I’ve experienced the racial disparities and harsh retribution of the Virginia criminal legal system firsthand. I join the call for Gov. Ralph Northam to pardon the Martinsville 7 posthumously as a small but important way to begin the process of acknowledging the unfair and racist treatment of Black people in the Virginia legal system.
I had just turned 20 years old when I received a 24-year sentence in Virginia for armed robbery. I came home this year after 22 years. From the moment of my arrest until now, I have been treated with assumed guilt, denied due process and cruel violence in the Virginia Department of Corrections.
Alfred Dearing
My juvenile records, which should not have been used, were used in my conviction, which raised the length of time I could serve. I asked for a motion for severance from my cousin, who was my co-defendant and who, due to pressure from law enforcement, wrote a statement against me. His statement became the only evidence that was used against me.
When I first heard about the men who made up the Martinsville 7 I wasn’t surprised at all it happened because it continues to happen today. The mentality is the same, just 70 years later.
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Virginia was the first slave state and its positon toward slavery hasn’t changed; it’s just modernized and evolved in the criminal legal system. The state still allows hate to reign against black people; just look at white supremacists in Charlottesville.
In prison this is all intensified where Black people (many of whom were children when sentenced to adult time) are vastly over-represented in the population. When I first came in I wanted to take college courses that they offered at one time, but was told they stopped offering them. I was denied other programming due to the length of my sentence.
Nothing was available for me to change, learn and improve. I was surrounded by constant violence. The seriousness of my charge meant I served all my time in Supermax facilities like Red Onion, Sussex 1, 2, and South Hampton. They are the worst prisons in the state. In Red Onion a man stabbed his cellmate 47 times and the guards dragged his lifeless bloodied body out and left him there for everyone to see for days.
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I spent a total time combined of about two years in solitary — the system relies on solitary. “Reentry” is a joke.
I lost my mother and my brother right before I came home in 2018. Two of the closest people in my life died and I could not be there for their funerals or to process my grief. I wasn’t eligible for parole and couldn’t ask to be resentenced. Though my sentence was extreme, it wasn’t a life sentence; despite the fact that I spent as much of my life incarcerated as I did in the community, that’s not life in the eyes of the law.
Gov. Northam must pardon the Martinsville 7 to acknowledge the racism and injustice perpetrated on Black defendants in Virginia. We cannot bring back the lives of the men killed by the state but it will go a long way to admit human rights violation and begin the process of changing a system that blatantly denies justice to this day. I carry the emotional scars and trauma of my incarceration with me all the time. As a state the trauma and wounds of what happened to the Martinsville 7 men must be acknowledged in order for any kind of healing and progress to occur.
Alfred L. Dearing Jr., who writes under the pen name Spoken Truth, is a Washington, D.C., native and award-winning poet. He is a member of the D.C.-based nonprofit Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop, where he serves as a poet ambassador, sharing his poetry and personal story to create personal and societal change.
This column has been updated.