After 68 years, a lifer embraces freedom
‘ I feel real good. ... I’m out. i’m home’
PHILADELPHIA • On a snow-flecked February morning, Joe Ligon stepped from his lawyer’s car, his gait deliberate yet steady, his hair white. A few hours before, he had eaten a breakfast of pancakes, two bowls of cereal, no milk, his final meal in prison.
“This is no sad day for me,” he said. “Feel real good. Like a dream come true. I anticipated this from day one.”
What was Ligon looking forward to? “A better everything.”
The son of Alabama sharecroppers, Ligon entered prison when dwight eisenhower was president. during the 68 years that he spent incarcerated in a half dozen penal institutions, the world outside moved on. At the one-day trial in 1953, Ligon and his co-defendants were referred to as “coloured.” At school, his special education classes were designated for the “orthogenically backward.” He was incarcerated in a facility named the Pennsylvania Institution for defective delinquents, the inmates classified by courts “as mentally defective with criminal tendencies.”
Ligon, 83, has never had his own place, operated a cellphone, paid a bill, cast a ballot, earned the minimum wage, lived with a partner, fathered children.
While he was locked up, almost all of his family died, most of the men to murder. All he has left is a sister, some nieces and nephews. This was his central sadness: “It would have been much better if I had come out when my parents were still alive.”
Ligon was 15 on that night when everything went wrong. Now, he was an old man with few teeth — but an old man who was free and, given the circumstances, in remarkably good health. He doesn’t take any pills except vitamins.
“I feel real good. One reason for that is because I’m out. I’m home,” Ligon said. “When you get life, you have no hope, especially if you give up. you don’t make plans like I made plans.” His plans were always to be free.
That February night, Ligon and five other teenagers drained two bottles of wine, ripped through the streets of South Philadelphia near his home, and stabbed eight men, two of whom died.
Ligon admitted to stabbing one victim who survived. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Since then, all his co-defendants have been released or died.
Ligon broke every unenviable record, becoming the nation’s oldest, longest-serving juvenile lifer.
In 2016, after the u.s. Supreme Court ruled that all juvenile lifers had to be resentenced, Ligon became eligible for parole. but parole was anathema to Ligon.
At a sentencing hearing the following spring, the judge told him, “I don’t want you to die in prison.”
Ligon opted to serve nearly four more years.
His first night out, Ligon didn’t sleep any better than his last night in, even without the sirens and glaring lights that, for decades, woke him at 6 a.m.
“That’s an adjustment. you have to get used to governing your own life. your life’s been controlled for so long,” said his friend John Pace, sitting with Ligon in a back pew of bible Way baptist Church. “This is going to take some time to learn exactly what he wants to do.”