The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Time served
York man convicted of murder in 1988 freed after serving 30 years
At 7:24 a.m. June 19, a Tuesday, Michael Lehman emerged from the steel door in the visitor’s center at the State Correctional Institute at Rockview, carrying a battered black foot locker that contained everything he owned.
He immediately spotted his sister, Alexis Sipe. He took a deep breath and set the foot locker down gently and approached his sister and embraced her. He picked up the foot locker and walked across the driveway in front of the prison to his parents’ Ford Flex.
He hugged his mother, Sharon Swope, who had adopted him at 7 with her ex-husband, and then his stepfather, Don, and nephew Aidan. No words were exchanged. They just looked at each other for a moment.
Finally, Lehman exhaled loudly and said, “Yeah. OK.”
It was a day that none of them had ever thought would come. Not long ago, they were resigned to the notion that Rockview, a sprawling correctional facility just east of State College, would be Lehman’s final home, that he would grow old and die there.
It was strange. It was the first time he had been outside the fence, outside the walls of prison, without being handcuffed and shackled, in 30 years. It was the first time he had worn civilian clothes - a white polo shirt, gray Dickie’s shorts and a pair of gray Vans slip-ons - during those years.
It was the first time in three decades that his sister could recall seeing him not wearing a prison jumpsuit emblazoned with “DOC” - an acronym for Department of Corrections - across the back. She recalled that when she was a kid and would visit, she wondered aloud why all of the men in the visiting room had the nickname “Doc.” Alexis asked him. “Are you OK?” Lehman blinked and looked around and said, “Yeah.”
He climbed into the passenger seat of the Flex, and his sister began the two-hour drive to York County, heading to Route 26 toward breakfast, home and the rest of his life.
“Not so fast,” he cautioned his sister. “If you crashed here...”
His voice trailed off as the car approached the entrance to the prison.
• • •
Several times during the drive home, and throughout his first day outside the prison walls, Lehman said, “I never thought this day would come.”
Prison has pretty much been the only home he has ever had, having been behind bars since he was 14, the same age as his nephew. He’s 44 now, a man slouching toward middle age, complaining about the stiffness in his back after a long drive.
When he was first incarcerated, he was a skinny teenager, his body swimming in an orange prison jumpsuit with a full head of brown wavy hair. Now. his head is shaved, and he sports a goatee and hornrimmed glasses.
He had spent two-thirds of his life locked up, deservedly so, he freely admits. He also has freely admitted that he didn’t think he deserved to ever walk away from Rockview. He was excited about being out of prison, but at the same time, he feels tremendous guilt and anxiety. That was the only life he knew, and now, in his words, he had to begin “the next chapter” in an unwritten life.
It had been a strange and surreal day for him.
It had been 30 years since he was arrested and locked up, one of four accused of killing Kwame Beatty. Beatty had been a counselor at the Children’s Home of York, where Lehman had been placed after running away from home. Lehman was the lookout, sitting in a hallway while the others, an adult and two other juveniles, stabbed Beatty to death in the counselor’s room at the home.
He has never minimized his culpability and has always taken responsibility for Beatty’s death, saying, on numerous occasions, that he was responsible for the death of a man who was a better man than he will ever be. He says he feels that guilt and shame every day; it is never far from his thoughts. He knows he can never make amends, but he also knows that he wants to do something about it.
What that is remains to be seen.
• • •
Lehman is one of 517 so-called juvenile lifers in Pennsylvania and the 155th to be released after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that life sentences without the chance for parole for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional.
When he was sentenced to life without the chance for parole - escaping the death penalty by one vote by the jurors who presided over his trial - he didn’t know what that meant. Like a lot of juvenile lifers, he believed that he would get out of prison someday, believing that, somehow, life without parole didn’t really mean that.
The years passed. And as they rolled by, Lehman was convinced that he would die in prison, that this was his life. He made the most of it. He is remarkably intelligent - his IQ has tested in the 126 to 130 range - and well-read, and he decided in his 20s that if this was going to be his life, he would do something with it, rather than waste away in prison.
He worked as a teacher’s aide, leading classes for inmates working on their GEDs, something he earned behind bars. He acted in a play written by a fellow inmate, a man who became a mentor to him. He was active in the lifer’s association, serving as the organization’s president and helping organize its annual banquets for prisoners’ families.
He worked in the prison’s furniture factory. He made friends. He became a part of the community, a community composed of lifers, for the most part, men who had killed other human beings.
His appeals had gone nowhere, and he was resigned to dying in prison. He still maintained a little hope that, one day, he could get out. His hope was bolstered in 2012 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case involving a 14-year-old boy named Evan Miller - who, along with another boy, killed a man by setting fire to his trailer - ruled that life sentences without the chance for parole for juvenile offenders violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the decision, called Miller vs. Alabama, was not retroactive.
In other words, it did not apply to Michael Lehman.
Two years later, in January 2016, the Supreme Court in another case ruled that the Miller decision should be applied retroactively, that the decision, called Montgomery vs. Louisiana, should apply to all juvenile offenders sentenced to life.
That meant that Lehman had a chance of getting out of prison.
In early April, at the conclusion of a two-daylong hearing, he was resentenced to 30 years to life, making him eligible for parole on June 19, 30 years and one day after he and the three others - Cornell Mitchell, Dwayne Morningwake and Miguel Yoder - were arrested for Kwame Beatty’s murder. • • •
It was June 18, 1988. Mitchell, then 25; Morningwake, then 16, and Yoder, then 17, snuck into Beatty’s bedroom in the group home and stabbed him to death while Lehman, armed with a steak knife, remained upstairs, instructed to stab anyone who tried to intervene. (Mitchell died in prison from AIDS in 1991. Yoder pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison, making him eligible for parole this year. Like Lehman, Morningwake was tried as an adult, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without the chance for parole. He was resentenced in October 2017 to 46 years to life and won’t be eligible for parole until 2043, when he will be 70 years old.)
Lehman thinks about the date of the murder a lot, It’s never far from his mind. He says he is shamed by his actions that night, the guilt always there.
• • •
The night before her brother’s release, Alexis Sipe reclined on the bed in her hotel room, her mother sitting on the other bed while her son Aidan lay on the bed. It was strange, she said. She still had a hard time believing her brother would be getting out of prison.
She was 5 when he was arrested and held in York County Prison. She turned 7 when he was convicted and sent to Camp Hill state prison, the state’s triage center for incoming inmates. That’s where she first visited him.
Most of their visits occurred in the cavernous visiting room at Rockview. The room is almost always noisy. If friends or family want to share a meal, they have to get the food from vending machines, paying for credits to use in the machines at an ATM-like device outside the room.
“It’s crazy,” said Alexis, who practices law with her stepfather now. “Absolutely insane. He was supposed to die there.”
She recalled that she and her brother used to pick on one another. Once, he made fun of her hair, saying, “Remember that time you cut your hair short and dyed it orange?”
She replied, “We all make mistakes. Remember when you were involved in a homicide?”