After release, a hard road back
With her conviction overturned, woman struggles to start over
HOLLY SPRING S, N.C. Nancy Frederick screamed with joy the day a federal judge threw out her daughter’s gun conviction and sent her home from prison. But she worries, too.
Her daughter, Kim Harris, was released a month ago with little more than a bus ticket and the clothes she was wearing, and she doesn’t have much more today. Without a job, she’s having a hard time coming up with the $32 she needs to get her driver’s license back. Without a license, she’s struggling to find a job.
Unless something changes soon, Frederick worries her daughter will end up back in her old neighborhood, back with her old friends, and back to her old vocation: selling drugs.
“It’s so hard for her to go out and get a job. And if she feels like no one’s not going to help her, she’s going to turn back and start doing that stuff she was already doing,” Frederick said.
Harris is one of at least 17 people released from federal prison this year following a USA TODAY investigation that identified dozens of inmates who remained locked up on gun possession charges even though a court later determined that they had not committed a federal crime.
The U.S. Justice Department had initially urged courts to keep them imprisoned even though its lawyers conceded they were “legally innocent” but reversed its position after the newspaper’s investigation.
Harris, 32, said she started selling cocaine and marijuana when she was 15. She said the police used to tell her that “everywhere I go there was al- ways a cloud of smoke following me.” She was twice convicted on drug charges in state court.
Her last arrest was in January 2008, when police stopped her on her way to drop off her boyfriend at a halfway house where he was finishing his own sentence on federal gun charges. An officer found two loaded handguns and extra ammunition in the car, according to court records.
Harris told the police both guns were hers, though her lawyer later claimed in a court filing that one actually belonged to her boyfriend, James Bennett, a reputed gang member known as “Inky,” and that he threatened Harris and her family if she didn’t take the charge for him. She did, and refused to testify against him.
A judge sentenced Harris to more than eight years in prison for being a felon in possession of a gun. She had already served three the day guards summoned her over the loudspeaker to the office of the women’s prison camp in Marianna, Fla., and told her that her conviction had been overturned, she said, and that they had to get her off the premises as soon as possible. She picked up her belongings, and they drove her to the Greyhound station and gave her a ticket.
Harris said she rode the bus overnight to Raleigh. Her aunt picked her up, and they went out to eat. She stayed briefly with her mom, then her grandmother, then with people she knew in Raleigh.
Everything since has been a struggle, she said.
She wants to find a job training service dogs, something she learned to do while in prison. But she said she’d take a job doing landscaping — or anything. Meanwhile, she borrowed $5 and $10 at a time from relatives who didn’t have enough money to help her more. She got back the $150 she had paid in fines and court fees on Tuesday.
“Only thing I got is to take a day at a time and make it do what it do,” Harris said. “A lot of things I want to do, but I don’t have the money. I got the charges. It’s hard. It’s just a bad situation.”
Harris said she won’t go back to selling drugs. “I can’t go back to that life. . . . When I was in fed prison, I weighed my options,” she said on a recent afternoon, twirling blond-tinted dreadlocks falling past her shoulders.
“I’m free, and that’s all that matters to me.”