Sentenced to 21 years

He doesn’t remember overdosing on crack.

A cousin told him what happened that day in the early 1990s — how he ran through a screen door and passed out on a dirt road near Kannapolis, a town

about a half-hour’s drive from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Patterson had started using crack a few years earlier, after being homeless following the deaths of his grandparents, who raised him. It took time but he shook his drug habit.

Still, the illiterate highschool dropout with a drug-possession record saw just one option to earn money: hustling drugs.

On a typical day, he sold drugs to up to 80 people in and around Kannapolis. Business was thriving. Until, he says, the strippers set him up.

In late August 2001, Patterson said, he drove to meet the women at a Concord gas station.

He had supplied them with crack before. When he arrived, they weren’t there but plenty of law-enforcement officers were.

That fall, Patterson pleaded guilty in federal court to possession with intent to distribute 20.5 grams of crack, and estimated the drugs had a street value of $850 to $900. He faced a prison sentence of 10 years to life, court records show, and Patterson thought he would get the low end of that sentence.

But he had a trio of prior convictions having to do with either possessing or selling cocaine. None of the crimes involved violence, but the convictions changed the calculation of his new sentence, making him a “career offender.”

In February 2002, a judge sentenced Patterson to 21 years and eight months.

“I cried like a baby and said, ‘Lord, you got me. Just please protect and guide me,’” Patterson recalled.

In prison, Patterson saw plenty he’d like to forget. The inmate who got stabbed to death for cutting in the chow line. The prisoner who shoved a lock inside a sock then split open someone’s skull during an argument.

As the years rolled on, the cards from friends and family stopped coming. The visits became fewer. But his girlfriend, mom and sisters stood by him. Patterson also was close to his dad, who died in 2008 while he was in prison. Patterson couldn’t go to the funeral.

A teacher in prison got through to him on this point: As a black man with a felony, he already had two strikes. But he could do something about the third strike: no education. So Patterson learned how to read and write, eventually earning his GED. He completed adult continuing-education classes, from business management to piano theory, attended victim-impact programs and sang gospel in the prison choir.

His favorite song: “Lord, Make Me Over.”

The clemency plan

In 2014, midway through his second term, Obama began his clemency initiative.

As he later wrote in the Harvard Law Review, criminal-justice reform for people who deserve a second chance “reflects who we are as a people and reveals a lot about our character and commitment to our founding principles.”

The “war on drugs” in the 1970s and 1980s had led to much harsher punishment for having or selling crack vs. powder cocaine. The resulting sentences disproportionately impacted minorities, and Congress did not change the laws until 2010.

Several legal groups formed Clemency Project 2014 to offer inmates free aid. They screened more than 36,000 requests and sent nearly 2,600 petitions to federal authorities for consideration.

Attorney Naikang

Tsao handled Patterson’s case. Under current law, Tsao said, Patterson’s priors would not have qualified him as a career offender and the amount of drugs he had would have been subject to a much lower sentence. Also taken into consideration: In 14 years in prison, Patterson had never once had an infraction.

Aug. 30, 2016, is a day Patterson will never forget, and one that Tsao easily recalls:

Patterson is summoned to the prison administration building.

Sit down and shut the door, his caseworker says. Someone needs to talk to you.

The phone rings and Tsao’s on the other line.

“Man, please don’t give me bad news.”

He doesn’t: “Obama commuted your sentence today.”

Patterson drops the phone. He falls to his knees and cries and cries.

“Hallelujah. Thank you, Jesus,” Patterson shouts, sobbing. “I knew you was going to do it, Jesus. Oh, hallelujah.”

A free man

Patterson walked out of prison on Sept. 27. In the parking lot, he hugged Angela, his longtime girlfriend, without guards ordering him to stop.

He spent the next two weeks in a halfway house then was under house arrest until late December. Longtime friend Russell Young helped him land a job at a Charlotte window-manufacturing plant. According to Young, Patterson works hard and avoids his old crowd.

“He wants to work and make honest money,” Young said. “I see that in him, I really do.”

In November, Patterson and Angela, a school-bus driver, were married. They’ve been together for 20 years.

Patterson has seven children, ages 17 to 26, and one who died as a baby whose name he has tattooed on the back of his left hand. He’s also raising another child, 14-year-old Alexandrea, as his own daughter.

Patterson says he doesn’t want to let them down. Or his wife. Or Obama.

At times, he reads his commutation letter and still chokes up.

“You have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around,” Obama wrote to him. “Now it is up to you to make the most of this opportunity.”

Patterson wants to prove Obama right and the doubters wrong, “that we ain’t nothin’ but drug-dealing thugs. … We’re human beings that made a mistake. And people can change. I’m living proof of that.”

Patterson knows the devil’s out there. But so is his wife. He calls her his angel.

“I rehabilitated myself through the word of God,” Patterson said. “I looked at all my wrongs and the mistakes I did. … I ain’t going back to that life.”