‘Midnight’ knocks system of crime and punishment
Brittany K. Barnett didn’t set out to be a crusader. She was just a rural East Texas girl with a big, supportive extended family and few cares in the world. That was before her mother fell victim to crack. “When the drug war came for us,” she writes in her inspiring new book “A Knock at Midnight,” “it came with a vengeance. When the drug war came for us, it came straight for my mom.”
Driving hours to see her mother in lockup, becoming aware of the many other, mostly Black citizens doing time for drugs, Barnett grew alarmed at some of the federal drug laws on the books. For instance, the so-called 100-to-1 rule, under which possession of crack mandates a sentence 100 times longer than that for powder cocaine. Even after her mother was released, and Barnett became a law student at the University of Houston and then Southern Methodist University, she couldn’t shake what she saw as the enormity of injustice surrounding mass incarceration in America.
Particularly jarring: the number of life sentences handed down for crackpossession charges.
“I think we have to remember as Americans that life without parole is the second-harshest imaginable punishment permitted by law in America,” Barnett says during a recent interview. Indeed, there’s only one sentence worse, and that’s death.
“A Knock at Midnight” tells the story of how Barnett converted outrage into action, putting her money where her mouth is time and again, getting knocked down nine times and getting up 10. Barnett doesn’t have to proclaim herself a hero; instead, her actions fit the designation.
After law school, Barnett was on the corporate law fast track at Dallasbased ORIX, where she delighted in closing deals and being a role model for other Black women seeking a place in the corridors of power. But after work, she would go home and stay up all night pursuing her true passion: petitioning President Barack Obama to grant clemency to inmates serving life sentences for drugs. In a sense, she had two jobs: one increasingly lucrative and frequently exciting; the other pro bono and filling her soul with a sense of purpose.
‘A Knock at Midnight:
A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom’
by Brittany K. Barnett
Crown 336 pages, $28
Eventually, when it came time to make a choice, she followed her heart.
“I felt like I wasn’t fulfilling my highest and best use in the world, and so I had to make a tough decision,” she says. “I don’t regret it. I won’t pretend like it was not a very tough decision to leave such a financially secure position where I was on such a rapid trajectory for advancement and then to fly out into the unknown. So that was not easy, but I’m glad that I took the leap.”
Today she has partners with a tragically intimate knowledge of her purpose. Sharanda Jones and Corey Jacobs were among the many for whom Barnett won clemency; both were already several years into life sentences. Now Jones and Jacobs work with Barnett on the Buried Alive Project, which strives to dismantle life-without-parole sentences handed down under federal drug laws.
“A Knock at Midnight” isn’t your ordinary memoir. It carries the force of urgent action, and it calls attention to sentencing laws that must be read to be believed.
Most important, it bears the toil and triumph of freedom hard won. That’s a quality that readers will have a hard time taking for granted after reading these pages.