Crime Spree

Abstract

Crime Spree Desiree Cooper (bio) So many of us walk around believing there's a moral wall between good people and bad people. But in my experience, that wall is permeable, like snow fencing. The slide from law-abiding to lawless can be swift and random. Like a plague. Maybe that's why folks say, "Sam caught a case," rather than "Sam was arrested." It's as if there is no act of volition, no agency in breaking the law. Criminality just infects you while your defenses are down. It can happen to anyone. Toni is a pretty Latina in her forties, the first in her family to earn a bachelor's degree. When she was seventeen, she and her boyfriend schemed to sell ten pounds of marijuana. (They never had drugs, only old clothes in a garbage bag.) Toni, the getaway driver, has never denied her culpability in the plan, but claims she had no idea that her boyfriend was armed. She alleged that she dropped him off with the bag in Southwest Detroit to meet the buyers. When she circled back to pick him up, she heard gunshots. "There weren't supposed to be gunshots," she said. "I drove away in terror." Several days later, police came to her job, arrested her, and put her in the back of a squad car. That's when she found out that she was an accomplice to a marijuana deal, turned robbery, turned murder. The shootout had [End Page 117] left one teen dead and his twin permanently paralyzed. Toni prayed that it wasn't true (she was, and still is, a devout Catholic). She worried about what her mother would do when she found out Toni had been arrested, worried about who would care for her disabled brother if she were behind bars. But her tears didn't erase the fact that her actions had set in motion the shooting of two teens. It was the 1990s and children over the age of fifteen routinely were dubbed super-predators by the media and tried as adults. Toni was interrogated for hours, denied the simple dignity of a tampon, given incompetent legal representation, and convicted of murder. In 1991, she was sentenced more heavily than her boyfriend who'd pulled the trigger: twenty-five to fifty years in prison. In prison, Toni was housed with adults. Some of the women became like mothers and sisters. She was sexually humiliated and raped by guards. But she studied hard and earned her bachelor's degree and a bevy of certifications. She prayed and wrote and learned. She expressed profound remorse, apologized for her role in the shootings, and walked the straight and narrow despite the hopelessness of mandatory minimums. In the mid-2000s, her cousin sent me a letter to the Detroit Free Press where I was a columnist. He begged me to help get her sentence commuted. By the time I met Toni and learned her life story, she'd already served more than fifteen years. I wasn't sure if that was a fair exchange for the taking of a life. But I was sure that Toni would never commit a crime again. I decided to help. It took years, but her sentence was commuted in 2008. Today, Toni is a soft-spoken PTA mom with a bubbly, raven-haired daughter and a soft spot for animals. People don't know that for years, Toni kept her bathroom door open in her suburban home, forgetting that on the outside, people are allowed to piss in private. Her neighbors don't know that the headlights beaming through her bedroom blinds at night can send her shrieking in fear—they look too much like the flashlight beams of hard-cocked security guards. To most people, Toni is just one of us. The late 1980s was the height of Detroit's crack epidemic. The unemployment rate was among the highest in the nation, as was the rate of violent crimes. There's no getting around it: Detroit was a dangerous town. [End Page 118] In 1988, I left the practice of law and went to work for a Detroit nonprofit that helped address the...