Long before my first, award-winning book, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present, an epic poem on the captivity, exploitation and suffering of Black people in America, was published (2000), I knew I had arrived as a writer because I had received my first piece of hate mail in response to a guest editorial in Newsday, the daily paper of Long Island, NY.

ENDLESS PUNISHMENT IS A CRIME

My guest editorial in Newsday was about the quality of mercy. Gov. Mario Cuomo, dubbed Hamlet on the Hudson, on New Year’s Eve in 1985, granted executive clemency to Gary McGivern. Granted, McGivern was an unlikely candidate for executive clemency, which has been described as an “extraordinary form of relief.” Most New York governors have been extremely parsimonious in granting executive clemency to people convicted of crimes of violence, going back to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who granted such clemencies more so than all his successors to the current governor, Kathy Hochul.

Gary McGivern was serving time in prison when he, and two others, allegedly attempted to escape from custody when they were being transported. During the attempted escape, according to the theory of the crime the prosecutor put forward, McGivern and the two others killed a deputy sheriff. (One of the two others, Robert Bowerman, with McGivern was also killed during the attempted escape.) McGivern’s defense, as well as Chuck Culhane, offered that it was the other individual who attempted to escape, not them. Nonetheless, McGivern and Culhane were convicted of felony-murder and sentenced to death. They successfully challenged the sentence of death and were sentenced to 25 years to life. Throughout, McGivern maintained his innocence.

In commuting McGivern’s sentence through executive clemency, Gov. Mario Cuomo was not suggesting that he believed that McGivern was innocent, but that taking everything as a whole, including McGivern’s rehabilitational efforts, that an appearance before a parole board was in order to determine McGivern’s “parole readiness.” McGivern would appear before a parole board panel, and it would make a determination whether he should be released to parole supervision. Granting McGivern clemency was politically risky, and the talk in the prison yard was that there were worthier candidates for clemency than McGivern. In some ways, Gov. Mario Cuomo exercised political courage in being clement in this particular case, though there were hundreds if not thousands of other people in prison with more compelling cases than McGivern. My guest editorial in Newsday spoke to Mario Cuomo’s political courage and the quality of mercy as articulated by Shakespeare’s Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

About two weeks after my guest editorial was published in Newsday, I received my first piece of hate mail, from Hicksville, NY. The hater quickly devolved into an ad hominem attack, stating that he was sick of my “kind,” and that it did not matter what my race was. Note that my guest editorial was about the quality of mercy, and race did not enter the equation. For the record, a white governor granted executive clemency to a white person who had been found guilty of killing a white deputy sheriff! Of course, in matters of crime and punishment, race seems to find its way into the equation, even when it’s not part of the formula. The Hickvillian assumed that I was Black.

Writers who choose to put skin in the game have toughened themselves against ad hominem attacks. When we are personally attacked as opposed to the ideas we put out to the public, then we know we have touched a nerve of raw truth.

Truth be told, haters don’t deter me. It would be a stretch to state that haters inspire me. Nonetheless, I continued to write even more editorials and letters to editors on crime and punishment, because it is a subject that not only touches raw nerves, but also the subject where truth is most wanting.

In my next blog I’ll write about crime & punishment.