Brown’s attorney: ‘She is free! Hallelujah’
After 9-year effort, Bone’s client released
NASHVILLE - At 3:20 a.m. attorney Charles Bone finally got the news he’d been fighting for during the past nine years. His client, Cyntoia Brown, had just left the grounds of the Tennessee Prison for Women.
“She is free! Hallelujah!” he texted the team of attorneys and advocates who worked on the case.
“I’m rejoicing,” Bone said in an exclusive interview with The Tennessean Wednesday. “Knowing this is a new life for her is thrilling, but we also know what a challenge it is for her to start this journey of freedom.
“We are confident she’ll be as successful as a free woman as she had been as an incarcerated woman, but it is a totally different journey.”
Brown, 31, is now a public figure — a woman whose story about being sentenced to life in prison for a crime she committed at age 16 captured global attention.
Brown admitted to shooting Nash
ville real estate agent Johnny Allen, 43, in the back of the head in 2004. At the time, Brown said she was forced by an abusive older boyfriend to trade sex for money. Allen picked her up at an east Nashville Sonic Drive-in and took her to his home. Brown said she feared he planned to harm her when she shot him in bed as he lay naked beside her.
In prison, Brown earned two degrees through a Lipscomb University program aimed at educating those incarcerated. She mentored other inmates. She advocated for English learners classes for fellow inmates who spoke only Spanish.
In January, former Gov. Bill Haslam granted Brown clemency paving the way for her release in the early hours of Wednesday morning after serving 15 years.
Bone declined to describe in detail Brown’s future plans, including where she will live and whether she has a job, citing concerns for her security and privacy.
But he noted that Brown plans to write a book.
“We’re just excited and thankful about the book she is going to publish in October and I think the message she can deliver to the world is a message of what education can do, what redemption can do and just what perseverance can do.”
Bone is a well-known Nashville attorney who specializes in mergers and acquisitions, not criminal law.
He first learned about Brown’s case by watching a 2011 documentary about her case, “Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story,” by filmmaker Dan Birman. In 2017, Birman, The Tennessean and PBS’S documentary arm, Independent Lens, collaborated on a seven-part series “Sentencing Children,” which highlighted Brown’s case.
Intrigued, he visited Brown in prison. He decided to represent her.
“Not being a criminal lawyer, I had to have help,” he said. Bone recruited Houston Gordon, a criminal attorney. The pair went to work researching her case. Both volunteered their time.
“The more research we did, the more we found there are serious issues about the way juveniles are treated in America,” Bone said. “Cyntoia was the living embodiment of how ridiculous the juvenile justice system has been.”
In Tennessee, juveniles and adults who receive a sentence of “life with the possibility of parole” must serve a minimum of 51 years before they can be paroled.
It is the longest sentence in the nation. In addition to Brown, 184 other men and women continue to serve life sentences in Tennessee prisons for crimes they committed as teens.
“We spent a number of years in a lot of courts trying to convince the court she was wrongly convicted and should be given some relief,” said Bone.
The attorneys’ efforts to appeal Brown’s sentence proved unsuccessful.
They had filed an appeal with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals when the governor granted clemency. But Bone said he had low expectations that the conservative appellate court would have ruled in Brown’s favor.
He hopes the attention Brown’s case generated will force Tennessee lawmakers to reconsider sentencing laws.
“I think the story of Cyntoia is not just about her,” he said. “It’s about when children commit crimes but have a genuine story of redemption or education. When they have done the things Cyntoia has done, there should be a process that’s more defined than what happened with Cyntoia,”
Reach Anita Wadhwani at awadhwani@tennessean.com; 615-2598092 or follow her on Twitter @Anitawadhwani
“The more research we did, the more we found there are serious issues about the way juveniles are treated in America. Cyntoia was the living embodiment of how ridiculous the juvenile justice system has been.” Charles Bone, Cyntoia Brown’s attorney