I don't think it's necessary, but here's a picture of the guy:Johnny Holley Jr. still can't quite believe it.
Arrested almost 30 years ago for stealing a toolbox. Sentenced to life in prison without hope of parole. Now out, but only after spending 28 years — more time than many murderers serve — behind bars.
"I still in the world can't figure out how I ended up with that sentence," Holley, 63, said in a phone interview from Tuscaloosa, where he lives with a sister since leaving a state inmate transition center in March. He'd been there since last summer, when the state parole board released him from a prison term that began in 1980.
Holley's story drew statewide attention in 1994 when told on the Press-Register's front page. By then, he'd languished 14 years in prison for a petty theft committed when Jimmy Carter was president.
He took the toolbox from a pickup parked outside a Tuscaloosa church one Sunday morning in early 1980. Because of a record of prior convictions — although never for hurting anyone — he was hammered by a state law that heaped extra time on repeat offenders.
Holley ended up with the toughest possible sentence short of execution.
He is free today only because the Legislature changed the repeat-offender law early this decade.
The change in the law allowed for the possibility of parole. Even so, it took him several years to be resentenced and to get out.
Holley said he's not bitter. He found faith three months into his term, he said, and that "broke the whole cycle."
"I'm glad to be out," he said. "I'm going to try to do all in God's power to stay out."
His niece, Patricia Evans Mokolo, is less forgiving of the state. Only 9 when her uncle was sent away, Mokolo sees his experience as evidence of a profound "imbalance" in the justice system.
"You have people who don't have money, are not well-educated and don't have anyone to fight for them," she said. "They are the ones who are going to bear the brunt of the punishment."
Holley, a high school dropout who admits that he deserved at least a couple of years imprisonment for the theft, questioned whether his lawyer at the time handled the case properly.
He knows he was also sideswiped by circumstance.
The repeat offender law had taken effect only weeks before his sentencing. Confronted while stealing the toolbox, Holley pulled out a pocketknife, thereby turning the crime into armed robbery.
The toolbox's owner, who has since died, didn't want to press charges, but was talked into it by a young deputy district attorney who later concluded that he'd made a mistake.
"I was acting as a knee-jerk prosecutor without the benefit of enough experience to know that law cannot be a 'one size fits all' process," Bruce Maddox, now a lawyer in private practice, wrote in a 2005 affidavit in support of Holley's release.
Maddox wasn't the only one who believed that Holley deserved to be released. In 1994, some 60 guards at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, where Holley was then an inmate, signed a petition saying that he had become "a changed man."
"He has built up respect from most people that know him," said Ann Williams, a Saraland woman who became acquainted with Holley through her prison ministry.
But without the 2000 law change, his only ticket out of confinement would have been a hearse. As it is, his imprisonment cost Alabama taxpayers more than $400,000, based on the current annual cost to the state of locking someone up.
Repeat offender laws have been on the books since at least the 1920s and became increasingly popular in recent times as a way of dealing with "career criminals," said John Sloan III, chairman of the justice sciences department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
While there is an argument for putting such criminals away for a long time, Sloan said, "you'd better be ready to get out your wallet."
Since his release, Holley has gone from church to church to share his testimony and dissuade young people from following the "corrupt" path that did him so much harm. He hopes to find a job using some of the skills learned in prison. Assuming that he meets his parole conditions, a pardon is possible as early as 2011.
Relatives and other well-wishers are planning a formal welcome-home party for him a little sooner than that, perhaps at the end of this month, Mokolo said.
"We want it to be a big to-do."
28 years, $400,000, and this was only because the legislature changed a law or else he would have been in there until the day he died. I'm not religious but I'm starting to feel the need to praise God fro making me white so I know nothing like this will ever happen to me.
The point of this is to have a discussion of things like 3 strikes and disparate sentancing.
