Will COVID-19 free Mcdonald?

Pandemic could help man jailed for decades

Melody Smith shouldn’t have had to summon people like Dorian Myers, who suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes, to join her and others in a half-mile march from I Am A Man plaza to the National Civil Rights Museum in 90-degree temperatures on Juneteenth.

But Smith’s uncle, on whose behalf Myers showed up, struggles with greater maladies — the main one being injustice.

Smith’s uncle is Curtis Mcdonald. In 1997 he, along with Alice Marie Johnson, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in a Houston-to-memphis drug trafficking ring.

In 2018, President Donald Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence after Kim Kardashian, who was moved by her story, advocated for her release. Mcdonald, however, has had to go through more rigid channels. So far, those channels aren’t budging. U.S. Attorney Michael Dunavant, who apparently is still salty over Johnson’s release — last year, he denied her request to be released from federal supervision because, among other things, he believes she is gaining too much fame from telling her story — opposed Mcdonald’s plea for compassionate release in March.

On June 8, federal judge Samuel Mays Jr. agreed with Dunavant, holding to strict in

terpretations of what comprises qualifications for such a release.

No matter that Mcdonald is 70. Or that he has already served 23 years in prison for a nonviolent crime. Or that he has been an exemplary prisoner.

But since Mays’ ruling, Mcdonald has been diagnosed with COVID-19. Smith, as well as Johnson and his family and supporters, hope that a new request for his release will be granted.

Which is why people like Myers joined a crowd of Mcdonald’s supporters in the Friday march.

They wanted to make sure the community knows that an old African American man, one who has done more than two decades in prison for a non-violent crime, could die in prison for no real reason other than someone’s obsession with making an example of people like him.

“It’s really hot out here,” Myers said, “and it’s not good for me. But we needed to come out here, to show up, for all this injustice.”

Smith, who, along with Johnson, has been fighting for Mcdonald’s release for some time, said it was past time to magnify her uncle’s plight.

“With the times and with everything that’s going on, we just figured that this was our last resort,” she said. “If not, my uncle is going to die in jail ...

“We just wanted someone to hear our voice.”

Smith, as well as J.R. Futrell, who runs the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Young Man University, a prison mentoring program, said Mcdonald has done more than enough to be released.

“Everyone makes mistakes, and he deserves a second chance. He has changed his life, and he helped change the lives of others that are in prison with him,” Smith said.

Said Futrell: “He’s (Mcdonald) extraordinary. He teaches from his mistakes, and the men love him.”

Hopefully, the outpouring of community support on behalf of Mcdonald, as well as his COVID-19 diagnosis, will be enough to earn him a compassionate release. Johnson is also working to get him clemency, as well.

“He’s a 70-year-old Black man and a firsttime offender, and a lot of the men (fellow prisoners) said he helped to change their lives,” said Johnson, who didn’t attend the march but spoke with me on the phone earlier in the week.

“But he’s a danger to be out?”

Things shouldn’t have had to come to this.

It shouldn’t take people marching in sweltering temperatures, nor a diagnosis of a potentially fatal disease, to get an old man who has already done more than two decades in prison and has rehabilitated himself, to be released.

The space he’s occupying could be used for violent offenders who are younger and have more time and energy to wreak havoc on the streets.

Mcdonald’s plight not only magnifies the unfairness of the drug war, but how, in some spaces of the judicial system, revenge continues to be prized above justice.

“This really saddens me so much,” Johnson said. “This is really heartbreaking for me, because there’s people who think Curtis should die in prison.”

It will be beyond shameful if that happens.

JOE RONDONE/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL Kim King leads protesters on Friday calling for the release of her uncle Curtis Mcdonald, 70, who was Johnson's drug trafficking co-defendant. After 23 years Mcdonald continues to serve his sentence and has since contracted COVID-19.

ALAIN MCLAUGHLIN Alice Marie Johnson had been serving a life sentence for a non-violent drug offense before she was granted clemency by the Trump administration.

AP Celebrity Kim Kardashian, left, helped to free Alice Marie Johnson from prison.