Among Murderers. Sabine Heinlein
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admitted that, although the fluorescent light of the liquor store illuminated the dark street somewhat, he could not really make out the details of the process that made Davis collapse. He saw “a flash” and heard “a bang.” At this point Davis and Bruce were between thirty and forty feet away from him, and Bruce had his back turned to Vega, who now claimed that he had been distracted by Bouknight, the man in the trench coat with the carpenter’s knife, when the shot was fired.
Because he considered the testimony of both witnesses insufficient if not ridiculous, Bruce’s defense attorney, Torres, motioned for a mistrial. When the judge denied his motion, Torres asked him to reduce the charges from murder in the second degree to manslaughter in the second degree.
JUDGE: Second? Where, from a fair view of the evidence, do you see that? Would you explain that to me?
MR. TORRES: Well, Judge, in view of the fact there’s been no testimony that actually saw the weapon being shot and in view of the fact that both witnesses merely heard a sound, a pop, and saw a flash at a considerable distance, I think the jury could infer that the shooting was done accidentally and not with any intent to cause death or cause injury, physical injury.
COURT: Accidentally?
MR. TORRES: Recklessly. By the same view that Bruce possessed a weapon and discharged it in the direction of Tyrone Davis, they could believe that he did so not with the intent to kill or cause his death, but rather merely with the intent to either cause serious physical injury, which would make it manslaughter in the first degree, or to scare him and as a result of that he recklessly caused the death.
Bruce was sentenced to twenty years to life. While he now admits his guilt and shows genuine remorse for having ended someone’s life, he thinks he did not receive a fair trial. No one ever saw a gun on him. There was no physical evidence. His brother, who had observed the incident from across the street unnoticed and from whom Bruce found out that Tyrone Davis had died, had gotten rid of the murder weapon. Bruce was arrested more than sixteen hours after the act at Munchtown. A drug test may have shown that he was high on cocaine when he committed the crime, but no one bothered to check. The only two witnesses were drunk and possibly under the influence of illegal drugs.
It took Bruce two years to reveal to me another, pivotal piece of information, one that the trial transcript had neglected. Over barbeque ribs at a restaurant not far from the Castle, Bruce finished his story. After having separated his female friend and Tyrone Davis, he left the liquor store. The girl immediately took off on foot. Joseph Vega and Tyrone Davis followed Bruce out of the store. Bruce and Tyrone started to argue again. Every time Bruce and Tyrone started to fight, Joseph would stick his hand in his coat pocket as if he were about to pull a gun. According to Bruce, Tyrone was the first to land a blow. He hit Bruce in the face. Bruce pulled a gun. It was then that Bruce realized that neither Tyrone Davis nor Joseph Vega actually had a gun. They were just bluffing. Terrified, Tyrone ran. I’ll fuck this motherfucker up, Bruce remembered thinking. He chased Tyrone down and shot him. At that point the fact that Tyrone and Joseph had just bluffed and that Tyrone had run away like a coward was more infuriating to Bruce than the insults Tyrone had hurled at his friend.
“Then I was living by a street code,” Bruce explained to me at the restaurant. “If you don’t have a gun, you don’t play like you have a gun. You pull a gun, you use it.” Tyrone didn’t play by the “street code,” but Bruce did. The code held that because he had pulled a gun, he had to use it. After all, his internal sense of propriety was not the only thing at stake. At that point the whole neighborhood was watching.
Bruce’s trial transcript and his follow-up story provide a window onto an environment with codes revolving around self-preservation and respect. Bruce had to communicate to his community that he was willing to fight.
Elijah Anderson, now a sociology professor at Yale, spent several years in the 1990s documenting street law in a poor African American neighborhood in Philadelphia for his book Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. Anderson describes street laws as a response to alienation and racial discrimination by those who make and enforce America’s mainstream laws (namely the police and the judicial system).
Street law governs “interpersonal public behavior, particularly violence,” Anderson wrote. It is a form of communication whose nature “is largely determined by the demands of the circumstances but can include facial expressions, gait, and verbal expressions.”3 Joseph, would stick his hand in his coat pocket as if he were about to pull a gun. . . . The whole neighborhood was watching. If you don’t have a gun, you don’t play like you have a gun. You pull a gun, you use it.
For people like Bruce, who have lived in poor, violent environments all their lives, these laws provide safety, “for if they are bothered, not only may they face physical danger, but they will have been disgraced or ‘dissed’ (disrespected).”4
After listening to Bruce’s story I wasn’t surprised to read in a 2009 Department of Justice study—which followed up on Anderson’s findings—that “a youth’s expressed street code attitude is a developmental predictor of violent behavior.”5 What struck me was that the street code didn’t loosen its grip in prison. I now understood what Bruce told me when we first started talking. He said, “You are coming from a crime-infested environment. You are familiar with the people [in prison] and their lifestyle. They were doing the same thing as you were doing in your neighborhood. We all know each other from the street.”
Dismissing your moral code and thinking in an environment that, whenever you take a step forward, pushes you back seems almost impossible. Yet being able to control your impulses, feel empathy, and take responsibility for your actions is the first step toward rehabilitation, the first step necessary to return to and function in mainstream society. Naturally, I wondered who or what taught Bruce alternative ways of thinking. And since I came to see conditioning, violence, and rehabilitation as tightly intertwined, I also wondered how exactly he came to think the way he did in the first place.
CHAPTER FOUR
Talking Murder
Angel seemed mad. I had already apologized twice for being late and didn't know what else to do. When I arrived at the Castle one day in late June of 2007, Angel was sitting alone in the backyard reading one of his old poems. Full of pathos, his poems’ main themes expressed his wish to break out of his former self, his isolation, and his attempts to enter our world, if only spiritually. What do I owe you Oh My Society that you punish me so? one of them read. What rights under heaven do you claim to do with me as you wish? Who in this realm is more worthy of your mercy than I?1
A black iron gate stood between us, and Angel and I had to go around the corner to meet. I had brought cherry-apple-apricot cake and grapes because we wanted to picnic in the park by the Hudson River. As we headed to the water, Angel crossed Riverside Drive erratically at a red traffic light. A few months after his release he seemed to have put aside all decision making involved in crossing the street. He told me to follow him, but the street curved at such a dramatic angle and the cars moved so fast that I decided to wait for the light to change. As Angel crossed, part bold, part careless, he looked determined yet lost. He wore big mustard-colored Timberlake boots, and his khakis were far too wide and about five inches too short. If his pants hadn't been held up by a belt they would have been around his ankles. But the belt seemed to serve another crucial purpose. He needed it to attach his pedometer. His Digiwalker counted the miles he walked each day—usually about two, but today a bit more, since it took us a while to find a spot to sit.
The pedometer was a present from Tanya, a Quaker who had sent him letters in prison and developed a growing interest in him since his release. She had also given Angel a cell phone, vouched for a credit card, and started to pay him frequent visits at the Castle. I had yet to meet Tanya, but Angel had made sure right off the bat that I knew he had a way with the ladies. Once he declared that a woman across from us was looking at him like he was “a box of chocolate.” “I'm starting to get bothered by these side glances,” he told me another time. When I asked him how he noticed a woman's interest, he said, matter-of-factly, “If she messes with her hair, she's interested.”
The bench Angel