinematographers and audio engineers on stories that range from moving into a new cell to prison lunches.
In one video, a teary-eyed man in San Quentin talks about his struggles watching his son grow up from afar.
“Many of us committed violent crimes, and we want to show we were accountable and that we just aren’t the same people anymore,” Wallace-Stepter said. “There’s so much more to us than the crimes we’ve committed.”
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle – Ashley McBride, writer Jessica Christian, photographer
