7+ months since 9th Circuit Court- nothing but delays from the Attorney General

The past several months have been real hard on me. Ever since we won in the 9th Circuit Court. I fully expected to be home by now. Being in here after we won has become so much harder. How can they keep me in prison when they know I am innocent? I let my guard down to the cruelty of this. I expected things to move so much faster. We had a court date for October 7th and my lawyer was saying I’d be home by Christmas. Then they took our court date away, things started getting delayed. We are just now barely getting to the point that we’ll get a court date. And it’s not fair.

I think I hold back on writing about the pain because part of me doesn’t even want to admit it to myself. Being in here is already so hard. I have had 13 years of my life stolen from me and still every morning I wake up in a concrete prison cell I share with a person I can barely stand. Nearly everything good in my life has been taken from me; stripped away as if I am not even a person. I don’t know what I am supposed to do anymore.

I know I do not deserve to be stuck in this place. I am a man and I deserve to be respectfully treated as a man. Not as less than a child. I am venerable. Every day I must deal with the indignity of being in this awful place. Things that are routinely done here are de-humanizing. To be made to stand in only my boxers and boots to pee into a little container while another man watches so he can test my urine for drugs when I’ve done nothing wrong. I am treated like a criminal every day.

When I really start to think about how much of my life has been stolen from me, I cannot believe it. Almost half my life has been stolen from me. I have missed out on so many things. My last teenage years. I turned 18 and 21 in jail/prison. I never got to become an adult in the real world. I grew from a boy to a man in prison. My life experience will differ from everyone else and will affect me for the rest of my life. When other people talk about their 20’s what am I to say? “Ummm, I spend my entire 20s in a prison for a crime I have nothing to do with?”

Sometimes I feel angry. Sometimes I feel depressed. It feels like sadness is always there in the shadows, waiting to slip out and take hold. It weighs me down sometimes.

I hate having to get up in the morning. Being asleep is the only space that is truly mine. My life is constantly watched, controlled, interrupted, disturbed, hassled. Laying under my blankets on my uncomfortable mattress is my space. It’s the only peace and quiet I get. None of the rest of the day is “mine” completely. So a lot of what I face in the day I just have to brush off, let go, do my best to ignore. I just want it all to be over.

I am assured and confident that I am coming home. But I am still scared sometimes. No matter how good tomorrow may be, tonight I still have to go to sleep by myself in this cold hard prison cell kept from the woman I love. All I want in life is to come home now.

Written by Sean